Doctorow's had some pretty bad takes, honestly, for all I agree with him on some things. His review of Naomi Klein's Doppleganger -- a book which explores conspiracy theories and how they capture people -- reduces the entire book, incorrectly, to his own political soapbox:

Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal.

This is, frankly, juvenile. Not every bad thing in the world can be mapped on to one's particular soapboxes. Treating GenAI as Good because Copyright is Bad is exactly in character for him.

(Also Cory gets smug about releasing his novels CC, as if all working writers can do that, but I'm sure it helps the family finances that his wife is an executive at Disney. It's great to use money from one of copyright's biggest monsters to act self-righteous about other people trying to make a living.)

also here for "well the opposite of left wing views is racism"

thanks for saying it aloud my friend

There are countless issues here. They didn't do exception handling, they used a string to store their UUIDs (even if this was a DB constraint, you use sqlalchemy.Uuid and let the ORM and DB handle the translation), and as the person you're replying to stressed, they're using non-monotonic UUIDs. Also if you have a unique user_id and you're never exposing your primary keys, you don't need to get fancy, just let the ORM handle it with auto-incrementing, for most use cases. And so many other tragic things about this one tiny blog post.

tl;dr if you're going to copy code you don't understand, copy it from the docs, not from everything in the kitchen thrown into a blender.

I wonder if we can start requiring history of science, philosophy, and literary & artistic theory classes in secondary school (or at least before giving out doctorates), just to limit incredibly annoying adults who think they're geniuses. I also thought I invented brain-in-a-vat thought experiments when I was ten, but I don't opine on them reinvented from first principles.

They want to ban kosher food and circumcision, but love the Israeli government and the war on Gaza, which says... so many things, about so many people.

Some scientific breakthroughs were memes at first

name one.

I'm sorry but if you put your private key in a repo at all and don't immediately scream aaaaah! what did I do! and change all the locks on everything, you're ngmi

Oh, but you’ve provided us with statistics! Please, though, for the peer reviewers: we need the baseline measurement. How many women do you date who don’t break up with you? And are they all in Canada?

The woman-explainer has arrived in the thread.

Counterpoint: I have read fanfiction where Optimus Prime is a pretty solid cuddler.

can't goosestep without great boots.

Honestly any day the Guardian isn't publishing transphobia wearing a feminism mask is a good day for them.