This is the most important thing I’ve learned since the start of my career. All those “clever” tricks literally just serve to make the author feel clever at the expense of clarity and long-term manintainability.

Idc, just please don’t call me a coder, it makes me sound like I’m a script kiddy.

KISS, my guy.

I think you’ve got it backwards. I learned to read pointer decls from right-to-left, so const int * is a (mutable) pointer to an int which is const while int *const is a const pointer to a (mutable) int.

Lossy sort

I looked it up and this is exactly right.

My company has on multiple occasions brought in applicants to interview who aren’t qualified for any positions we’re actively looking to fill. I’m not 100% sure why that is, but it’s led to us rejecting candidates who everyone otherwise felt pretty positive about.

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The US wields immense geopolitical power; of course they get a say. That’s not to say that it could prevent an annexation if the CCP wanted it badly enough, but Washington has no shortage of levers to pull to make it as unattractive an option as possible.

On the contrary, I think that totalitarian states are moreso the exception than the rule in this day and age. Hell, I wouldn’t even group Russia in the same class. There are varying degrees of autocracy and the US president certainly wields more power than heads of state/government in many European countries, but it’s just a bad faith argument to try to draw a comparison to it when speaking about a regime such as the CCP.

Apples to oranges, the DPR and LPR moreso puppet states of the Russian Federation than sovereign state in their own right. The same isn’t true of Taiwan (despite its ties with Western states aiming to protect their interests in the region).

Hey, that sounds familiar!

Lol

The ROC has undergone a pretty big shift in its form of governance and general culture in the last ~50 years. Yes, their current claims are a remnant of their past as the government of mainland China, but given that changing their official stance runs the risk of provoking the PRC they’re effectively immutable for the time being.

A disfunctional system isn’t the same as a totalitarian one. Both are bad, yes, but they’re not one and the same.

I’m sorry, but there’s no way you can possibly equate the US government to the CCP without arguing in bad faith. The decidedly un-totalitarian nature of the US government is exactly why it’s basically not functioning right now. There’s plenty of valid criticism there, but to draw any sort of comparison to the Chinese form of government is insane.

Texas is de fact and de jure a part of the United States. It’s not a valid comparison and you know it.

There are firsthand accounts of human rights abuses taking place against the Uyghur people on Xinjiang. The Chinese fucking government reported a 60% decline in birthrates in certain Uyghur-majority regions in the province between 2015 and 2018. If that doesn’t scream forced sterilization then I don’t know what does.

Also, cultural genocide is still genocide definitionally.

Do you disagree with either of those observations? They seem fairly indisputable to me.

The status quo has broad support because it keeps the peace, and the Taiwanese people generally don’t want to fight a war against China. That doesn’t equate to the majority of the Taiwanese people holding the view that they’re a part of the PRC and it should be fairly obvious that they don’t believe nor want that.