Tag: misc

Recently I sold a car. It was an interesting process as I hadn’t sold a car to someone I didn’t know in a long time. I listed the car in a few places and was surprised by the interest. It was an EV (I guess it still is), and with the rising price of fuel in the US, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I arranged a couple of showings, but I had quite a few people offer to buy the car after only seeing a few pictures, asking if I’d take a check.

Some of you might be wary at this point, and I was. However, my wife had gotten similar offers from a few people when she was selling a horse. She never did, but we talked about where the scam is if someone sends a check and says they’ll wait for the funds to clear. This piece decodes where it is.

I was curious, so I agreed to take checks from three people. Two of them sent the checks in registered letters, with proof of delivery. This is a USD$20 cost right now. One sent a FedEx letter. That probably cost a similar amount. In all cases, the people said they were sending enough for the car to be shipped, on top of my asking price. I also told them I’d need the check to clear, and they agreed.

The first one I received, I drove by the bank while in town and deposited the check. I discussed the check clearing with the bank. I was told by the teller that I’d be able to get $400 that day and the rest the next day. I asked about when the check actually clears and the funds were moved, since all three checks were drawn on non-Colorado banks. The teller realized I wanted validation and said it would be 7-10 days and gave me a customer service number to call to check when funds were actually moved

I haven’t used checks very much the last few years. While I know technology has improved, what has mostly happened is that the banks operate on a system of trust that appears to move faster even though many of the underlying systems are older and still slow. When you deposit a check, the bank doesn’t validate anything. That might seem strange, but it doesn’t. It sends the bank routing number, the account number, and amount through a process that reconciles the money with another bank.

Think of this as data in two different databases, which it really is. The update in bank 1 isn’t sent to bank 2 for a period of time. The update from bank 2, which debits their account and credits bank 1, takes longer. In this case, the time is in days.

That’s serious eventual consistency.

What happened with person 1 was that they asked for confirmation of the deposit, and then texted me 2 days later saying that they’d need a deposit for the shipping company. I repeated that I’d need the funds to clear. They wanted to argue about needing to move fast, but I ignored them. After a few days, they said they were sick and could I front them money for a few bills and they’d drive to get the car. I didn’t agree and eventually they gave up communicating with me. A week after the deposit, I got a “funds failed to clear” message from my bank. No charge to me, but the “money” that appeared to be in my balance disappeared.

Person 2 texted me the image of their FedEx note, and when I said I would wait a week for the check to clear, they asked me to tear up the check and send them a picture. I declined. Person 3 sent a check blindly, saying they were trusting me. I ignored future texts, but they persistently kept checking for 12 days. In all cases, these are checks on real banks, but fake names and accounts.

Checks are insecure. And just like plenty of data replication systems that try to synchronize data between two databases, there can be issues if you do not have a two-phase commit.

I wrote this so many of you would be aware of a scam that is out there. Watch out and warn your less tech-savvy friends. However, also be careful when you work with data that lives in two places. There is a lot of overhead to ensuring the data is correct in all the systems, and there are good reasons for this. Sometimes eventual consistency isn’t good enough.

Steve Jones

Note: A few people are concerned about the check images linked. Those are fake people and fake accounts.

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

These days algorithms rule much of the world. From how supply chains are managed to how vehicles run their engines to the media that many of us watch on the various streaming services. I assume that most of you know that algorithms drive what you see on social media, on YouTube, and even the search results you get, and what you see might be different than what I see. There is a constant search for a perfect, or at least, very targeted way of getting you what you want.

Or at least what the algorithm thinks you want. However, is that the best way for algorithms to be designed? It is for the companies that want to profit from your attention, but is this intense personalization better for us?

There is an interesting article on music discovery, focusing on Spotify, since they are one of the largest streaming services. The article talks about the algorithm and how it tries to match selections to our tastes, basically a complex data analysis of our choices along with metadata that’s been created around data that’s hard to classify. There are attributes assigned to songs, but are these the attributes that make sense? That’s a topic for another day. The result of this is that Spotify tends to recommend more of what we already listen to, which has also driven artists to change how they produce songs since the algorithm matters.

This seems like a similar challenge to what I’ve seen with the written word. A long time ago many of us consumed the words (with less choice) in newspapers, books, and other physical media. However, we often ran into random things that were different because of our physical paths in life. We might encounter books in a shop or library and be attracted to a cover for some random reason. We might pick up an unexpected work lying adjacent to one in which we were interested and discover something new.

The way we look at books, or anything, changes when we browse and randomly wander the world. These days, we have less of that, with algorithms in electronic systems that guide us further on a path we’re walking, not allowing for chance encounters, or even wildly different thoughts because we stumbled on something. Even in our social media, this doesn’t often happen. I’d hope that we might encounter a recommendation from another we wouldn’t otherwise see, but the promotion of certain feeds and the glut of viral re-sharing often ensures that we don’t see many random things. Instead, most of us see the same thing that many others do.

Those of us who have studied computer science know random things are hard to create in computer systems. Building algorithms that embrace randomness isn’t something many of us focus on, instead trying for matches that reinforce or duplicate something our clients already want/use/see/etc. That has helped create many businesses in the digital world, but I’m not sure that those businesses are always good for the world.

I don’t have a good solution for random chance, other than talking with others, especially those who live different lives from you, and embracing the way they view the world. Hopefully that leads to a book, movie, or other chance encounter that you might not otherwise have.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.