And they absolutely hate ever doing anything about bicycle theft in particular.
Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police
3 years ago by The Picard Maneuver to c/programmer_humor
clay_pidgin 43 points 3 years ago
I have heard that very often. I wonder if bikes are harder to track down than other property for some reason.
SlikPikker 48 points 3 years 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.
pimento64 66 points 3 years 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.
captainlezbian 37 points 3 years ago
As a gay cyclist I know I’m doing something right by pissing off cops without doing anything wrong
merc 7 points 3 years 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?
Localhorst86 37 points 3 years ago
smaller, therefore easier to hide. Not registered with a central authority like, for example, cars.
Zron 43 points 3 years ago
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.
snowe 4 points 3 years ago
There is bike registration. https://bikeindex.org
It’s helped track down bike trafficking gangs sending bikes to Mexico. The police just don’t care at all
Redex68 25 points 3 years ago
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 6 points 3 years ago
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 3 points 3 years ago
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 27 points 3 years 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.
superduperenigma 1 point 3 years ago
And they absolutely hate ever doing anything about bicycle theft in particular.
FTFY
lunarul 1 point 2 years 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.
Sheeple 99 points 3 years 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.
CmdrShepard 24 points 3 years ago
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.
shalafi 4 points 3 years ago
This internet myth has got to die. ONE case in ONE department, a quarter century ago, does not mean it's a practice.
HawlSera 32 points 3 years 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?
CosmicCleric -11 points 3 years 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 24 points 3 years 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.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA -1 points 3 years ago
Before handing out life advice maybe try it IRL and see how it goes. It's kinda fun.
trolololol 1 point 3 years ago
I tried being born rich but it didn't work this time around. Maybe next re incarnation?
HawlSera 10 points 3 years 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 221 points 3 years 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 112 points 3 years 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 52 points 3 years 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 19 points 3 years 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 10 points 3 years 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.
dejected_warp_core 22 points 3 years 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 15 points 3 years 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
ICastFist 23 points 3 years 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 12 points 3 years 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 202 points 3 years 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
MagnoliaMayhem 9 points 3 years ago
Just watch at 3X!
CoderKat 16 points 3 years 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...
SamirCasino 19 points 3 years ago
I love you for that joke.
TrenchcoatFullofBats 6 points 3 years ago
I heard that he wanted to get Officer Thomson and his lamp on the case, but the request form was incomplete.
SameOldInternet 135 points 3 years 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.
charonn0 114 points 3 years 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.
CosmicCleric -51 points 3 years 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.
CosmicCleric -37 points 3 years ago path: 0 5705501 5705876 5706386 5711486, hotness: undefined, score: -37, children: 6
starman2112 23 points 3 years 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
CosmicCleric -41 points 3 years 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.
ShrimpsIsBugs 12 points 3 years ago
You either don't know what binary search is or you completely missed the context of this conversation
lustyargonian 11 points 3 years 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.
captain_aggravated 34 points 3 years 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 5 points 3 years 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 1 point 3 years 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.
CosmicCleric -3 points 3 years ago
I've written binary searches before.
CosmicCleric -5 points 3 years 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 3 points 3 years 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."
DaleGribble88 4 points 3 years 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.
CosmicCleric -4 points 3 years 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 10 points 3 years ago path: 0 5716706 5739910, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 1
Cihta 9 points 3 years 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.
TerrificTadpole 9 points 3 years ago
We just give all the tools to solve crimes to people who have no idea how to use them, no biggie.
Madison420 10 points 3 years ago
*have a perverse incentive to not know how to use them or to know things about their job generally.
zbyte64 5 points 3 years 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 102 points 3 years 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.
rockSlayer 80 points 3 years ago
They probably do know. They just aren't meant for protecting your personal property
tiramichu 65 points 3 years 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 13 points 3 years 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.
SkepticalButOpenMinded 12 points 3 years 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."
be_excellent_to_each_other 0 points 3 years ago
“Don’t attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity.”
Cannacheques 5 points 3 years 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
BowtiesAreCool 5 points 3 years 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
DarkThoughts 97 points 3 years ago
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.
DarkThoughts 12 points 3 years ago
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.
ezures 10 points 3 years ago
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 7 points 3 years ago
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.
SmoothLiquidation 5 points 3 years ago
Just enough so that you could get a conflict between two of them.
Weirdfish 3 points 3 years ago
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.
MonkderZweite 6 points 3 years ago
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 2 points 3 years ago
I love Steam, but the fact that you cannot permanently disable auto updates for specific titles is definitely infuriating.
EvolvedTurtle 2 points 3 years ago
I was looking for this specific comment lmao
Localhorst86 72 points 3 years 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 18 points 3 years 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..."
Alph4d0g 50 points 3 years 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.
andthenthreemore 18 points 3 years ago
Na. If it's British police it's just an excuse. All they're there for after all these years of Tory cuts is to give you a reference number so you can make an insurance claim.
tocopherol 15 points 3 years ago
You just have to say there was a weird technique the Nazi's liked to use.
pressanykeynow 9 points 3 years ago
They probably already know all Nazi techniques.
lemming741 48 points 3 years ago
When troubleshooting physical systems, it's called half-splitting
Ilovethebomb 3 points 3 years ago
This is fault finding 101 for fire alarm systems.
HawlSera 43 points 3 years ago
Jesus fucking Christ, I know police are dumb, in fact if your IQ is too high you can actually be legally barred from employment as a police officer in the United States of america. Look it up. But fuck incompetence of these Jokers continue to tickle my asshole in a negative way
kablammy 5 points 3 years ago
Whoever owns the camera presumably has an interest in reducing/solving crime in the area (why else have cameras?), so they would likely be happy to make the footage available to police if asked nicely, with no warrant required.
spark947 -1 points 3 years ago
Yeah, in general, but not necessarily in that circumstance. A lot of time talking to tech people (I'm a softwar engineer) they can can be smug about this while leaving out important context.
acceptable_pumpkin 56 points 3 years 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 21 points 3 years 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 3 points 3 years 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.
SmoothLiquidation 6 points 3 years ago
path: 0 5696328 5697336 5699096 5699492, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0
ReplicantBatty 1 point 3 years ago
Enhance!
Cannacheques 1 point 3 years ago
Covert zorb ball carrying remote control toy racecar through the HRV system
jmcs 35 points 3 years 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 19 points 3 years 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.
Kalkaline 10 points 3 years ago
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.
CmdrShepard 2 points 3 years ago
Works the same for finding a burned out bulb on a string of Christmas lights too.
groucho 41 points 3 years ago
The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.
clericc 4 points 3 years ago
How do you do a binary search for an open-end scale (are PID params open-end?) and three knobs at the same time when they interdepend in their influence? I need to know since i have a PID tuning on my personal projects plate
groucho 4 points 3 years ago
It's been ages, but we'd done rough calculations for the three controls so we roughly knew what we needed. Our teacher was big on manually tuning instead of just using formulas since he thought just running numbers "lacked artfulness."
So we grabbed a point and started searching around manually. I think we were just tuning the derivative portion at that point, trying to get a fast response without the system without it going chaotic and noisy.
nullPointer 39 points 3 years ago
just tell them there is a black man at the moment of theft, they will get on it lickety split!
Cannacheques 4 points 3 years ago
Sad meme very relevant
CurlyMoustache 38 points 3 years ago
This is how I look for the best bits in porn
doctorcrimson 5 points 3 years ago path: 0 5732307 5739863, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 3
doctorcrimson 2 points 3 years ago path: 0 5732307 5739863 5958957 5977588, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1
lingh0e 33 points 3 years ago
A police officer being unable to think in such a fashion is exactly why no one could solve the see-saw riddle on Brooklyn 99.
skydivekingair 7 points 3 years ago
For those looking for the handout:
person: A B C D E F G H I J K L
round 1: L L L L R R R R — — — -
round 2: L L R R R — — — L R L -
round 3: L R R — — L R — L L — R
drislands 4 points 3 years ago
This would be easier to parse with a monospaced font. I'm not sure how that works in lemmy so this might take an edit or two...
round 1: L L L L R R R R — — — -
round 2: L L R R R — — — L R L -
round 3: L R R — — L R — L L — R```
skydivekingair 3 points 3 years ago
Cool, thanks. I’m not the best at formatting when using my phone.
Mr_Dr_Oink 2 points 3 years ago
Oh i get it. So if in round 1 it tilted down on the right. Round 2 it was even then round 3 it tilted down on the right then it was person G and they are heavier. However if it was reversed and tilted on the left then even then left then it was still person G but they are lighter. Because that pattern only occurs once. This is brilliant. Thankyou to you and the person you corrected the formatting of.
RoyaltyInTraining 6 points 3 years ago
Where is the piped bot when you need it
Venat0r 3 points 3 years ago
You can just replace the domain of the url with piped.video:
Mr_Dr_Oink 2 points 3 years ago
How do you solve that? I saw a solution in the comments where it says to start with numbering all the people and butting 1234 and 5678 on the see saw, then it says if they weight the same then continue and that seems to work. But if they dont weigh the same it doesnt work and it doesnt say what to do in that case.
adrian783 0 points 3 years ago
you can do it like you weight 6v6 then 3v3 then for the last weighing you weight the 2 out of 3.
or you weigh 4v4 to find out which grouping of 4 the light weight person is in, then do 2v2 and 1v1.
ChairmanMeow 3 points 3 years ago
You don't know if the person is lighter or heavier yet.
Sagifurius 1 point 3 years ago
That's not the question. Either the scales balance, and the third is heavier or lighter, or the scales don't balance and you get both answers, but the question is purposely framed this way
NotSoCoolWhip -1 points 3 years ago
If 1234 and 5678 don't weigh the same youd need 4 seesaws in some cases
HubertManne 29 points 3 years ago
that dawn of humanity is only going to work if the rewind/fast forward is instantaneous.
kryptonianCodeMonkey 67 points 3 years ago
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.
Dukeofdummies 21 points 3 years ago
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?
funkless_eck 34 points 3 years ago
my guy half of them don't spend 10 minutes on a murder. There's a reason it's called detective fiction
Dukeofdummies 6 points 3 years ago
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 9 points 3 years ago
if they were smart
I gotta stop you right there
Deceptichum 18 points 3 years ago
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.
skydivekingair 21 points 3 years ago
In Artillery you call it bracketing/straddling.
mosiacmango 10 points 3 years ago
It's called bracketing in electrical engineering as well for troubleshooting.
CynicRaven 2 points 3 years ago
Called half splitting in troubleshooting terms when I was in the Navy.
8000mark 17 points 3 years ago
For anybody else looking for the source of this quote: https://archive.md/RyZI0
The_Picard_Maneuver 2 points 3 years ago
And I had worried about it being a picture of text.
lemmesay 11 points 3 years ago
image transcription:
Afterwards I found a chatroom thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of theft no one would look at the footage. He said he had tried to explain sorting algorithms to police - he was a computer scientist, after all. 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 through. It's very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of theft. This argument didn't go down well.
andioop 6 points 3 years ago
Source article for the curious, and an unpaywalled copy on archive.is
driving_crooner 6 points 3 years ago
I used to do this when having problems while rendering video in my past life.
HiddenLayer5 3 points 3 years ago
Pfft, didn't even try to enhance the footage. They're obviously not cut out for forensics work.
schmidtster -46 points 3 years ago
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?
schmidtster -31 points 3 years ago
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 20 points 3 years ago
It’s your software/hardware
Where do you read that in the original post?
OmenAtom 17 points 3 years ago
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 23 points 3 years ago
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 -30 points 3 years ago
It’s public money, why waste it when you could provide it for them.
But argue fallacious points.
Deceptichum 21 points 3 years ago
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.
Crackhappy 20 points 3 years ago
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 -21 points 3 years ago
If it’s in your driveway it’s your problem, yes.
NoIWontPickaName 8 points 3 years ago
Because it is their job to do it.
slurpeesoforion 7 points 3 years ago
Chain of custody
NoIWontPickaName 20 points 3 years ago
So I should do their job for them?
Why the fuck are we paying them then?
kryptonianCodeMonkey 1 point 3 years ago
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.
programmer_humor
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Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
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- If the mod doesn't find it funny, you're banned. Ha-ha!... For real: do not use the community for "statements". There are other places for such content. Keep it chill and funny.
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programmer_humor
@programming.dev
33675
2568
7703
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
- If the mod doesn't find it funny, you're banned. Ha-ha!... For real: do not use the community for "statements". There are other places for such content. Keep it chill and funny.
go to feed...
Yeah, pigs don't like to be corrected. Or made to look like they don't know what they're doing.
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