Andrei

An awesome first half, but a very tedious and repetitive second half.

Getting kind of samey...

This an amazing book on how to write positively about something totally insane.

It starts out with the two big positive ideas: give children space to adjust on their own and expect more of them because they can handle it.

And then the insanity begins. French parenting is based on Rousseau and Dolto. Rousseau who famously raised no children, giving his away, and wrote a totally crazy impractical and downright abusive book on parenting. Dolto who was a borderline nutjob and whose ideas are often actually child abuse. Together they're responsible for great amounts of child suffering, like France having an age of consent that's just 13 years old (raised to 15 just recently; which is still criminally low). And totally developmentally inappropriate things like telling a 1 year old 15 times per day to say hello. Otherwise, Rousseau says that your kid won't be a good member of society.

Once the insanity starts, it never ends. French women don't mind doing basically all the housework and child rearing. Having their doctors tell them that they need to get into better shape for their husbands. At the same time, everyone is really cold, doing things like cancelling tennis lessons because, oh, they're so inconvenient for the parents now. Never pushing children to exceed in school, to challenge boundaries, to achieve new things.

France has one thing going for it. State support for parents. Everything else, is an unscientific, garbled, unpleasant, cold mess that's 200 years behind parenting in other countries. I cannot believe people read this as a howto manual!

Maybe it's me but I really did not like the style where we switch between POV characters all the time instead of telling a single engaging and coherent story.

A beautiful and funny case study in the insanity of the Libertarian movement. A disaster both from an economic point of view, all it did is destroy the local economy. And a disaster from the community point of view, instead of a peaceful town it descended into vigilante justice.

Boomer doomesday science fiction. Peppered with an overuse of “like” to make you forget how out of touch with reality the author is.

Starts with a whirlwind tour through a distorted neocon pop history where only America has agency. There are no arguments in the book, there's no evidence, it's just science fiction written as fact. A world where diversity is weakness, where fascism will work well in the future because it helps the economy, where Millenials are “entitled and lazy”, where America “rubs out” Mexican culture from immigrants as if washing away dirt, where whiteness is the top prize that no one should unfairly “redefine”, where all countries want to irrationally commit suicide but are held at bay by American might, where Greece is a “basket case” and no more than a “historical doormat” and a “failed state”, where the EU's hope for survival is a bailout by the British, where the only option is “neo-imperial control” instead of cooperation and mutual growth, where the countries with access to raw materials are the ones that will prosper (ironic, given that all evidence shows this is the opposite), where Europe only excels at “less complicated manufacturing”, where colonial empires are the future and local people don't matter. The author even has the gall to make a map that shows half of Poland as being in the Russian sphere of influence, a nice shoutout to his pro-fascist viewpoint. Never mind that he's anti green tech because of “the weather”.

Poorly written drivel.

An awesome premise! But it's wasted on a strange form of fiction following various animals around. It felt lazy and repetitive.

Aside from being badly executed, this book reads as if it was written before the pandemic happened. Nothing we learned about pandemics in the past few years is included in the book. It's almost surreal how out of touch the book is.

Some ideas are interesting and important, but the writing is lazy, the facts are sloppy, and the story is disjointed. It would have been nice to see a more polished work.

Should have been advertised as a children's book. It's not bad as one. As a field guide, it's kind of boring and shallow.

Same old questions rehashed. Kind of repetitive.

Instead of just saying what it wants to say, it commits to a tedious convoluted metaphor.

Omphalos was an awesome story.

A terrible biased book. It completely overlooks slavery, redlining, and discrimination. But it goes out of its way to praise banks like Wells Fargo for lending to “ethnic minorities”. A bank that apologized for taking humans as collateral for loans...

Neat at the beginning but really tedious toward the end. One joke can't carry an entire book.

After building up the others so much with their otherworldly bullets, an incredibly disappointing and predictable ending.

This is a cookbook in the sense of ‘what to type in to do X' instead of ‘how to do X'.

Leaves out all of the hard parts around security, monitoring, long-term maintenance, zero-downtime refactoring, etc. all while building a trivial app. The use of some random non-AWS services for core functionality like Auth0 instead of Cognito is particularly grating and disappointing.

A fair book significantly marred by the author pushing their own fringe agenda and research.

I was hoping to learn about evidence-based software engineering. There is a lot of random stuff in this book, but one thing that there is virtually nothing of is a discussion of evidence-based software engineering. It reads like the appendix to the book it wants to be.

This is not a book, it's a long and tedious list of random stuff loosely organized into chapters. It's the most bored I've ever been reading something fascinating.

An evil soulless warmonger recounts his time in an administration that is as corrupt as it is incompetent. The book itself has no narrative, no point, just a constant boring stream of events poorly told with a singular agenda: trying to settle scores with this and previous administrations while absolving the author of all of the disasters that he directly contributed to. In a just world, he and all of his fellow enablers of a criminal president would be rotting in jail now.

Tries to pack in too much and consequently ends up saying too little. Bland generic advice without context and depth.

Nice to get ideas about what to do, but it's not well organized or written. It also advocates rather harsh methods at times. It also suggests that one should repeat the same command until it is followed. Look for ideas about what is possible and then find better ways to train the same behaviors elsewhere.

This book suggests way too many negative interactions along with outdated dominance theory.