• teft@startrek.website
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    11 months ago

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

    • 🐑🇸 🇭 🇪 🇪 🇵 🇱 🇪🐑@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • tquid@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

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

      • lars@programming.dev
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        11 months ago

        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@beehaw.org
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          11 months ago

          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.

      • lunarul@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

          • SlikPikker@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            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@reddthat.com
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              11 months ago

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

        • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
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          11 months ago

          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.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            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@sopuli.xyz
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              11 months ago

              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.

  • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    This argument did not go well

    You can’t convince people to do their job with logic when they just don’t want to do their job. After minorities, the thing cops hate most is doing their job.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Come on, don’t disparage our hard-working Boys in blue. Without police who’s going to come to your house to take notes about the crime that you have sufficient evidence to prove, and even have a likely suspect for, and then never follow up?

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        I assume he doesn’t have access to it. He just knows there’s a camera pointing at the place where his bike was stolen, and that the police have access to the footage.

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      when they just don’t want to do their job.

      It might also be a matter of getting a directive from their management not the care, because there’s not enough cops to go around for the ‘important’ stuff.

      They don’t want to waste their limited time for simple property theft, which is ironic considering that’s what police are supposed to be doing (stopping theft).

      The answer would be then to hire more police, but unfortunately that would mean higher taxes for the citizenry, and that seems to be a hard glass ceiling.

      • trolololol@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Wrong

        The police exists to protect the status quo. Try overthrowing any immoral law or legally but immoral behavior and you’ll see how efficiently they move about.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        No, the police just don’t want to do any work. In my hometown you can’t get the police to do shit unless you are a black man who “fits the description” or “smells like weee” then they will gladly try to make your death look as much your fault as possible.

  • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    This didn’t go down well.

    IT consulting pro-tip: Customers would rather pay for your time and expertise, than be made to feel stupid that they didn’t think of something so simple themselves.

    • mwknight@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      After working in desktop support for a year after college, I realized that people just wanted their problem solved and to not feel frustrated. That realization made my job immensely easier because I pivoted from copying a file in 30 seconds and walking away to talking to them a little bit and letting them feel good after we were done. My ticket closing speed slowed down a little but people felt better and I consistently got positive feedback.

      • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

        Dude same here. I usually say stuff along the lines of ‘yea it took me forever the first time to figure it out’ or ‘it’s a common issue that a lot of people have, I’ll get it sorted in a sec for you no problem’. Make it seem like they’re not stupid, regardless of the truth and then fix it, keeps em happy and more willing to cooperate with you as well.

        I also talk through what I’m doing and if they show interest I’ll teach them so they can fix it in the future, ‘ah I’ve seen this before, took me like a hour to figure it out on my computer, for me it was a chrome update that broke how downloaded files open. Here let me right click the file, and go to open with, we hit Adobe pdf and check the always open with this program button, that should do it let’s test it out. OK seems like its good to go. Let me know if you have any more issues’. If they don’t show interest then it’s no problem.

        • meathorse@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          Are you my kindred spirit!? :P Thats almost exactly what I do too!

          My favourite is when someone apologies for not knowing something or having dumb questions. Apart from “there is never a dumb question” because there usually isn’t, I typically respond with “if everyone already knew how to do everything, I’d be out of a job” which always seems to go down well.

          • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Some of my favorite help desk moments are those times you get to a be teacher for someone that’s genuinely listening and happy to learn.

      • BakedGoods@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        When I started in support 15 years ago my boss said: “First you solve the person, then you solve the problem”.

        He was a good dude.

      • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Same story here, actually. I cut my teeth on internet telephony (modems) support for an ISP. People would call up furious about not being able to connect. I learned that chatting people up during a long Windows reboot did a lot to humanize their struggle and get them to calm down and loosen up. First few times were organic, then I started looking for pretenses to do this, just to bring the temperature down for the rest of the call.

        • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Call centers tell you to empathize but that’s not something you can teach. You can either do it or you can’t. So they give those terrible scripts, and then some of them require you to speak the scripted lines, even when you know all it does is piss the caller off.

          No hears that scripted pablum at the start of call and thinks it’s genuine. No one. “I’m sorry to hear your having issues sir, but I’ll be happy to assist you.” genuinely comes off condescending at this point. They know you know it’s scripted, they know you know the representative has to say it, but they make them do it anyway.

          Here’s what I found doing ISP call center work, and it worked virtually every single time: imply through tone and pointed comments you’re as frustrated as the called with how shitty the service and the hardware is. They’re never prepared for it, it always catches their anger off guard.

          Don’t outright say “Yeah, Cox is absolute dog shit, and that POS gateway we make you pay for isn’t worth the cost of the the technician we’re sending out to ‘fix’ it.” You’ll get in trouble for that.

          But if you’re careful and creative, you can make them appreciate you think that

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      11 months ago

      Just yesterday, I was helping this manager set up a new system of ticket line (the kind where you get a ticket number and wait for it to be called in a panel). He complained that they didn’t have a proper printer just for these tickets, so he made the tickets in excel and printed them. To the right of the number, someone would mark the service, from a list of 6.

      “Why not use a single letter prefix and print different piles of passwords? (A01, A02, A03; B01, B02, etc)”

      That’ll use too much paper. We’ll also need more tickets than before

      “That will use less paper, you can print 2 tickets using the same space. Also, the amount of tickets always depends on the number of people that show up, but you’ll have a better idea of which service is being needed each day”

      Mr manager didn’t like the idea and moved on to another problem.

    • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Eh, it’s less intuitive than you might think, as someone who already knows how to do it.

      I once had to explain this process to a software engineer who was quite senior to me. The guy wasn’t any idiot, he was a pretty competent engineer, he just didn’t know this trick.

      The cops might even already know how to do it, they just don’t want to, because they’re cops.

  • Pazuzu@midwest.social
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    11 months ago

    I thought this had to be hyperbole, so I did the math myself. I’m assuming human history is 200,000 years as google says, and we want to narrow this down to the second the bike disappeared. also that the bike instantly vanished so there’s no partially existing bike.

    each operation divides the time left in half, so to get from 200k years (6.311×10^12 seconds) to 1 would take ~42.58 divisions, call it 43. even if we take a minute on average to seek and decide whether the bike is there or not it would still be less than an hour of manual sorting

    hell, at 60fps it would only take another 6 divisions to narrow it down to a single frame, still under an hour

    edit: to use the entire hour we’d need a couple more universes worth of video time to sort through, 36.5 billion years worth to be exact. or a measly 609 million years if we need to find that single frame at 60fps

    • rckclmbr@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I regularly bisect commits in the range of 200k (on the low end) for finding causes of bugs. It takes me minutes. Pretty crazy

    • psud@aussie.zone
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      11 months ago

      History is about 10k years, the 200k years is mostly pre-history. People didn’t write stuff down until they invented agriculture and needed to track trade between owners, workers, etc

    • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Combine AI image/visual-pattern recognition and quantum computing, and this search could be completed before it was even started.

    • stockRot@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Ever heard of a logarithm? If you haven’t, you just reinvented it.

      Also, your math is wrong: log base 2 of 200,000 is ~18

      • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        You did 200k years. You need to do 200k years as seconds (the 6.311e12 they mentioned). Their math is right.

        Not sure why you’re acting like they claimed to invent the logarithm, either…

  • SameOldInternet@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    This post just shows that the police rarely if ever review any video as this method would’ve been learned as a result of repeatedly reviewing video.

  • Melllvar@startrek.website
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    11 months ago

    Part of my job is to review security footage for reported incidents.

    If there is a long-lasting visual cue that the event has or has not happened yet (e.g. a window is either broken or not), then a binary search is very useful.

    If the event lasts only a moment and leaves no visual cue (e.g. an assault), then binary search is practically useless.

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      If the event lasts only a moment and leaves no visual cue (e.g. an assault), then binary search is practically useless.

      But you will see the event happen though.

      It’s a matter of if you can identify who the perpetrator is or not, but at least that due diligence should be done by police, looking at the person doing the crime and see if they can be identified.

      • null@slrpnk.net
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        11 months ago

        But you will see the event happen though.

        Not with a binary search.

        Edit: just collapse this thread and move on. Cosmic Cleric is an obvious troll.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Edit: just collapse this thread and move on. Cosmic Cleric is an obvious troll.

          Screw you, and your gatekeeping censoring.

          I replied, saying the comment is not correct, and I gave reasons why, which are valid reasons.

          • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            Your reasons for why they were incorrect about a binary search being useless in situations that don’t leave visual cues is that you can simply look for the visual cues lmao, that’s not valid at all

            • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              Your reasons for why they were incorrect about a binary search being useless in situations that don’t leave visual cues is that you can simply look for the visual cues lmao, that’s not valid at all

              I never said they work 100% of the time. I said they work most of the time, which is a true statement.

              An event happens in time, that event has a duration, if you can detect that duration then a binary search works perfectly fine.

              And even after the duration most times events change the environment around them, which stay statically changed, and are detectable.

              So much work to try to Kill the Messenger. Maybe organizations don’t want people to think they work so people won’t demand that they be used, causing more work for them.

              • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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                11 months ago

                I never said they work 100% of the time. I said they work most of the time, which is a true statement.

                That’s also what the comment you claim to disagree with said, so why are you even arguing?

                An event happens in time, that event has a duration, if you can detect that duration then a binary search works perfectly fine.

                And even after the duration most times events change the environment around them, which stay statically changed, and are detectable.

                Right. And when that happens, it’s covered by the second paragraph of the parent comment:

                If there is a long-lasting visual cue that the event has or has not happened yet (e.g. a window is either broken or not), then a binary search is very useful.

                Situations where binary searches aren’t useful are covered in the third paragraph of the comment:

                If the event lasts only a moment and leaves no visual cue (e.g. an assault), then binary search is practically useless.

                You’ve claimed that you disagree with this, but have yet to explain why you disagree beyond saying that there would be visual cues. Except that they’ve already said that binary searches work in situations that leave visual cues. You haven’t explained how a binary search can work in situations that leave no visual cues except by claiming they they would, except if they do, then the person you claim to disagree with has already said that binary searches are useful.

                • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  You’ve claimed that you disagree with this, but have yet to explain why you disagree beyond saying that there would be visual cues.

                  I have explained it, multiple times. I disagree that there would not be visual clues most of the time. I can’t prove a negative I don’t belleve in, to me its a false scenario that doesn’t (mostly) happen. In fact, the whole point of my very first comment was to rebut implicitly the ‘no visual clues’ clause.

                  Each comment is not atomic, on its own, its part of an overall conversation being had. To try and do so otherwise is just to play “gotcha” and is intellectually dishonest.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          But you will see the event happen though.

          Not with a binary search.

          Yes you will.

          A binary search is just what it says, it’s just for searching only.

          When you find that moment in time where the bike was there one moment, and then the next moment the bike’s not there, then you view at regular or even slow-mo at those few seconds of the bike in the middle of disappearing, and see the perpetrator, and hopefully can identify them.

          • Azzu@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            You didn’t get what was talked about here. Re-read the topmost parent comment.

            How do you binary search for two people arriving, one punches the other, they both leave?

            • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              You didn’t get what was talked about here. Re-read the topmost parent comment.

              I was responding to this …

              Part of my job is to review security footage for reported incidents.

              If there is a long-lasting visual cue that the event has or has not happened yet (e.g. a window is either broken or not), then a binary search is very useful.

              If the event lasts only a moment and leaves no visual cue (e.g. an assault), then binary search is practically useless.

              I disagree with the “leaves no visual cue” part, as I’ve commented on. There’s ALWAYS something caught on the video to help determine things. Maybe not enough, but never nothing.

              • LUHG@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Maybe I’m not understanding both arguments here but I’d like to understand. I’ve had to review footage of a vending machine being shaken to release drinks.

                You have no before or after visual clue as to when the event took place. The only indication is when you physically see it happening. The same could be said for an assault. If nothing is changed in the before or after static still how can you pinpoint the incident?

                • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  You have no before or after visual clue as to when the event took place.

                  That wouldn’t necessarily be true. If you shook it hard enough to move the contents inside the vending machine and the vending machine had a glass front then you would have a static change that would last from the time the event happened until a human being came to work on the machine. That change would be detectable.

                  Or from the shaking the vending machine is moved an inch forward and an inch to the left. That change would be detectable.

                  Everyone arguing against me is trying to focus the point that the event is such a short duration that it’s not detectable afterwards, and what I’ve been arguing the whole time and that people keep ignoring is that most of the time after an event happens that the environment around the event changes, and it’s detectable afterwards.

            • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              How do you binary search for two people arriving, one punches the other, they both leave?

              In the same way the OP talks about it …

              You don’t watch the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it wasn’t there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way though. Its very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have taken an hour to find the moment of theft.

              Instead of a bike, you look for the aftereffects of a fight happening (chairs knocked down, tables turned over, etc.). You can even look at how many people congregate around the location of the fight before and after the video as a ‘marker’ to the point of time the fight was happening/just finished.

              Edit: One thing we didn’t even mention, AI can also be used these days to notice subtle changes in the video. If a video is a static image of an alley, then two people walk in the alley and fight, even though they leave no traces behind, that moment of the fight is caught on the video with activity/movement. Motion sensor movement, basically.

                • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  You are seriously confused.

                  And you are seriously trying to kill the messenger.

                  OP specifically said that you’re fucked if there is no visual cue.

                  And I’m saying there’s ALWAYS a visual clue/cue, always. Either the bike is there one minute and gone another, or a fight breaks out and trashes the place from the fight. In the vast amount of cases, there’s always a visual difference.

                  And in this case we’re talking specifically about a bike, going missing.

              • Kialdadial@iusearchlinux.fyi
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                11 months ago

                Your adding things that would allow a binary search work, but the question was in a situation where the only evidence is the conflict itself

                2 guys enter one guy punches the other guy they both leave. Nothing is moved no blood was created,

                you could not use a binary search effectively to duduce when it occurred.

                • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  Your adding things that would allow a binary search work, but the question was in a situation where the only evidence is the conflict itself

                  I’m describing the vast majority of fights that happen in the public. Also, you’re trying to move the goalposts by focusing on a fight, when the discussion is about the theft of a bike.

                  Edit: One thing we didn’t even mention, AI can also be used these days to notice subtle changes in the video. If a video is a static image of an alley, then two people walk in the alley and fight, even though they leave no traces behind, that moment of the fight is caught on the video with activity/movement. Motion sensor movement, basically.

              • Ardyssian@sh.itjust.works
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                11 months ago

                What about this hypothetical scenario:

                Suppose the objective is to review highway cam footage of the day to verify that a (non-speeding) car with a particular license plate drove past the area / used this route. The route is used 24/7 by many identical cars throughout the day and night, and that our target car is one such identical car, with the only difference being the license plate. We know on average cars that drive past this camera only appear for 3 seconds on the footage. How can binary search be used to find the car within 24 hours of footage, if the target car only appears for 3 seconds within the 24 hour video?

            • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              You either don’t know what binary search is or you completely missed the context of this conversation

              I’m a computer programmer. I know exactly what a binary search is. I’ve written binary searches before.

              The search is to get you to the point where you can watch the video to see the crime happening, in hopes of indentifying the perpretrator.

                • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  Then you missed the point of this conversation

                  You’re being intellectually dishonest, in an attempt to kill the message.

                  This is what was said in the origional OP pic…

                  You don’t watch the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it wasn’t there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way though. Its very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have taken an hour to find the moment of theft.

          • lustyargonian@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            Binary search only works on sorted data, i.e. you know which side of the mid point is pointing towards the incident. If the incident leaves no trail, you can’t know whether you can discard the left side or the right side, making it a complicated linear search at that moment.

            • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              If the incident leaves no trail, you can’t know whether you can discard the left side or the right side

              There’s a moment where the bike is there, then another when its not. The whole video, either way, will either from the beginning up to the point of theft have the bike there, or NOT have the bike there from the point of theft to the end of the video. The marker is the removal of the bike from the video lens.

              • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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                11 months ago

                But the comment you replied to wasn’t talking about bike thefts specifically, it was talking about unspecified situations that don’t leave traces. You responded to someone saying that binary search doesn’t work in situations that don’t leave cues not by arguing against the premise (e.g. “but no such event exists, everything leaves cues”), but by telling them that you simply have to look for the cues from the hypothetical event that didn’t leave any.

                • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  but by telling them that you simply have to look for the cues from the hypothetical event that didn’t leave any.

                  And my point is that the DID leave a clue that a binary search would pick up on, the disappearance of the bike.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Let’s use the example of a bike theft. We enter into evidence a 4-hour security cam video that shows the thief with the bike.

        Scenario A: The camera can directly see the bike rack, and the bike in question is visible at the beginning of the video, and not visible at the end. Somewhere in this 4-hour video, someone walks up to the bike and takes it out of the bike rack. You can use a binary search to find the moment that happens in this video because you can pick a frame and say “Ah, this was before the theft; the bike is still there” or “ah, this was after the theft; the bike is gone.”

        Scenario B: The camera can’t directly see the bike rack, but can see the doorway you have to walk through to get to the bike rack. So somewhere in 4 hours of doorway footage, someone walks through the door, then a short time later walks back through the door with the bike. A binary search won’t help here because the door looks the same at the beginning or end of the video. A simple binary search won’t work here because the door looks the same before and after.

        • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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          11 months ago

          This is the explanation that CosmicCleric needs in order to understand binary search.

          Because as it is, (s)he’s failing abysmally at demonstrating any understanding whatsoever of that subject.

          • null@slrpnk.net
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            11 months ago

            Nah, they’re just gonna say you can use AI or something, as a retroactive explanation for what they obviously weren’t talking about in their original comment. They’re a troll; they’re not going to budge.

            Edit: Case in point. They’re now at the level of mental gymnastics that they’re saying part of their original response implied that they were talking about the capabilities of AI at some point in the future.

              • null@slrpnk.net
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                11 months ago

                And to recap, what you said is:

                If an event lasts only a moment and leaves no visual cue, you will see that event happen using a binary search.

                Which is, of course, false.

                • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  And to recap, what you said is:

                  If an event lasts only a moment and leaves no visual cue, you will see that event happen using a binary search.

                  Which is, of course, false.

                  It’s not false if the event changes the environment around it, which was my point.

                  You incorrectly assuming a completely clean and static event that does not affect anything around it afterwards, and in the real world that’s just not usually the case.

                  And for the record, I never said it works 100% of the time.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Scenario B: The camera can’t directly see the bike rack, but can see the doorway you have to walk through to get to the bike rack. So somewhere in 4 hours of doorway footage, someone walks through the door, then a short time later walks back through the door with the bike. A binary search won’t help here

          I never said it works 100% of the time. This that it would work most of the time. And I make that statement based on the fact that usually the environment changes around the event, or the event happens long enough to be detectable, if not by humans, then by AI.

          In all of my comments I’m assuming that that focal point of the crime is visible.

          But even if it wasn’t, if the person stealing the bike knocks over a trash can while doing it and that’s in the camera view it would still be useable. Or if a crowd congregates around the focus point and looks around for the bike, that would also make a binary search feasible.

          That’s always just been my point, that a binary surgery more often than not works because most times the environment around the event changes in some way, from subtle to extreme.

          • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            You would have to be confident that said change in environment was done by the bike thief. What if that knocked over trash can was done by some unrelated bored teenager twenty minutes after the bike was stolen?

            It might be better to use some software to remove any frame of video that is identical to the one before it, no motion is taking place, etc. then manually watch the much shorter video of “only when stuff happens.”

            • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              You would have to be confident that said change in environment was done by the bike thief.

              Well, the change would happen, the human will be noticed, and then they can watch that moment in time on the tape to see who did it. The binary search would be about shortening what portions of the video tape a human/AI would have to review manually.

              It might be better to use some software to remove any frame of video that is identical to the one before it, no motion is taking place, etc. then manually watch the much shorter video of “only when stuff happens.”

              So, I hope you’re not under the impression that I’m advocating binary search as the ONLY way of doing a search. I’m just staying within the confines of the subject as brought up by the OP, which was about binary searches.

              At the end of the day its about detecting the change/aftereffect, and not the search inandof itself. A binary search just helps you narrow down the video you have to watch manually, especially when there’s allot of it to review.

      • DaleGribble88@programming.dev
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        11 months ago

        I’m just a random guy stumbling across this thread hours after the fact. I want to say that after reading many of these comments. I feel like I’m starting to get a handle on what your position is. You aren’t wrong, but you are communicating your idea horribly.
        Your position seems to be “Thankfully, many crimes do leave behind lasting visual cues, so you can still do a binary search for those situations if you are clever about what to look for.”
        What you’ve actually been communicating is that “If there really was no lasting visual cue, then just find a lasting visual cue anyway, then do a binary search on that and it’ll work!” - It’s all about how you choose to present, order, and emphasize your comments. Your message is more than just the words you type. I hope this message helps clarify the debate and confusion for you and anyone else who stumbles upon this long chain.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I appreciate you responding kindly, and your thoughts, thank you.

          What you’ve actually been communicating is that “If there really was no lasting visual cue, then just find a lasting visual cue anyway, then do a binary search on that and it’ll work!

          What I’ve been attempting to communicate, and I think have been expressing that, is that “no lasting visual cue” is not right (most of the time), its incorrect, and that there’s (almost) always a visual cue, and that you can do the binary search because there is. Not maybe, but there is, lasting visual cues (most of the time).

          I disagreed with the point being asserted by the comment I initially replied to. I think people are getting hung up on my very initial comment, where I implied instead of being explicive, thinking my assumption was a well known one, just based on how I see the world operate (humans are messy). But how those replied to me seem that its not well known (or just not realized).

          In hindsight, I should be more explicive, but that’s a horrible way to have to communicate, like if I have to pass every comment through a lawyer before posting it. You’d think people instead of instantly attacking would just have a conversation about try to understand my assumption. That didn’t come up until WAY later in the conversation tree, and only by a single person. There was way too many comments just attacking me with every hypothetical possiblity just to try and prove me wrong, and that, was wrong of them to do. Its not conversational, its bad group think.

          Your message is more than just the words you type.

          I was just telling my wife that the other day, its how you say that matters as much as what you say. I’m actually a well spoken person (on a good day at least). I’m honestly going to blame some of the confusion not on me, but on others with their hypotheticals, and confluencing how you scan a video, with how you search for sections of a video to scan, as adding to the confusion.

          I hope this message helps clarify the debate and confusion for you and anyone else who stumbles upon this long chain.

          Well, I think (saying this in 3rd person) what null was trying to do (gatekeeping censorship by telling others to not read my comments and calling me a troll) is really, really wrong. and bad for Lemmy, and I would have liked to have seen more people call him out on it, but instead he was rewarded with up votes. I truly don’t believe I deserved that, or that ANYBODY deserves that, and that his comment should be moderated.

          And only because you mentioned it, I don’t feel confused, I feel anger. Anger over how I’ve been treated. It was just supposed to be a friendly conversation, expressing a counterpoint, and people responded by doing things they would not do in public to another’s face.

    • doctorcrimson@lemmy.today
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      11 months ago

      I once had a friend who was robbed of all kinds of stuff including a PS3, and that the guy was signed into his Netflix changing account profiles the very same day. I told him he can just get a tracking number by calling Playstation and that the active police officer can use it to track them. Thing is, the officer ghosted him for like 8 months despite having everything they needed to immediately find the exact location of the perpetrator actively using the stolen property.

      • Cihta@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        They don’t care really. As has been my experience anyway.

        I once had my car window smashed, a mix of gear taken…some was expensive, some was personal to me. I felt violated. Called the police, explained, gave S/Ns to what I could, told them exactly who did it. He didn’t give a shit. Actually made me feel like I was wasting his time. I think Seinfeld covered this…

        “We’ll let you know if we find anything” “Do you ever find anything?” “No”

        But oh, my reg is out of date and the plate scanner picked it up? Boom, they really kick it into gear. So that’s $130… i could just go take care of the tags immediately with a friendly warning but now don’t even want to. And in the end I end up pretty fucked.

        If only they put that effort into other things I just might have gotten my linear power amps back. Props to anyone who knows that product.

      • Madison420@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        *have a perverse incentive to not know how to use them or to know things about their job generally.

        • zbyte64@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          11 months ago

          Sat on jury duty. We literally said not guilty because the officer was supposed to follow a process for line ups and they didn’t even do the bare minimum. They were like we got out guy

  • frezik@midwest.social
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    11 months ago

    I’m a little surprised the police didn’t already know about that method. Seems like they’d encounter enough CCTV footage that’d it’d be standard training.

    I once again overestimate the training levels of the police.

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        11 months ago

        Right.

        What they really want to say is “We aren’t interested in investigating your personal theft. Things get stolen all the time and we really can’t be bothered. You are not important to us.”

        But they can’t say that, so they instead throw out some excuse that puts the onus back on the other person.

        • DragonTypeWyvern
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          11 months ago

          You dont quite understand.

          They aren’t here to protect your property.

          Or you, really.

          Not unless you have a couple million in assets, then all of a sudden it’s all hands on deck, let’s get this bicycle back.

        • Rediphile@lemmy.ca
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          11 months ago

          They can, and do, say that.

          Edit: just without the you’re not important to us part.

      • SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        I dunno. “Don’t attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity.” I can totally believe that the average police officer has not thought this through. “5 hours of footage! We don’t have 5 hours to look for one bike.”

      • cannache@slrpnk.net
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        11 months ago

        And Detective Conan Doyle O’Brien really did just let his bro fuck around and watch porn and even bring a stripper into the station during footage reviewing hours. Of course, Stuart was quite shocked to hear he was not invited to the stag do later that weekend

    • Laticauda@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      I imagine it’s utilized in more “serious” investigations and they just can’t be arsed for theft.

    • roofuskit@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      In the US most their training involves how to be more aggressive veiled as training to be assertive.

    • BowtiesAreCool@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      It’s a somewhat narrow situation. You won’t always have the object of interest in plain view of a camera. What if it’s behind a door? Well now you do have to scrub through all the footage

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    11 months ago

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

    • Rolando@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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…”

  • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    “This argument didn’t go down well.”

    🤣🤣🤣 LMAO

    What an awesome punchline, should have been on its own line for more impact.

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    11 months ago

    I’m sure it didn’t go well. If it was somehow framed in a sycophantic way where the police were led to believe it was their idea, I’m sure it would have gone better. Wait that might not be too difficult to do.

  • Kalkaline @leminal.space
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    11 months ago

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

    • acceptable_pumpkin@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

        • justJanne@startrek.website
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          11 months ago

          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@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          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.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • systemglitch@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.