Aaaaaaagh, why cant you talk this way to people?! Life would be so much easier! Why didnt the argument go down well?! Is the cop stupid?! Binary search works! The guy was correct! God damnit, why must people be so unaccommodating, even when proven their accommodation would not take long?
Story time: I’m in Taiwan and I have a white female friend who is here for college.
She went on a “date” with someone she met on an app and they met at some coffee shop. The dude turned out to be SUPER creepy and she cut the date short and left. The dude proceeds to online stalk her for months. She barely speaks Chinese and was scared to go to the police due to the language barrier and the stalking was all online. Also she doesn’t know the guy’s name and he had since deleted his profile from the dating app.
My wife and I convinced her to go to the police. She left with some print outs of the stalking emails and DMs just to file a report, not expecting much.
The police tried their hardest to communicate with her and spent the next 4 hours helping her. They found the guy using traffic light footage on the day of the date and was able to use CCTV footage and using his metro card at the subway. Within the day, they found him, visited him and gave him a warning.
Well, did that warning stop him?
Ya, it was pretty instant.
it could take 5 minutes, sure, but it’s still 5 minutes of work and that’s not why we signed up for the job. so unless you give us the exact minute the bike was stolen we can’t help you. if you do, we probably still won’t help you. call us if you have some dark-skinned people to shoot, but otherwise stop bothering us.
Cops are only useful if you need someone to get to the scene two hours late, and then shoot your dog.
Police are so f***ing worthless and useless
In electronics testing, it’s called the half split method. Not getting the correct voltage. Halfway through the circuit. Go back halfway. If you are reading the correct voltage, go forward halfway.
I had a bike stolen from a convenience store once. I talked the clerk into letting me review the footage. I found the guy stealing the bike on tape, along with the licence plate of the car that dropped him off. Through a bunch of sleuthing I found out his name and exactly where he lived. I called the cops with all of this information and evidence and told them I want to press charges. Then basically said “lol, fuck off”. So I kept trying to find out where the bike was. It was an expensive bike and I wanted it back. While looking for the bike I found out the thief had sold it for money that he spent on meth, and then got caught with the meth, so he was actually in jail. I called the cops back and told them I have one of their inmates on video stealing my bike, I have the license plate number of his collaborator, and I have witnesses. I want to press charges, and they already have the guy in custody. Again, their answer was basically “lol, get fucked. We don’t help people”. Fuck the police.
ACAB
Wait couldn’t you have filed a lawsuit? I mean yeah, the cops didn’t do their job (I guess they could be sued for that too). But you would need proof in text form so just ask them again in a mail or letter. If they don’t do their job and you have proof then they’re screwed
If they don’t do their job and you have proof then they’re screwed
Nope, Warren v. District of Columbia had the SCOTUS rule that the police have no obligation to protect or serve. They can’t be sued for failing/refusing to do their job, even if it puts people in harm’s way.
The case revolved around a dude on a train who got stabbed. There was a psycho moving down the train cars stabbing people, and the police were chasing him. A passenger saw the attacker coming, saw the police in pursuit, and decided to help. He stopped the stabber, expecting the police to quickly catch up. Instead, the police locked the passenger inside the train car with the stabber, and watched through the tiny windows until the stabber was tired out from stabbing the passenger.
The passenger sued the police department, stating that they refused to protect him. The SCOTUS ruled that the police have no obligation to protect nor serve, and can’t be sued for failing to help you.
Ahm, I think you want to reread the Source. Its even worse with several women getting raped and tortured for 14 hours because of lazy police.
Ah you’re right. I was thinking of Lozito v. The City of New York. Same ruling; different circumstances.
And fucking upsetting. The US is really a policestate.
Against who? A meth addict bike thief definitely doesn’t have any money. Do you mean against the police? Possibly? Idk. I lived in a conservative town where the Chief of Police was basically idolized. I definitely didn’t want to paint a target on my own head. This was 20 years ago, so if I had other options, they’re gone now.
Defund the police, shit on the thin blue line. This is always an option.
ACAB
Honestly, this was the comment that exposed me (regular office rube) to binary search as a concept and it is so. fucking. helpful.
In what ways do you use it in your daily life? Genuinely curious.
not the commenter you asked but i use a binary search when i’m playing a modded game that is having issues to pinpoint which mod(s) cause the issue. beats launching the game over and over to test each mod by a long shot.
a recent example: i put together a mod list for risk of rain 2 to play with some friends, but the game crashed on launch when all the mods were installed. so i disabled half the mods (in order, alphabetically or other) and tried to launch the game again - still crashing. disabled half the remaining enabled mods, test, repeated as necessary. with only a few cycles of booting the game, i was able to determine the specific mod causing a crash on startup out of my list of 50 something mods.
While that’s really cool and useful, it might be the way a couple of mods interact as opposed to a specific one.
Sure, but it’ll still narrow down on one of those mods - perfect information would require figuring out why it crashes in the first place, but finding at least one of them would let you play the game without it and look up if anybody else reported problems with that mod.
Imagine you work at a company that sells cookies. The company offers a variety of cookies at different price points to different customers. The company sets up contracts offering a customer a set variety of cookies at various prices, with a clause stating that if the customer wants a different type of cookie the company makes later on, it will be priced and added to their list. This should be in the form of regular contract amendments/addendums, but it isn’t.
Several years go by, and in the course of that several different varieties of cookies have been added by the customer. The price given to them at the time may not account for the cost of materials and labor today, or how many of those cookies not mentioned in the contract are being ordered v. how many were expected, the fact that you outsourced some of those cookies, or brought some of those cookies in-house, etc. The cookie executive asks you “When did we offer customer x cookie y at price point z?”
Now, the company has a perfectly good database of cookies and price points for customers, but it’s very old tech and requires certain access privileges, which are very hard to give people outside of the accounting department. Accounting is never able to help with this, and the cookie executives try poorly and fail to get people like you access. But you do have years and years of cookie addition request forms, which are kept in chronological order by customer and contain a list of all types of cookies requested up to that point in time.This is where binary search helps - you can pretty quickly find the one where the cookie y was added even though there are hundreds of these forms.
It’s not a situation that should exist - we have a god damn cookie database where you can just pop in customer x and cookie y to get price z, with an effective date - but in my crazy cookie factory it helps a ton.
There’s other examples but they’re all pretty much variants of this thinly veiled analogy.
Sometimes that’s just the way the cookie crumbles, man
It’s a crummy job, but someone’s gotta do it.
Slightly irked you didn’t spell it “crumby” 😅
That doesn’t make sense at all. How would you - given two stacks of papers - know which stack the correct form is?
There’s lots of stuff about what I do that doesn’t make much sense :)
It works in this scenario because the stacks are reliably sorted by customer and date, and each form has a running tally of what cookies are on offer as things get added to the list.
Assume customer x’s forms are taken out, and you make two stacks of them without shuffling the forms. The very first form on the first stack from 2022-01-01 does not include cookie y. The first form on the second stack, from 2023-02-01, also does not contain cookie y. Based on this information and the conditions above, you can infer that the form you want is in the second stack.
Now, if the forms were not reliably sorted, or did not contain a running record, you’d need to approach this differently. Strategies would probably involve inferences or straight getting the info you need from other sources - custumer correspondence around “We want cookie y, how much?” (if it occurred when you were in a position to get such correspondence); knowledge of big changes to cookie offerings to the customer (contract renewals); bugging accounting at a regular, annoying cadence with progressive escalation until they answer/complain about you bugging them, etc.
Wow that got complicated very quickly. Bummer no-one can come up with a simple example of when quicksort is useful.
Expecting feral hogs to be capable of reason was a mistake.
The cops don’t like when you point out how intelligent they are (or aren’t really)?
I am shocked
/s
It’s not that the cops don’t know how to search a video, they simply don’t want to, because theft of property from you, a working-class nobody, is nothing to them.
It can also be both.
(Source: I have talked to cops before)
And why should we trust you about that, you cop talker
Actab
As a rule, do not talk to cops. If you need to talk to cops, you either don’t, or go through a lawyer.
I’m not in the US. We don’t have the same lunatics you do. They’re just slightly demented here.
Neither am I but ours are so paranoid they will still wear stab vests under their hoodies when doing plain clothes patrols even if the majority don’t carry a gun.
And also that - depending on the format of the video and software involved - doing a “binary search” might not be that simple
With my own NVR system, it takes great quality video and I can pull files of it, but the actual interface is pretty janky to say the least, and accessing stuff like the fisheye cameras only really works well within the vendor’s app.
Cops suck at their job, and they hate it if you explain it to them.
I can’t remember a single time in my 40-years-long life when a cop genuinely helped me in any way,
apart from writing a report (full of errors and spelling mistakes) that my insurance demanded.
And I really don’t believe they “make the streets safer” either.kids stole my car
cops gave chase
they crashed the car
ran on foot
cops gave chase
they ran into an abandoned house
cops stopped outside
they walked nonchalantly out of the house
cops did not arrest as they could not be sure it was the same people
literal skyrim npc behavior.
They were chasing running people, those had to still be in the house. Probably doing laps in one of the rooms.
In Montreal, I was riding my bike drunk and crashed pretty badly. I broke a tooth and was bleeding out of my mouth. I got up and kept riding home when a cop stopped me who was sitting next to his car monitoring pedestrian traffic. They took out their first aid kit, gave me some gauze, asked if I needed to go to the ER, then let me be on my way.
I feel like that wouldn’t happen in the US. I was still very drunk.
And Montreal cops don’t have that great a reputation, at least from what I’ve heard.
Only interaction I had with one was when they were handing out pamphlets about hiding your (white) headphone cords on the metro. I guess people were stealing iphones
In many states it’s legal to ride a bicycle while drunk, so they probably would. In my state it counts as a DUI so they might arrest you.
Here’s a PDF of the rules per state:
https://bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/bui_full_chart.pdf
Yeah, it probably would. They would be interested in just how and why you got a bloody face. And even US cops carry basic medical supplies like a band-aid.
US cops aren’t the best, but they can and do help with such things.
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Got rear ended on the highway. Recorded make and model, rough driver description, and plate number with state, and direction they were heading. Told dispatcher and cops on scene everything, they couldn’t have given less of a fuck.
“We’ll keep a lookout, but really there’s nothing we can do.”
So why am I paying taxes for you welfare queens then? My insurance hotline was far more helpful at next steps and what needs to happen vs ‘shit sucks bro, here’s your case number, you gotta smash F5 on our website until the report gets uploaded. lol no, we wolnt reach out to you’
My family was victimized in a home invasion that went “get therapy” badly and the cops in their defense did get us in touch with resources and gave us the report of insurance, but they also all but accused me of being a drug addict because I have scars on my arms and had a bowl in my apartment (weed is legal here). They also refused to look at the cut window screen or the footprint on the other side of the window insisting that because the front door was unlocked after the burglar left through it we must’ve left it unlocked and that’s how he entered.
We didn’t like the cops before we were victims of violent crime, but it’s much more pronounced of a dislike afterwards. I’ve heard my entire life that “when you’re victimized by criminals you’ll come to appreciate the cops” and I can’t help but laugh at that sentiment.
Hell in a different instance I got robbed by a guy, got his license plate, phone number, and confession (buying something off the internet, guy took both things and ran, then later messaged asking for sex), and want to know what I’ve never seen since? That money. Like I’m not happy with the guy, but unlike my home invader I don’t even think he needs to be kept away from society, I just wanted my fucking money back.
In the U.S., cops statistically do nothing. They don’t prevent crime, they don’t solve crimes, they’re just a publically funded security firm for local businesses to contract. It would honestly be more surprising if you had a useful interaction with the police.
Even though this is all colloquially known and accepted, don’t think of arguing to lower the police budget in any way. Gotta make sure those buffoons have their surplus army equipment so they can feel safe while they rob and oppress citizens.
I was pushing a cart full groceries home when two white guys walked right up and started looking in my shopping cart. Exactly at that moment a cop car pulled up beside us.
That’s all they had to do. It was pretty good timing.
Probably nothing would have happened either way, but still. It also occurs to me that the presence of anyone else would have likely had the same effect. Like a prof rolling up on a unicycle, or someone walking their cat, or even a lone horse. Perhaps even a bold raccoon.
Excellent point, it’s not the presence of a cop that stopped them, it’s the presence of another person.
Same here. They show up after you get hurt, not before. They are supposed to make us safer, but we have more cops than any country in the world and we are not safer.
Like the old saying goes, “when seconds matter, the police are only minutes away”, except they’re actually more like an hour and a half away for me.
out in these streets. cops make the streets more dangerous by far
“I have determined by thinking really hard that the victim is responsible for the theft of their possessions. Deny all insurance claims”.
Depends on the country. Aussie cops are a lot nicer and more useful than many American cops.
I sold a trailer to a cop once. It wasn’t related to his police activities but I needed to get rid of it and he didn’t haggle.
are you white
He was never interested in finding the bike, he just wanted to “take notes” and go back to his donuts.
When I read this originally, it was a nice example how programmer brain can be applied IRL. Also works when trying to find something and I see the listing is someway sorted, like time tables and eshop product categories.
Man, as someone who worked surveillance for years, I can’t believe that anyone would have a hard time with this.
It was so, so, so, so easy to find when something vanished.
Now, did so and so walk in the building? Yeah, kiss my ass. Not happening.
I worked at a major outdoors retailer with a “gun library” of high-end firearms.
In one of our quarterly steel audits (where we pull all 10,000 guns put hands on them, verify the serials, etc) we discovered a $10,000 rifle was missing.
The thing is, the case it was in obscured the gun itself from the security cameras. It was behind like 6 other guns in a glass case any customer could item and pull the guns out to look at them (guns themselves were trigger-locked of course).
So we had to have the gun library manager sit there and watch 3 month’s of surveillance video of a specific case that was proclaimed opened 20 times an hour in a highly-trafficked area of the store. Because of all the activity, the video had to be watched in real time, and we were open 13 hours a day.
The manager ended up quitting over the boredom combined with stress.
I can’t imagine having someone watch 3 months x 13 hours of real-time security footage is worth the 10k, unless the insurance would pay his salary.
But now I know why stores sometimes have their most expensive stuff just sitting there in full view. It’s not just for the customers’ viewing.
Yeah it’s a sunk cost fallacy. 91 days x 13 hours = 1,183 hours. Even assuming the manager is making $10 an hour they wouldn’t recoup the loss unless they found it early.
Ofc no manager makes $10/hour.
Let’s make some assumptions. just picking a retail place with firearms managers and i see cabela’s listed on glassdoor reporting $53-91k. Let’s go with the low end 53k. Let’s also assume 40 hours per week and the manager is doing no more than 20% unpaid hours, so 2080 salary hours + 208 “good worker” hours = 2288 total hours worked in a year. 53k salary / 2288 hours = $23/hour effective pay rate. That’s even before considering the benefits package
$10,000 item / $23 per hour = ~435 hours of real time footage before it is a guaranteed sunk cost. This means finding it within first ~37% of footage. Meanwhile 435 hours would effectively take the manager off the floor for a quarter of the year.
I didn’t need to do math to tell you that this is a task given to someone to make them quit. Manager did something else and this how the company decided to get rid of them.
It’s not the 10 grand. It’s that a gun was stolen. Someone who walks into a store and steals a gun is the kind of person you want to identify and track down. If we catch them stealing a gun on camera, we can follow them out of the store with the other cameras and grab a plate number from a car.
It happened on another occasion where we saw the gun being stolen in real-time. We were able to track them on camera and call the police with a plate number and have the gun recovered.
We didn’t physically stop them from stealing the gun because that’s the kind of syluspect who will start shooting, and half the customers would pull out their own handguns and “help” by putting more lead into the air.
Honestly, if your security system didn’t allow you to set motion alerts, that’s a bad system. Basically any modern system will allow you to set motion alerts. You can specify a section (or sections) of the screen that will create a flag in the footage when motion is detected.
My job’s parking garage had a car get broken into, and a musician’s (very expensive) instrument was stolen. We didn’t have a camera pointed directly at the car that was broken into, but we had cameras at every entrance and exit, and on the ramps leading between each floor. Management was expecting to scrub through literal hours of footage. Using some basic motion detection, I set it to flag any time someone came up or went down the specific ramps or stairs that led to the level the car was on. It ended up being like 45 cars.
Then I just did a quick timer, to see how long each person lingered on the floor. Like 40 of the cars came up the ramp from the lower level, then like 30 seconds later went up the next ramp to the next level. So it wasn’t them. Only like five of the cars actually didn’t go to the next level.
And out of those five cars, four had drivers/passengers seen on the stairwells leading back down to the ground floor; They had parked on the same level as the incident, and went downstairs.
Only one car lingered on the same level for about 2 minutes, then quickly left again. At the exit, there was a camera on the gate which pointed into the cars. We got crystal clear footage of the driver, (someone who the musician knew) and the instrument case was very obviously sitting in the passenger seat.
The entire search (it was like 3 days of footage) took like 10 minutes total, simply by being able to whittle down when people were coming and going.
It was a high-traffic area of a retail store. Motion alert is useless.
Oh god, yeah I’d be out. I would not do that.
Watching surveillance is truly like watching paint dry. Realtime? Yeah, just shoot me.
The only time I ever struggled was when cash went missing and I had to watch sale for sale. Even then, I could fast forward.
I always went for voids and “nosales” first. Nine times out of ten that’s where I’d find the theft. More clever thieves made my life hell though.
Did they ever find the gun?
No.
