11 points
*

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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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.

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1 point

Certain departments specifically have IQ tests, in order to ensure you aren’t smart enough to easily get a better job elsewhere.

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1 point

This internet myth has got to die. ONE case in ONE department, a quarter century ago, does not mean it’s a practice.

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/09/nyregion/metro-news-briefs-connecticut-judge-rules-that-police-can-bar-high-iq-scores.html

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1 point

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.

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2 points

We need to have a chat about your definition of “fun”.

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3 points
*

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

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3 points

I regularly bisect commits in the range of 200k (on the low end) for finding causes of bugs. It takes me minutes. Pretty crazy

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1 point

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

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1 point

Just watch at 3X!

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1 point

Lemmy learns exponential math.

Mostly joking, thanks for doing the math.

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1 point
*

Combine AI image/visual-pattern recognition and quantum computing, and this search could be completed before it was even started.

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1 point

We can go deeper!

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1 point

A minute to decide if there is a bike in the picture really ?

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1 point

As a robot, finding bikes in pictures is really hard, okay

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-1 points

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

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3 points

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.

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2 points

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.

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1 point

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.

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0 points

What would you recommend for solving people? Does a household base like NaOH suffice?

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2 points

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.

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1 point

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.

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2 points
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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.

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2 points

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

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1 point

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.

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0 points

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.

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1 point
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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.

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0 points
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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.

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1 point

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.

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1 point

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

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