I (or really, my parents) were burned by something like this recently. They bought my kid an FAO Schwarz marble run tower for Christmas. It's made of terrible plastic, with rough seams, and every play session ends when a marble gets stuck somewhere nearly impossible to reach. It requires partial disassembly, bending, and a screwdriver to pry things out.
I was shocked that an FAO Schwarz toy sucked so much. I looked at reviews on Amazon to see if anyone else had these problems, and they had. The FAO Schwarz brand had been bought by the ThreeSixty Group in 2016. Now it's just a way to polish the image of cheap toys.
This is one of the reasons 3D printers are becoming a lot more common in homes not inhabited by the sort of geek/nerd like me who you would (correctly) assume owned a 3D printer or two.
Yes, something you print yourself will likely be lower quality than a bought one from years ago and you'll pay more in material and time than buying a new one will cost, but... it may be no worse quality than a new bought set, possibly better, replacement parts can be reproduced easily or additional parts added to the set cheaply (no buying a full set to get a couple of extra pieces that you want) and things can be customised.
One of the bigger 3D catalogue sites (I think MakerWorld, but without checking I'm not 100% certain) ran a marble-run themed contest some months ago for which there were a lot of interesting entries, some just copies of basic parts/sets (great if that is what you are looking for) but also some that were more innovative than that. If you have a printer, or know someone who has, it might be worth you looking into that if your kid would appreciate a new set, there are a lot of free designs¹ out there you could experiment with.
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[1] and paid ones, some designers try to make a living this way and some of them produce designs that are well worth the cost as they may be free of issues more amateur designs could have
I bought a teddy bear from them in 2014 and another in 2025. It's night and day. The earlier one is really high quality, the newer one feels like I won it from a claw machine.
FAO's used to be a prestige NYC brand. Of course, they carried many other branded products but those were mostly top-shelf (and expensive) as well. A LOT of formerly pretty high quality brands have ended up getting sold off to brand management companies and the like. I just got a few pairs of shoes from AllBirds because while the name will live on I have no doubt the quality will become pretty generic now that it's no longer a Silicon Valley must-have thing.
> Sure it serves their immediate purposes but what are the long term consequences of this? Do these people realize that every time they sell a piece of their soul to increase their personal wealth it destroys a piece of their society? Do they care?
It makes me wonder, at what amount of wealth does it stop being "F%ck you" money and start being a ranking on the scoreboard?
People need to be careful about buying into the shorthand lingo with LLMs. They do not learn like we do. At the lowest level, they predict which tokens follow a body of tokens. This lets them emulate knowledge in a very useful way. This is similar to a time series model of user activity: the time series model does not keep tabs on users to see when they are active, it has not read studies about user behavior, it just reflects a mathematical relationship between points of data.
For an LLM and this "vague" domain expertise, even if none of the LLM's training material includes certain nuggets of wisdom, if the material includes enough cases of problems and the solutions offered by domain experts, we should expect the model to find a decent relationship between them. That the LLM has never ingested an explicit documentation of the reasoning is irrelevant, because it does not perform reasoning.
The domain expertise I'm referring to isn't vague, it literally doesn't exist as training data. There are no cases of problems and solutions to study that are relevant to the state-of-the-art. In some cases this is by intent and design (e.g. trade secrets, national security, etc) long before for LLMs arrived on the scene.
We even have some infamous "dark" domains in computer science where it is nearly impossible for a human to get to the frontier because the research that underpins much of the state-of-the-art hasn't existed as public literature for decades. If you want to learn it, you either have to know a domain expert willing to help you or reinvent it from first principles.
They aren't just amazingly efficient in converting calories to protein, they're great at eating things without much other (agricultural) value to us. They eat the invasive spotted lantern fly!
True for chickens in general! But the Cornish Crosses in the factory farms probably never see a lanternfly, and wouldn't want to get away from the feeder long enough to go after one.
I agree with the gist of your points, but not much with these two:
>followed by white-collar business formation as customers realize that product quality went to shit when all the people were laid off.
These will be rare boutique affairs. Based on how mass production and cheap shipping played out, most people value price over quality. The economy will rearrange itself around those savings, making boutique products and services expensive.
>mass cheap fake media will likely lead to its fragmentation as any old Joe with a ChatGPT account can put out mass quantities of bullshit.
We have this today. And that's not a "same as it ever was" dismissal. Today, there are a lot of terminally online people posting the equivalent of propaganda (and actual propaganda). Social media pushes hot takes in audiences' faces, a portion of them reshare it, and it spreads exponentially. The only limitation to propaganda today is how much time the audience spends staring at the "correct" content provider.
>if you value say "economy" more than "time", you spend a lot of time to save a few cents, but if you reverse that stack order your spend extra cents to avoid spending the time. If the person you're dating has a very different stack than you do, it will be a source of problems going forward and doesn't suggest you'll have a successful marriage.
This exact difference exists between my wife and I. For example, when her car needed a replacement part, she enlisted her dad in an effort to find the cheapest part on eBay, attempt to replace it themselves, and then shop around for the cheapest mechanic to install the part they bought. When my car needed a part replaced, I took it to the dealership where I bought it. I figured they'd have the part on hand and know how to do it right. They would overcharge, but not a criminal amount.
We've come to an understanding: I like to use money to reduce stress. She likes to save money because it gives her a feeling of accomplishment. Not very different from hobbies.
Men are also often the primary breadwinners in families, so they feel the need to take a higher paying job. In families where the husband's job pays well, the wife's career can be decided by personal fulfillment. Teachers are respected (but not paid well), nurses are respected and can earn a good amount, and social work is a very self-fulfilling role (I don't think society holds them in esteem more than other professionals).
If we want men to take up certain roles, we need to pay more. That's the simplicity of capitalism and free markets. We bend ourselves into knots trying to find clever and (maybe) cheaper solutions to thorny problems.
> If we want men to take up certain roles, we need to pay more.
Why is it only now, when employment rates are seemingly a problem for men, that we need to pay more in these professions to attract men that might otherwise not have considered them? Why shouldn't we have paid more earlier?
The framing of the article and discussion around it is a little bizarre to me because it ignores the decades or longer of (American) society effectively pushing women into industries like education or nursing and subsequently devaluing them.
I don't quite understand why society has to step in and try to fix this for men who are feeling insecure about their job options while simultaneously actively avoiding trying to help women and minorities.
In my experience, all wealth comes down to either (1) producing and using something yourself, or (2) convincing somebody else to give it to you. Most of us trade labor or goods for wealth, convincing others that our stuff is worth the wealth they give.
If you want more wealth for your work, you need the other side to value it more. Better goods and labor are the obvious choice, but that's difficult. Better schmoozing is less effort and good payoff. Epstein was a paragon of this skill. Also companies that spend tons on advertising, like Coca Cola. Everyone knows their soda exists, but the ads are meant to convince you that you need one right now. No need to improve their product or innovate cheaper production. They just lean on the persuasion.
I can't think of a way to avoid this. If you want more money, it has to come from somebody. How could there be an unbiased and impersonal way of redistributing it?
This might be a little pedantic and certainly off topic, but Coke ads really aren't intended to convince you that you need one right now, they are intended to make sure they are the first drink you think of when you think of sodas. Everytime a waitress says "oh sorry will Pepsi be ok?" Coke ads have achieved their purpose even though they didn't sell any soda or change your preferences.
RC Cola exists right alongside Coca Cola, but has a marketing budget that is a tiny tiny fraction of Coke's, do you ever hear anyone ask for an RC Cola? Coke spends on marketing so they don't become RC Cola, not to convince you of anything.
There have been a lot of political prosecutions of people who disagree. James Comey, Leticia James, John Bolton, Mark Kelly. Luckily, grand juries and judges have prevented them from getting convictions. But dragging them through the legal process is punishment enough. The administration's incompetence at imprisoning political opponents isn't a reason to forgive them.
ICE has targeted protestors, and Rubio made it clear the targeting was intentional policy.
If we look beyond "imprisonment" and include "illegally or unfairly punish dissenting voices to keep them from having a voice," there are a lot more victims. Jimmy Kimmel, reporters at the Pentagon, openly supporting an ally's takeover of Warner Brothers to control CNN.
I was shocked that an FAO Schwarz toy sucked so much. I looked at reviews on Amazon to see if anyone else had these problems, and they had. The FAO Schwarz brand had been bought by the ThreeSixty Group in 2016. Now it's just a way to polish the image of cheap toys.
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