Memes

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Police are so f***ing worthless and useless

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

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.

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

git bisect

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.

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

I am shocked

/s

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.

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.

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

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. 🙃

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