Yeah, pigs don’t like to be corrected. Or made to look like they don’t know what they’re doing.
And they absolutely hate ever doing anything about bicycle theft in particular.
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.
Probably added the theft to the sins they were confessing that day as well.
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.
I have heard that very often. I wonder if bikes are harder to track down than other property for some reason.
They only care about property loss when it involves rich people.
Which proves that cops really DO actually do their jobs.
Because protecting the property of the rich is the exact core purpose of policing.
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.
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.
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.
WRONG! After minorities, it’s poor people. Then doing their job. :P
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
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
True and interesting to note. OOP says ‘dawn of humanity’ though, not recorded history, so taking 200k as ‘human history’ is also valid.
Yeah, I’m used to the narrower meaning of “history”, meaning recorded. I like that definition as it lets you differentiate between it and prehistory.
Definitely a useful distinction.
I regularly bisect commits in the range of 200k (on the low end) for finding causes of bugs. It takes me minutes. Pretty crazy
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
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…
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.
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.
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.
My go to is usually ‘everything is easy if you know how to do it’
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You are seriously confused. OP specifically said that you’re fucked if there is no visual cue.
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.
Police try to understand anything challenge (100% impossible) (gone sexual) (gone violent)
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.
“Exactly my point. We will not be investing an hour looking at the footage to pinpoint the time of theft, now get out!”
everyone is a little bit gay!
“This argument didn’t go down well.”
🤣🤣🤣 LMAO
What an awesome punchline, should have been on its own line for more impact.
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.
You just have to say there was a weird technique the Nazi’s liked to use.
just tell them there is a black man at the moment of theft, they will get on it lickety split!
