this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Memes

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A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.

An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.


Laittakaa meemejä tänne.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

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?

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Well, did that warning stop him?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 23 hours ago

Ya, it was pretty instant.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago

Cops are only useful if you need someone to get to the scene two hours late, and then shoot your dog.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 22 hours ago

The cops don't like when you point out how intelligent they are (or aren't really)?

I am shocked

/s

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

Police are so f***ing worthless and useless

[–] [email protected] 8 points 22 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 21 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago

Expecting feral hogs to be capable of reason was a mistake.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago

He was never interested in finding the bike, he just wanted to "take notes" and go back to his donuts.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Honestly, this was the comment that exposed me (regular office rube) to binary search as a concept and it is so. fucking. helpful.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

In what ways do you use it in your daily life? Genuinely curious.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

While that's really cool and useful, it might be the way a couple of mods interact as opposed to a specific one.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 114 points 1 day ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago
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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

It was a high-traffic area of a retail store. Motion alert is useless.

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[–] [email protected] 214 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 day ago (6 children)

It can also be both.

(Source: I have talked to cops before)

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[–] [email protected] 277 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (18 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 163 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago

I remember marveling at how simple and obvious binary search was when I first learned about it in programming.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 day ago (2 children)

My bike was stolen, and I live in a small enough town that the cops actually did go through the footage to find the thief.

He called back 15 minutes later for more details and mentioned he was 15 minutes into the footage.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (22 children)

My dad once told me that he had to find the circuit breaker that corresponded to a particular wire and because we have around 60 circuit breakers in our house, he had to flick one off, run down and check the wire, run back up, flick the next circuit breaker off, and do that quite a lot of times.

In that moment, I got to explain binary search to him and he was genuinely interested. 🙃

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think the old school method was to plug in a stereo and turn the volume up. When you couldn't hear it then you got the right breaker.

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[–] [email protected] 128 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

They don’t pay cops to think. In fact, I don’t think they even pay cops to recover stolen bikes.

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