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nullPointer , in Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police

just tell them there is a black man at the moment of theft, they will get on it lickety split!

Cannacheques ,

Sad meme very relevant

Grimble ,
  • Binary search: O(log(n))
  • Sequential search: O(n)
  • Linear search: O(n)
  • Police ethnicity database search: O(0)
ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider ,
@ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider@hexbear.net avatar

No need to search when you already have someone you wanna pin it on.

ooterness , in Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police

This post is horrifying, not funny.

Dukeofdummies , in Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police
@Dukeofdummies@kbin.social avatar

I mean, in the era of VHS this won't work because ultimately you're fast forwarding and rewinding. So you're gonna watch it anyway. but in the digital era I thought this would be what any Police officer did?

Like... they're not even gonna spend 10 minutes on a theft?

Deceptichum ,
@Deceptichum@kbin.social avatar

Like... they're not even gonna spend 10 minutes on a theft?

What and be responsible for paperwork?

Cops are the biggest bludges you’ll ever meet.

funkless_eck ,

my guy half of them don’t spend 10 minutes on a murder. There’s a reason it’s called detective fiction

Dukeofdummies ,
@Dukeofdummies@kbin.social avatar

I know but if they were smart they'd say they're gonna take an hour to do it, find the footage in 10 minutes and goof off another 50.

Pull a Scotty, then you're productive and lazy. It's just disappointing they can't even procrastinate properly. I feel bad.

SpaceNoodle ,

if they were smart

I gotta stop you right there

schmidtster , in Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police

I get the sentiment, but you want them to waste public resources doing it on all these different clunky uis and software? Sometimes these take minutes to load new information to parse.

Maybe waste your time pinpointing it instead of expecting public resources to do what you could do for them?

BombOmOm ,
@BombOmOm@lemmy.world avatar

on all these different clunky uis and software

As someone who has used security cam software before. I swear they are designed to be as unhelpful, slow, and convoluted as possible.

new_guy ,

I mean… their job supposedly is to protect and serve the citiens so yeah… I’d expect them to use their tools to do their job.

schmidtster ,

It’s your software/hardware and you know how to operate it. Would take you a fraction of the time as well.

Maybe public cameras sure, but private that’s not their tool by any stretch of the imagination.

And most public cameras don’t record for privacy reasons.

bleistift2 ,

It’s your software/hardware

Where do you read that in the original post?

GBU_28 ,

What? It was a campus security camera, not their hardware

OmenAtom ,

In what world do random citizens own and operate the security cameras of, well, anything? As opposed to the people that work there, or I dont know the police? Whose job is allegedly to solve crimes?

Deceptichum ,
@Deceptichum@kbin.social avatar

Oh shit, a few minutes to do their job. The fucking horror, wouldn’t want to cut into their being an utter fucking bastard time, where they’re probably harassing a minority or beating their wife.

schmidtster ,

It’s public money, why waste it when you could provide it for them.

But argue fallacious points.

Deceptichum ,
@Deceptichum@kbin.social avatar

Okay so genius, are the cops going to provide the footage for the person to watch themselves to narrow down the time?

How the fuck do you expect this person to work it out if the ones with access to the evidence to do so refuse to do so?

And further fucking more, how is doing their job, wasting public money? There’s a lot of money wasted on police, investigating a robbery for a real person is not one of them.

slurpeesoforion ,

Chain of custody

NoIWontPickaName ,

Because it is their job to do it.

Crackhappy ,
@Crackhappy@lemmy.world avatar

So when there is a pothole in front of your driveway, you’re going out and filling it in yourself, right? Because why waste the city’s valuable time when you could do it yourself?

schmidtster ,

If it’s in your driveway it’s your problem, yes.

Aatube ,
@Aatube@kbin.social avatar

They said in front. So right after you go out

Even if it was in your driveway, unless you’re a cement construction worker you’d probably have no way to fix it and contact somebody

SpaceNoodle ,

Oh, so your excuse is that you’re illiterate?

frezik ,

Who is “you” in this sentence? I mean, I could probably write security camera software, but I don’t, and have no plans to. I imagine most of the people here are the same.

kryptonianCodeMonkey ,

Yeah, every time I have ever had to hand over footage to the police for thefts at our family store, I clip and organizr that shit. I also include a paper identifying each file, the timestamps and what happened during them, any details I identified that they can corroborate (physical description, identifiable clothing/tattoos, make and model of vehicle, license plate number, etc.). I often end up putting in 1-2 hours of work on it watching, editing and transferring footage.

If you want traction and results from the police, you need to make it as easy as possible for them by doing the heavy lifting yourself. The cynical view is that thats because they just don’t care, but also, in fairness, your case is one of dozens of cases on their desk and the cases never stop coming. This is your priority, so put in the effort instead of expecting others do so. That being said, that is much easier when you have direct access to the cctv footage. I’m guessing this student didnt.

NoIWontPickaName ,

So I should do their job for them?

Why the fuck are we paying them then?

gregorum ,

That’s an interesting way to say that they shouldn’t get paid if they’re not doing their jobs. 

HubertManne , in Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police

that dawn of humanity is only going to work if the rewind/fast forward is instantaneous.

kryptonianCodeMonkey , (edited )

Also, if I rewind to the Neolithic and I see a bunch of cavemen, sabertooth tigers and a Schwinn chained to a bike rack, I’m not going to just fast forward from there. I have other questions.

MagicShel ,

I mean… You’re not gonna outrun that sabertooth on foot.

DarkThoughts , in Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police

That's how I look for broken mods too. Move half of them into a temp folder, launch the game. If it works, put half of the sorted out ones back. if it doesn't work, remove another half and try again.

Weirdfish ,

This is all fine and good till it’s a conflict between two specific mods. Damn you FO4 on PS4, why you gotta be like that?

DarkThoughts ,

You would still at least figure out one of the conflicting mods and could look for updates / further information about conflicts.
Edit: On PC that is.

Zehzin ,
@Zehzin@lemmy.world avatar

Then it’s even easier, just remove one of them

Shyfer ,

You can put mods on the PS4?

Blamemeta ,

A very limited amount.

SmoothLiquidation ,

Just enough so that you could get a conflict between two of them.

ezures ,

Bethesda made mod workshop worked on the consoles, so you could share the pc made mods.

Small setback that it didn’t support script extender, so it was quite limited. Still better than no modding tho.

v4ld1z ,
@v4ld1z@lemmy.zip avatar

To add to your answer, Skyrim also supports mods on PS4/5 and there are even a couple really useful ones. Stuff like the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch exists, for example.

Weirdfish ,

I have had a much better time w Skyrim mods than FO4 on the PS4 as far as stability goes.

Weirdfish ,

I only have it on PS4, and yes there are lots of mods in the workshop. There are obviously limitations.

Every few months I try installing various mods to make what I want out of it, darker nights, flashlight mod, weapon and armour changes for a more hard core experience, etc, and end up with 15 or so mods installed.

Start a new hardcore mode, get just about past diamond city, and the game invariably starts crashing.

No idea which one or ones are causing the issue, and in the end I get annoyed and go play something else.

Haus ,
@Haus@kbin.social avatar

When I want to see a broken mod, I just surf over to Reddit.

KSPAtlas ,
@KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz avatar

Yeah, pretty great in my minecraft modding experience

EvolvedTurtle ,

I was looking for this specific comment lmao

MonkderZweite ,

Btw, this is why i have given up on Early Access on Steam; can’t disable updates and have to fix your 100 mods then.

DarkThoughts ,

I love Steam, but the fact that you cannot permanently disable auto updates for specific titles is definitely infuriating.

Kalkaline , in Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police
@Kalkaline@leminal.space avatar

God damn, whoever came up with that is clever. I would have never come up with that on my own.

fsxylo ,

waves magic wand computer science!

systemglitch ,

Honestly you probably do it already without thinking about it when trying to figure out where you left off a video that you never paused.

Or if you ever had VHS tapes, or so e from of disc media… perhaps a cassette when looking for a particular part of a song.

Maybe not as methodical as perfectly breaking it down into halves of halves, but xlos enough to help you pin point what part you are looking for.

Pamasich ,
@Pamasich@kbin.social avatar

I'm pretty sure they were using sarcasm.

Kalkaline ,
@Kalkaline@leminal.space avatar

I’m pretty sure I was serious. I don’t know how people can be that clever. It seems simple once it’s explained, sure, but I wouldn’t be able to come up with that on my own without someone else giving me a problem that points me in that direction.

khannie ,
@khannie@lemmy.world avatar

Studied this in computer science algorithms class waaaaayyy back in 1996 and by golly this one stuck with me. It’s so simple and so effective.

jmcs ,

What if you had to guess a number between 0 and 100 and the other person (or an application) only told you if the number is bigger or smaller? That’s the form that’s usually presented to CS students and most people end up figuring it out on their own. Then the trick is knowing how to generalize it.

acceptable_pumpkin , (edited )

Some security camera systems have this built in. They show snapshots of various times where you choose the total period, say 24 hours. Then you glance through the snapshots that are all displayed at once on the screen and click on the last one where your bike was still there. That will then “zoom in” the timeline and show another set of snapshots, though this time within a smaller total time window. Keep clicking on the last panel with the bike, and it will soon show you the clip of the bike being stolen.

Really helpful to find out when something changed.

dudinax ,

Yeah, there’s no reason it should take an hour no matter how long the tape is.

justJanne ,

If you’ve got 14 billion years, a theft takes a minute, then you need 53 recursion levels of binary search to find the moment of the theft. (14 billion years can be split into about 7.3e15 1-minute segments, 53 levels of binary search allow you to search through 9e15 segments)

That means OP assumed that it’d take 1 minute to decide whether at a certain still frame the theft had already occured or not, to compute the new offset to seek to, and the time it’d take to actually seek the tape to that point.

Not an unreasonable assumption, but a very conservative estimate. Assuming the footage is on an HDD and you’ve got an automated system for binary search, I’d actually assume it’d take 5 seconds for each step, meaning finding a 1min theft on 14 billion years of footage would take 5 minutes.

Anemia ,

According to my napkin math it would take longer than an hour if the tape was ~3.3*10^218 sec long (or three million trillion trillion… (18 trillions) …trillion years). Assuming you have only have two options to choose between but can pick which alternative in in 5 seconds (2^720) and you want to get down to a 1 minute intervall.

So i mean its not impossible to find a tape long enough though it seems unlikely that we would be so off in our estimates of the age of the universe.

ODuffer ,
@ODuffer@lemmy.world avatar

Enhance…

ReplicantBatty ,
SmoothLiquidation ,
Cannacheques ,

Covert zorb ball carrying remote control toy racecar through the HRV system

glibg10b ,

Without binary search, we would not have search engines today

CmdrShepard ,

Works the same for finding a burned out bulb on a string of Christmas lights too.

teft , in Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police
@teft@startrek.website avatar

Yeah, pigs don’t like to be corrected. Or made to look like they don’t know what they’re doing.

tquid ,

And they absolutely hate ever doing anything about bicycle theft in particular.

clay_pidgin ,

I have heard that very often. I wonder if bikes are harder to track down than other property for some reason.

Zipitydew ,

They only care about property loss when it involves rich people.

SlikPikker ,

Which proves that cops really DO actually do their jobs.

Because protecting the property of the rich is the exact core purpose of policing.

Coasting0942 ,

Technically it’s maintaining social order. So get back to work menials or be reported to the Enforcers for organized discontent.

ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

Maintaining social order, especially in the form of violent repression against demonstrations, indirectly protects the rich’s properties, so all in a day’s work.

Localhorst86 ,

smaller, therefore easier to hide. Not registered with a central authority like, for example, cars.

Zron ,

There’s plenty of cases where they don’t look for cars either.

Or the cops themselves just straight up steal the car themselves.

My wife’s car was ordered to be towed by, according to the impound lot, the police.

Neat thing was that there was no ticket with the car, no police station within 3 miles had a record of a ticket for her or the car, and the area she had parked had no signs that suggested it was illegal to park where she did, nor does the city have any ordinance about overnight parking.

Best we can figure, is a cop or the tow company that works with the city, just decided to tow a car for funsies and the 500 bucks it took to get it out of impound.

The police and every organization associated with them are corrupt to the core.

tocopherol ,
@tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Reading that I almost had a thought like it must have been a mix-up or something, but no, US police will murder people with less thought, so that type of fuckery is completely expected.

snowe ,
@snowe@programming.dev avatar

There is bike registration. bikeindex.org

It’s helped track down bike trafficking gangs sending bikes to Mexico. The police just don’t care at all

tocopherol ,
@tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Love bikeindex, I actually got my stolen bike back thanks to that site. It was literally two years later but still, the police wouldn’t have even made a report probably in the city I was at, with bike theft so ubiquitous.

pimento64 ,

Given the number of times I’ve seen cops on police forums and r/protectandserve use terms like “bikefags”, I think it’s just the typical cop disgust of anything they perceive to be weak or effeminate.

captainlezbian ,

As a gay cyclist I know I’m doing something right by pissing off cops without doing anything wrong

v4ld1z ,
@v4ld1z@lemmy.zip avatar

Thank you for you service o7

merc ,

Yeah, I don’t get that. Bicycling requires strength and endurance. It exposes you to the elements. Why is sitting in a cushy car something some people think as being more macho? Is it that you’re in control of a heavier and more powerful machine?

pimento64 ,

Bicycling requires strength and endurance.

So does cleaning a house, but that’s “women’s work”.

Is it that you’re in control of a heavier and more powerful machine?

That’s it. You didn’t get it at first because made the mistake of associating manliness with things like patience, strength, hard work, endurance both of toil and hardship; all things that do make up ideals of manliness to normal people. But you need to approach it from the perspective of a wastrel, a weak, foolish, and lazy person who demands the respect and deference of being manly without putting in the hard work—something he has avoided all his life. He might praise hard work in abstract, but he has no discipline for it and doesn’t respect those who actually do it, he just considers them beneath him. To such a person, the defining aspect of manliness and machismo is mastery, mastery over others and their wills, and since mastery through work is a waste of time to him, he turns to shortcuts.

From there, it’s not hard to see where the thought process goes. Since strength is to him based on control and mastery, he picks something that gives him more command over the road in a direct and in-your-face way. The man who drives a lifted Ram 2500 can confront you by running you the fuck over. By contrast, in his opinion, cyclists are entitled jackasses in miniscule booty shorts who can only confront you on the road by screaming “CRITICAL MASS! FUCKING CAGER!” and throwing sparkplugs at your windows. The difference in power dynamic is proof enough to our friend of who the “real man” is.

To take the mentality to its conclusion, the easiest way to gain mastery in general is through authority, and the easiest way to get that, even easier than joining a gang, is by becoming a cop.

polskilumalo ,
@polskilumalo@lemmygrad.ml avatar

In Poland we have a saying about bike theft, that they won’t even consider looking for it unless you are the commendant’s son.

Redex68 ,

I’m pretty sure any petty theft is very hard to track down. Not just bikes, if someone broke into your house and stole some minor things it’s almost certainly not gonna get found. Bikes are the same, it’s very easy to resell them and repaint, and nobory registers bikes.

Rediphile ,

Because even if they look for it and find it, whoever is riding just says it theirs and there is literally nothing the police can do unless it was caught on video or there is a meaningful identifying feature like a serial number or something else specific and unique.

Seeing a sketchy guy with a black and red bike with the same bike rack you had isn’t enough to prove anything.

If an officer approached me riding my bike around and asked me to prove it’s mine, I couldn’t either despite not being a thief.

AlexWIWA , (edited )

Anything that’s not serialized and recorded is basically impossible to find. If you have serial numbers then they can inform local pawn shops, but even then the shops probably aren’t checking serials for anything under $500.

And if the thief just sells it on craigslist then no one is checking serials.

lars ,
@lars@programming.dev avatar

I reported my bike stolen in college and I got a call the next day that they had found it parked in front of a nearby church.

It was stolen on a Sunday. I guess someone didn’t want to be late to service.

thebuoyancyofcitrus ,

What you’re entering the third act of your love story and you have to get to the church in time to break up the wedding and declare your love, what’s a little bike theft? The universe will take care of it.

Honytawk ,

Probably added the theft to the sins they were confessing that day as well.

TheBlue22 ,

God made them do it!

superduperenigma ,

And they absolutely hate ever doing anything about bicycle theft in particular.

FTFY

lunarul ,

It probably depends a lot on where you live. My wife’s bike got stolen and she was woken up by police coming to check on it (one of the maintenance guys at our apartment noticed a man at 7-Eleven riding it and recognized it; came back running to check if it’s indeed missing and called the police). We fully expected the police would do nothing about it (it was the cheapest Walmart bike), but an hour later they called that they found the bike and have the culprit in custody. It did help that the bike was a girly mint green with a wicker basket, so they instantly recognized it when they saw it.

Then again, in San Francisco, when my wife got her car window smashed and wallet stolen (she was late for class and dropped her wallet under the car seat, didn’t stop to take it; but it wasn’t the wallet that caught the thieves’ attention, it was the breast pump bag that looked like a laptop bag; they threw it on the floor when they saw what it was), we never heard anything back from the police.

Sheeple ,
@Sheeple@lemmy.world avatar

Fun fact. Cops on average have lower IQ and often fail literacy tests. Furthermore it appears that critical thinking is discouraged in the job, with candidates being selected who lack critical thinking abilities over those that have them.

JoMiran ,
@JoMiran@lemmy.ml avatar

We need to have a chat about your definition of “fun”.

Shiggles ,

Certain departments specifically have IQ tests, in order to ensure you aren’t smart enough to easily get a better job elsewhere.

shalafi ,

This internet myth has got to die. ONE case in ONE department, a quarter century ago, does not mean it’s a practice.

nytimes.com/…/metro-news-briefs-connecticut-judge…

aniki ,

deleted_by_author

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  • Honytawk ,

    Can you blame them if they can not find one from after 1999?

    shalafi ,

    Because the 1999 story is the origin of this talk.

    Anders429 ,

    Anyone got a non-paywalled link?

    shalafi ,
    underisk ,
    @underisk@lemmy.ml avatar

    Calling 25 years a quarter century is a fun way to make it seem way longer. Precedent is kind of important in law so setting a precedent that says they can discriminate on the basis of IQ is relevant until is overturned. Do you have any articles about a ruling overturning that precedent?

    CmdrShepard ,

    I think it’s more nefarious than that. Many departments want a good 'ol boys club where they’re the ultimate authority and they want their officers to fall in line rather than question department actions.

    XEAL ,

    It sounds like this could be applied to the military too

    Sheeple ,
    @Sheeple@lemmy.world avatar

    The military doesn’t actively exclude smarter people. However they 100% prey on people who are less educated

    Localhorst86 , in Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police

    “Exactly my point. We will not be investing an hour looking at the footage to pinpoint the time of theft, now get out!”

    Rolando ,

    Show up with a box of donuts.

    “Hey, look what I got for us to eat while looking at that tape!”

    “Oh, I don’t think those donuts will last more than ten minutes here!”

    “No problem, I know a way that won’t take that long…”

    fibojoly , in I'll just be a quick 3h

    Me right now, discovering that our archives data have file sizes… sometimes in bytes, sometimes in kilobytes. I found some pattern this morning thinking I could know which was which, then the pattern collapsed at some date in the past.
    Joy.

    kopczak1995 , in Debugging

    Well, seems like coding while drunk didn’t help this time.

    stevecrox , in 10 months later bill revisits his spaghetti code. forgets absolutely everything and refuses to elaborate. this wouldn't have happened if Bill forgot to comment on his code
    @stevecrox@kbin.social avatar

    Basic rule if someone claims X magically solves a problem they don't follow X and are a huge generator of the problem.

    For example people who claim they don't need to write comments because they write self documenting code are the people that use variable names x1,x2,y, etc..

    Similarly anyone you meet claiming Test Driven Development means they have better tests will write code with appalling code coverage and epically bad tests.

    squeezeyerbawdy , in I'll just be a quick 3h

    Oooh I had a 45 second coughing fit- thanks flu and you dear poster!

    ExtraMedicated , in I'll just be a quick 3h

    You wanna know why this dashboard takes a full minute to load? It’s because it joins every table in the fucking database because some people can’t be bothered to look at a separate page for certain information.

    ensignrick , in I'll just be a quick 3h
    @ensignrick@startrek.website avatar

    Me this morning. I’m gonna take a look at why this Jenkins pipeline is failing. This one job starts a dozen others. Half are failing. For different reasons. After starting rewriting a job that someone half assed. Realize the original error was caused by missing input but some are still valid. Still can’t figure out why my rewritten program is erroring. Get pulled away because another program did something weird… I completed nothing today but worked a ton.

    My day…

    criminalunicorn ,
    @criminalunicorn@feddit.uk avatar

    You have perfectly described my day almost everyday.

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