This is just a poor strawman/false dilemma: you don't have to be 100% or 0% for something to be effective or true. You're not addressing the actual claim (_why_ climate change is controversial, and particularly why the current structure makes it particularly controversial to corporations, etc.), you're just making a non-sequitur that everyone is affected by it.
It's like someone saying "tax fraud by billionaires is a massive issue" and responding "well, did you declare every single dollar on your tax forms hmm?": they're both issues, but the former is obviously a much more impactful, structural and relevant one. You're trying to nullify their argument by attacking the "purity" of the person, but that doesn't negate the truth of their point. This is like a greatest-hits of common logical/debate fallacies (strawman, false dilemma, non-sequitur).
I'd wager the main difference between "many decades ago" and mid 2000s onwards is the perceived stakes of college. My time in college (around that time) was perceived by most as "make or break": either you did well in college, or you were doomed to a sub-standard lifestyle (not to mention the debt of college tuition).
Obviously, whether this was true or not is a whole discussion, but the attitude did lead to a lot more cheating (due to desperation) than I'd imagine past generations had.
A midterm being worth 25-33% of a grade, plus some classes only being offered in fall or spring semesters meant a bad test could roughly cost you tens of thousands of dollars, since the next time you could retake the class would be in a year, and it often was a prerequisite for another class. It just leads to an environment that encourages desperate "survival" behavior.
Flow was a type checker (used to be Typescript vs. Flow debates early on before Typescript ended up with more support), Flux was the unidirectional data flow architecture.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
because... they don't have as many examples, documentation, textbooks, or public example projects to base generation off of, perhaps. There may be a future where documentation/servers are more formally integrated with LLMs/AI systems in a way that makes up for the relative lack of literature by plugging into a source of information that can be used to generate code/projects.
End users just won't care about the algorithm. Try talking to a niece or nephew, especially one who makes money on the platform about The Algorithm and you'll get blank stares, or, at best, a "yeah I know, but...".
If you've had better luck, let me know (actually).
As for "being China", every country has protections on what goes in or out of the country including media. A lot of countries won't let you own a newspaper or news broadcast channel, so this is the next extension of that sort of idea.
It's the same idea as not allowing a company from the USSR to run a news channel during the Cold War, although obviously the lines are fuzzier and still being discovered with apps and algorithms.
My read on the situation is that this is the beginning of clamping down on _all_ (or most) of this. Also important to note the difference between racism and national security. The notion isn't "wacky chinese people ooh so mysterious so sneky", it's that the government isn't the US's ally and has (valid) reasons to want to reduce the US's grip on the global stage.
It's not (just) that it poses an economic threat to one of the biggest US companies (which as you said, I'm sure plays a big part in why it's suddenly relevant), but that it allows a government-influenced foreign media channel to influence policy indirectly by means of mass dissemination.
As for why now and not before, it's because of how apparent the possible effects are now that there's a very direct and widely spread channel that can pump OUT information, which is vastly more effective and obvious than passive surveillance through cameras or other hardware. (Also cybersecurity people have been calling out this sort of stuff for hardware since time immemorial)
I mean, book banning isn't a federal level thing (at least not at any remotely broad level) and typically happens either on one side of the political spectrum (same deal with LGBT stuff), or at the level of individual school systems. e.g. you won't find that book at the school library at most, but the bookstore down the street will have it.
Vast difference from the typical notion of book burnings and such.
"Objective" media exists (NPR, PBS(?), CSPAN) but just isn't as popular because biased media attracts more attention through confirmation bias and flashiness.
The difference is that citizens can influence those companies, or influence the politicians that can influence those companies. Also, there's no direct incentive to have broad negative impacts on citizen consumers at a global politics level (not that it doesn't do so at other levels).
If you're another country consuming Meta, etc. then you should probably be wary about dependence on a foreign platform's influence. The biggest difference however is how close the platform is to the government. In the US, it's getting closer, but still has some separation; in China it's rather close to one-and-the-same due to the pressure that the govt can exert on companies to do their bidding.
I think your point makes sense, but the comparison of programming to swimming loses the thread of thought a bit. Swimming is not my forte, but there are books by professional marathoners on how to train for marathons, for example, that are valuable to read for forming proper training plans as opposed to "just figuring it out".
I think your opinion on OSS/large codebases makes sense, but I don't think it's an either/or situation: reading should _support_ actual coding, similar to how studying a grammar textbook for a foreign language is there to support actually speaking/listening/communicating in that language.
I think that some of the advice hasn't aged well into modern language features and computer power, similar to the GoF Design Patterns book. Rather than an entry level book, this would be better for a budding intermediate who can parse what is good and bad about it.
But, even then, other resources are better IMO. (Metz, Ousterhout, Kay, PragProg, language-specific design patterns books, etc.)
The experience of doing things wrong is valuable, but I think you also don't want to get quagmired there. It just depends on how voraciously/quickly you read and seek out better patterns.
(Also, elephant in the room, Uncle Bob has been very vocal and opinionated on the internet about various things and it hasn't endeared many to him because of it)
It's like someone saying "tax fraud by billionaires is a massive issue" and responding "well, did you declare every single dollar on your tax forms hmm?": they're both issues, but the former is obviously a much more impactful, structural and relevant one. You're trying to nullify their argument by attacking the "purity" of the person, but that doesn't negate the truth of their point. This is like a greatest-hits of common logical/debate fallacies (strawman, false dilemma, non-sequitur).