Things like this make it seem like China will be much more likely to try and retake Taiwan soon. Seeing things like this, it is hard to imagine that the US will help defend Taiwan by providing military aid. I can imagine that trump will try to ask for something in return first. Even something like trump asking for TSMC to be sold to trump supporters (musk and others) seems likely to happen.
The risk of China taking Taiwan by force, unprovoked, in the near future is vastly overblown, in my opinion. Everyone involved, including China, prefers the status quo. If there’s one thing to know about war, it’s that it’s unpredictable. China hasn’t been involved in a war for decades, and while its military looks good on paper, its actual performance in a real war still unknown. Failing to win or even losing a war with Taiwan would mean saying goodbye to its global dominance ambitions, and weaken Xi's leadership.
The Chinese are strategic and patient. They just need to wait a few more years until they are able to blockade the entire island for long period of time. Then they can potentially take the island without firing a single shot. they don’t need to take on this kind of risk right now.
> China hasn’t been involved in a war for decades, and while its military looks good on paper, its actual performance in a real war still unknown.
This is a very important point. While China's military is huge and technologically advanced, it is structured very differently from western powers. To reduce the risk of a military coup, the PRC split up control of air, ground, and naval units, making it difficult to conduct joint operations. China's military is also structured more like the Soviet system, where decisions are made at the highest levels of command and lower levels are given little discretion. Information going up and down the chain of command can be delayed, ignored, or corrupted. This is inefficient in peacetime and can be disastrous in combat.
In contrast, most western powers have military branches that combine air, ground, and water forces (the US Army is the second-largest air force in the world, behind the US Air Force), and they are organized in a manner that encourages joint operations. Western militaries also push decisions to the lowest level possible, allowing forces to quickly adapt to changing conditions in combat.
Lastly, China has limited air refueling capability. This reduces the range and effectiveness of their air units. To reach targets far away, aircraft must carry external fuel tanks, compromising stealth, speed, and maneuverability.
It is for these reasons that China is very hesitant to test their military against any modern force. They're trying to fix these issues, but the PRC can't adopt the west's organizational style without making themselves vulnerable to a military coup, which (so far) they absolutely refuse to do.
When you try to predict dictators' behavior usong geopolitical arguments, you make the same mistake as the people who didn't believe in the Russian invasion into Ukraine.
It's the internal politics that pushes dictators to attack. And China currently follows the Russia's curve exactly there.
> And China currently follows the Russia's curve exactly there.
I still think Xi Jinping fears his people far more than Putin ever did. There's a huge powerful class of people who made tons of money off global trade in China, not just a few token Oligarchs from the 1990s like in Russia. They are the worlds factory, with a love of money and success. A global conflict is not something their people would easily stomach. While Russians seem to revel in their ability to withstand poverty and backwards systems I'm skeptical the same cultural malaise exists in China, even if they have strong national character (on paper).
> The risk of China taking Taiwan by force, unprovoked, in the near future is vastly overblown, in my opinion.
I don't share this view. China needs only a couple more (2-3) carriers and to arm enough H-6K's with anti-ship missiles to keep US capital ships at bay and they'll have all the tools they need to blockade and conquer Taiwan, perhaps without firing a shot. All of that will be in place in only a couple years; probably before Trump's term ends.
This is a supremely bad take. Completely devoid of true understanding of the situation.
Satellite imagery exposed China's has new landing barges at the Guangzhou Shipyard. These barges, equipped with 120-meter-long bridges and stabilizing pylons to land troops and vehicles on Taiwan's rugged coastlines by creating mobile ports[1]
You don't build these things if you don't need them. they have no other use except invasion.
> The Chinese are strategic and patient. They just need to wait a few more years until they are able to blockade the entire island for long period of time. Then they can potentially take the island without firing a single shot. they don’t need to take on this kind of risk right now.
...On the other hand, if they want to take Taiwan with a low probability of the U.S. intervening, it's hard to imagine a better time than right now.
One of the lessons Xi might have taken from Russia's war on Ukraine is that Putin made a tactical blunder by not invading during Trump's first term. Without the Biden administration's active support of Ukraine, Putin would likely have been more successful.
It's hard to guess probabilities on these sorts of things, but the current situation makes me uncomfortable.
(For what it's worth, the likelihood of a major Cascadia fault earthquake happening during the Trump administration is something that we can estimate the probability of, and even though it's not particularly high, it also makes me uncomfortable as an Oregonian.)
Taiwan without American support is extremely easy for China to take.
There is absolutely no risk whatsoever.
Everyone noticed trump behavior with zelinsky, Chinese too. It might instead push up their agenda to conquer Taiwan quickly before trump mandate end, or at least fund him to put up with a third mandate.
The _continuous threat_ of China invading Taiwan benefits China more than _actually_ invading Taiwan, which, even if it could take it militarily, would have a very difficult time "maintaining the peace"--Taiwan is not HK.
The ADS-B Exchange situation is more complicated than it "was sold out," and there are valid reasons for not wanting to use them–but it is still the most comprehensive source of uncensored flight tracking data.
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Wow, looks like it was a pretty complicated situation. I don't think OPs reference to it made any sense. Might make sense for a checklist of what not to do with regards to public housing.
Something that I noticed is that the terrain mode doesn't show the contour lines as you zoom in. They display when you are zoomed out to see a wide area, but as you zoom into a terrain feature the lines and the elevation text disappear.
I think that North Korea and South Korea are still at war. Did the US ever declare war against North Korea? I thought that the US was there due to the UN getting involved. Skipping the need for the US to declare war.
I believe they've all been AUMFs (Authorizations for the Use of Military Force), effectively bypassing various checks and safeguards in place when starting formal wars.
Checks and balances: A formal declaration of war requires a higher level of political support and public debate, providing more opportunity for scrutiny and oversight.
Indefinite conflicts: AUMFs often lack clear objectives or timelines, which can lead to prolonged and open-ended military engagements.
Legal ambiguity: AUMFs can create legal ambiguity, as they may not explicitly invoke the laws of war, which govern the conduct of armed forces and the treatment of civilians, prisoners of war, and non-combatants.
My experience is a bit old (2008 ish) so things might have changes.
I had the GI Bill. I submitted paper work each month that showed I was taking a certain number of credits towards my degree to the VA dept at the school. Money was deposited into my bank account a couple weeks later. I could use that money for anything I wanted. Sounds like this is what your friends had/have.
There are other programs such as paying off student loans when you join up, but I am not familiar with them.
I agree with you, this doesn't make much sense. The source quote is saying that someone saw a red cover in the water. How would the cover survive going through an engine? It should be shredded. Also, if the cover was left on it would have been sucked into the engine as soon as the pilot turned the engines on or when he when to full power before taking off. Makes more sense if a cover was left unsecured on the flight deck and was sucked in during take off. It still would be shredded though I would think.
According to wikipedia, 2010 American sales were 256k, 2019 sales were 363k. The high was in 2012 with 438k. There was a dip down to 322k in 2016 (for obvious reasons I would think) and has been going up since. This doesn't seem like game over.
I just began a shared slack channel with my co-workers, and put the call out for any other interested hobbyists from other departments. We'll collaborate and discuss there, and ignore the public boards.
I found in previous years I gave up a few puzzles in, so I need some community to keep the interest up. But I have zero interest in the competitive aspect.
Not Slack, but this is what I did with colleagues last year (I first participated in 2018, got a group in 2019). It was fun, moderately competitive (between myself and one other guy, the rest were just solving problems but he is always competitive, and I like to goad him), and we got to teach some of the young guys at the office things they should've learned in their CS education (but somehow didn't).
I suspect that thy learned these things, but it didn't stick. From memory of 2018/2019 things that the younger colleagues didn't know (or didn't know well enough to get without prompting):
- When to use CFG versus regex for parsing. Many inputs could be parsed with regexes if you made certain assumptions and got lucky. But CFGs were much easier for some.
- Shunting-yard algorithm. This came up, I think, in 2018.
- Using fast/slow to detect cycles and cycle length (one step at a time versus two, when they collide you can determine that there is a cycle and then determine how long the cycle is). Most used a hash table/map but this was not effective (due to RAM requirements) for some very large inputs. This actually comes up a few times. Variants of game of life, or just numeric processes.
- Multi-threading. It was very useful to implement the intcode VM using threads in 2019. Everyone who tried to juggle state and run multiple VMs at a time struggled when we later had to have a large number of VMs communicating with each other.
- Maybe not CS proper, but typically covered as part of a CS curriculum in a discrete math course. Several times problems related to modular arithmetic and permutations came up. If you understood them, the problem was tractable. If not, you struggled and maybe solved it but it wasn't efficient.
- Various graph and search algorithms. Particularly A* and Dijkstra's. Looking back, it seems there were a couple maze ones in 2019 and several more maze/path finding ones in 2018.
- Sorting/ordering of graph nodes, specifically topological sort. If you know what it is, it makes several of the problems much simpler over the years. I think it was specifically used in 2018.
Excellent comment, I did both parts last year up to day 17 and just had to stop, but learning about things like A* were really what made it worthwhile.
I have no formal CS training, but did a lot of online courses and so I use events like this to help plug gaps and learn new languages, and it would have been great to have a mentor like yourself through some of these puzzles last year as it can be quite hard to solve algorithm knowledge gaps etc. when also quickly trying to roll your own solutions.
Still, really a cool thing. I couldn't resist starting again today.
I'm in the same boat as you having no formal college/university CS training. You've given me a good idea for a blog series. Writing posts that go through the solutions I came up with for each day of AoC if I can do so without benefit of knowledge of useful algorithms & data structure concepts, and then reading the best solutions I can find on reddit etc, and write a blog post on how it works, as well as what underlying concepts it utilizes, and how they work. If I do that for all days/years of AoC, I could post a summary of the most useful concepts that I learned, that were applied to the most problems of AoC.
