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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • As someone who occasionally has to scrub through hours of security camera footage, these cops need to learn what a binary search is. We had some art get stolen from our gallery, and I had to search through ~5 days of footage to find it. I found it in about 3 minutes with a binary search.

    Start by defining your timeline. In my case, it was about 5 days (so roughly 120 hours) over the course of a long weekend. Then divide that time in half, (60 hours) and start at the middle. Is the artwork still there? If so, you know you don’t need to bother scrubbing through the first 60 hours at all. Or if it’s already missing, you know you don’t need to bother searching through the second half. Then divide the remaining half in half again, (30 hours) and do the same. Repeat, each time dividing the potential search by half. With only 10 divisions, (each taking only a few seconds to figure out what the next halfway point is and jump to it in the security camera program), I have already narrowed my search down from 5 days to ~7 minutes. And it only took me a few minutes total. And at that point, I just scrub through manually until I find the culprit.

    My boss was just sitting at her computer, watching the video at like 2x speed from hour 0, hoping to eventually catch the person. After like 20 minutes of that she gave up and passed it off to me. And I had the incident found in like 3 or 4 minutes total.

    The only real reason the cops have to avoid scrubbing through footage is laziness.





  • Discord is not a good replacement for support forums. Discord isn’t searchable by search engines.

    Historically, if I had an issue with a product and I googled “[product] [issue]” I’d be met with a support forum post, with someone describing the same issue. I could read the thread to find how they resolved it. I don’t actually have to interact with the post at all, and I don’t need to ask the same question again. For most (decent) forums I don’t even need to make an account just to read the post.

    Discord throws that all out the window. Now I’m met with a “JoiN OUr dIScoRd SerVEr to GEt suPPorT” page. Nothing is searchable via a search engine. And Discord’s server searchability (even in the app) has always been, at best, absolute dogshit. You already need to know exactly which text thread things were posted in, (because you can’t search the entire server at once), and you need to know exactly what was said, (because there’s no fuzzed search terms).

    So 99% of the time, you just end up asking the same question that has already been asked a hundred times in the past, and now you need to wait for someone to respond. It also puts a lot more strain on the support staff, because they’re answering the same question a hundred times instead of just the once in a forum.

    And don’t come at me with the “but Discord recently added a support forum feature where people can start threads and save the conversation for later” bullshit. That’s a band-aid, at best. It still isn’t searchable via search engines, so it means the above issues with Discord’s search function still apply, and the forum function is essentially useless as support forums.

    Lastly, why the fuck should I be forced to join another server just to get support? What if I don’t have a discord account? What if I live in a region that Discord doesn’t support? What if I just plain don’t want to clog up my server sidebar with dozens of servers that I have only visited once? What if I just really hate the fact that your server has been configured to push notifications for every single message by default? What if I just fucking want to google my issue, and get an answer without any further effort?