I love it when Americans come to read the fuckin article and then make an irrelevant comment 👍

The future don't GAF about the past.

This is an observation within a culture where toy stores are already segregated. It does not imply any inherent difference in how boys and girls play.

didn’t they say boys and girls play differently? why try to make us the same when we’re clearly not?

The key difference between girls and the ladyfig and boys and the minifig was that many more girls projected themselves onto the ladyfig—she became an avatar. Boys tend to play with minifigs in the third person. “The girls needed a figure they could identify with, that looks like them,” says Rosario Costa, a Lego design director. The Lego team knew they were on to something when girls told them, “I want to shrink down and be there.”

The premise of the whole article is belied by two paragraphs at the end.

“If it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains,” says Lise Eliot. A neuroscientist at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago, Eliot is the author of Pink Brain Blue Brain, a 2009 survey of hundreds of scientific papers on gender differences in children. “Especially on television, the advertising explicitly shows who should be playing with a toy, and kids pick up on those cues,” Eliot says. “There is no reason to think Lego is more intrinsically appealing to boys.”

Target’s Stephanie Lucy, vice-president and merchandise manager for toys and sports goods, says the Minneapolis-based department store will introduce Lego Friends on an end-cap (at the end of an aisle), then shelve it with other girl-oriented toys, not with the rest of the Lego—all currently in the boy section. As long as girls find it, Lucy says, “I believe it will do very well.”

Lego has actively engaged in a culture of "boys toys vs girls toys", and exclusively targeted the "boys toys" segment. They had more than enough pull to shatter this idea, but instead they opted to manufacture an entirely new "girl version", cementing the idea that the other sets are for boys. They're no better than those toy companies that make "magic set" and "magic set 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓰𝓲𝓻𝓵𝓼" (the same thing but pink).

Lego was big enough that they could straight up tell stores that their products could not be housed in a "boy section".

This reminds me of a blog post someone sent to me, Parody Pink, written around six years later by an internet-famous comic writer who raised money to personally buy and deliver Lego toys to hospitals on Christmas (video). Their post laments that the feminine Lego options were overly simple and uncreative, compared to the impressive functional mechanical options clearly marketed towards boys, and their struggles in picking a cool Lego gift for girls in their family which didn't make people ask "Was this gift meant to be for Joey?"

It really plays into what they said, "the idea of creative play as conducive to learning, or even formal education" seems to be minimised at the expense of focusing on that aesthetic beauty, forgetting that these aren't contradictory! I'm a little surprised that in a world already filled with plastic dolls, this strategy paid off, even if it was still a small progress in the direction of creative building.

And the article shows at the end that the team are painfully aware of how their products are affected by, and affect, stereotyping - perhaps being "ahead of their time" was too risky a position to be financially viable?

My daughter has so many Lego sets, mostly Lego Friends sets.

😅 haven't actually read it yet, someone linked to it somewhere else and it looked interesting, I didn't want to bookmark it so I remembered this place for articles that are a bit long and I'd come back to it

Searching for the author it looks like he wrote another article 13 years later:

In 1999, I wrote an article entitled “Why Arabs Lose Wars,” which has appeared a number of times in other periodicals and has had a rather long shelf life on the internet. Some considered it stereotypical, but it was derived from my many years of being with or observing Arab armies, including the civil war between the Jordanian Arab Army and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Other than the Jordanian experience, my store of knowledge comes from more than two years of daily interface with the Egyptian ground forces as an Army Attaché. I also gained insights from a number of temporary duty assignments with Gulf military establishments, including an assignment to the British-officered Trucial Oman Scouts before the emergence of the United Arab Republic.

I have combined these on-the-ground observations and experiences with over 40 years of collecting as much information as possible on the military culture and way of life of Arab militaries.

https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/journals/meria/v17i1/f_0029666_23981.pdf

Despite the sponsor of the original article looks interesting

American conservative think tank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_Forum

I'm actually surprised you'd share one of their articles. Of all the outlets, one so overt in support of American hegemony seems out of character.

It's horrible enough that such a situation has happened, but journos refusing to take an L when their poor practices are called out is gross.

In fact, China’s military spending per capita is less than the global average, and 1/10th that of the US alone. Yes, China has a big population, but even in absolute terms, the US-aligned military bloc spends over seven times more on military power than China does.

Furthermore, China has not fired a single bullet in international warfare in over 40 years, while during this time the US has invaded, bombed or carried out regime-change operations in over a dozen Global South countries. If there is any state that poses a known threat to world peace and security, it is the US.

These are points worth making every single time our politicians and media try to scaremonger on China.

Makes sense. Rusty grills looks like he crawled out of a highly polluted and radioactive cess pit.

That was really a great read. I think i'm gona have to read it a couple times, to get the most out of it.

Part of me wondered if Peter Putnam was even real the story is so surreal. I think its pretty amazing how his mum in the end moved in with them rather than be alone. Seems theres an acknowledgment there, even if it was never spoken aloud.

Seems Putnam doesn't even have a wikipedia page, Fuller and Wheeler do though, and he's mentioned on Fullers.

Usually the best thing to do with tech/programming articles is to go to HackerNews comments

This study had 16 participants, with a mix of previous exposure to AI tools - 56% of them had never used Cursor before, and the study was mainly about Cursor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772

Yikes

I don't have the time at the moment to read the paper, but I did RTFA, which unfortunately tends to point to the paper instead of summarizing its examples ("The authors highlight several examples of harm caused to both workers and users." [end of paragraph]).

Even at the end, I still don't understand what the TESCREAL bundle subscribers expect AGI to accomplish. Replace the labor of "undesirable" humans? Or is it meant to be a transhumanist intelligence aid?

In reality, these issues do not persist simply because of a lack of intelligence or ability. Solving them requires collaboration and systemic change on an unprecedented level.

Spot on.

We already grossly overproduce food and have grown food in adverse conditions for at least a century, I'd guess millennia, and we know why it isn't distributed adequately (spoiler: profit-oriented economy). We already know major causes of climate change and have the technology to replace them. In fact, some of the most industrial countries on Earth have already plateaued certain important emissions. We know why many technological advances are antagonized (spoiler: profit-oriented political economy). The knowledge has been known for a century and decades respectively. I know this is expanding on a tangential remark, but it's important to emphasise that we know the path forward, we know who stands in the way, and we have known for a long time.

thanks i now know more about people shitting in the woods than i ever wanted

Well, all of that was moderately horrible.

It looks like some sort of autocomplete in the UI mangled what I wrote. Ah automation, unless it's perfect it's entirely useless (yes I'm mad about my car automatically disengaging blinkers, which has caused infinity more blinker errors than on my motorcycle where it is manual).

!sneerclub@awful.systems, there seems to be an extra !sneerclub at the start of the link you added.

Oh I should add, there's actually a lemmy instance for highlighting the insane and horrible shit that comes from this group.

!sneerclub@awful.systems is how I link I think.

the nyt really wants you to know that ziz is trans. Surely innocent reasons for that given the nyt's reasonable past positions on trans people right?

this article sucks, Ziz and zizians are just another classic cult spun out of a movement that is profoundly alienating, abusive, and impervious to criticism. It's not the first time rationalism has gotten people killed (https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method is a good break down of the problematic attitudes and how they tie in to a tragic suicide) and it wont be the last.

Robert Evans did a reasonable deep dive into these people on his podcast behind the bastards if you want some better coverage that explores the cult dynamics more.

If you just want a crash course: Rationalism is a terrible hyper capitalist, white, male, anti humanities framework of ideas which starts with the premise that you, the reader, are inherently super smart for stumbling into them and wanting to learn how to be more smarter. There are like 5 big personalities who are all the smartest and because they are the smartest, and being the smartest necessarily means you think the most goodliest, and thinking the most goodliest means you can't be wrong, and you should ignore all prior human philosophy and just study them. Absorb so much baffling jargon that the obviousness of the bits that are genuinely good is obscured and the nasty ideas can slide right in without triggering alarm bells. Soon you'll be complete incomprehensible to normal people, and morally revolting to anyone who isn't a rationalist. Don't worry though, they're waiting with open arms to explain why being racist is really important for stopping the machine Satan apocalypse.

Ah whoops I read I as little L capitalised and didn't even think of the Liberal Party.

Big L Liberals are the major conservative party in Australia. Maybe I should say was after how they went in our recent election

Liberals are conservative.

Technically this can be right (liberalism is the status quo in our liberal democracy, and preserving it is conservative, and additionally conservatives are generally one type of liberal), but this is such a vague statement that whether it's right or not is subjective to the reader. It would be helpful if this claim were more specific.

they're american studies so think conservatives are happier than progressives