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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

> How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high.

I know I'm going against the grain here, but I love stickers. Many of the sets my kids got were "sticker infested" but as they only re-bricked it, we just did not put the stickers on some of them and got just more fun out of it.

> Within the past 10 years I have had at least 7 kits missing pieces. And the frequency keeps growing

I never had it. Also if you do, Lego will send you any piece (that is not a minifig) no questions asked. My kid threw my glob down and one of the parts got a bad indentation and looked ugly. I got a replacement part in the mail no questions asked.

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I can't help but think back to my childhood in the 1980s... there were always stickers included. In the Lego idea books they always showed those same stickers in use, making the association and relevance clear. So how many is too many? I mean, I'd say the more the merrier if that gives the set another dimension of play.

I am fully aware of the customer service side of lego. That's why I still use their stuff. But I suppose that is where our agreement will lie. Knowing what they are capable of and where they are now is noticeable.

I don't know. It very much depends on what you are into. I feel like a lot of the stuff that Lego does got way better in recent years. For instance the manuals in the app are a step above and beyond of where they were, and the build together element means that my kids are playing together and rebuilding old sets.

I am totally on the same page with you. It definitely boils down to what are you doing. There are a ton of cool pieces these days that would've been a pipe dream when we were kids. And lego's MO has always been imagination and creativity. I feel like the addition of stickers in essence sort of rules out the variable, but forces the builder to use it if they are following the kit by the book. Where as with a printed brick the person gets to choose whether they use it or not.

It's really splitting hairs at that point, but ascetically speaking it doesn't fit their ethos.

LEGO needs to pull a KIA.

First, they need the LLM instructions AI thingy to look at your pieces and instantly come up with inspiration. Gamify that.

But they need to pull a KIA in that they hired the young designers away from GM and gave them some room.

There needs to be a revolution in LEGO with the following:

A device which is communally owned - at a Library or an Elementary School.

Throw in plastic bottles and plastic waste.

It molds LEGO bricks.

And you can program different sets.

And kids can create sets and have the device spit out the bricks for that set they designed.

In grad school I knew a guy who was reeeeally into the idea of building benches out of reused plastic and cob. The basic design was plastic bottles stuffed with plastic bags acting as bricks, which are then cemented together with cob.

Cleaning the bottles and bags was incredibly difficult, even at the scale needed for a single bench. Just a massive amount of effort... The difficulty was that any residual bacteria would multiply and off-gas, eventually causing structural problems.

Likewise, I expect the biggest problem for a home-LEGO-recycler would be dealing with the many random impurities in the input stream.

LEGO is mostly ABS so its mechanical properties are a LOT better than the cheap stuff used for bottles.

Strongly disagree on your mold idea. LEGO’s stringent quality control is one of the things that makes it great. My childhood legos are all at my parents house, and my kids love to play with them when we visit. They still work perfectly 30 years later.

That level of quality is impossible with your local library mold idea. It would inevitably churn out low quality bricks due to (1) bad inputs and (2) molds not being replaced regularly for wear and tear, which would be accelerated due to (1).

You can’t just throw whatever plastic trash you have into a machine and expect it to produce good or even useable bricks.

"First, they need the LLM instructions AI thingy to look at your pieces and instantly come up with inspiration. Gamify that."

That exists, though it's not from Lego: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brickit-app/id1477221636 https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2021/07/03/got-a-b...

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