If there’s one thing I hate, it’s not being busy. I can’t really switch off, I’m always thinking about tech I could be playing with. In that vein, here are a few of the diversions that have been occupying my time since my last post on here.
Warning: rambling ahead!
Poking My Nose Into Other People’s Business
As a boy, I drove my parents nuts by forever taking stuff apart. There wasn’t an electrical or electronic appliance in the house that I hadn’t had in pieces at some point, and I wasn’t the best at putting them back together. My bedroom floor was strewn with circuit boards, motors, lights, speakers, batteries and general metal junk. Because I’m a grown-up and can’t do that any more (bah), I like to pick apart other people’s code and algorithms, and see how they work.
Lending Calculators
A while ago, one of my projects at work was to figure out how the lending calculators for various car finance firms worked – or in a couple of cases, didn’t work.
Anyway, I found this a great deal of fun, so I considered starting a side blog detailing all my efforts in this area. However, I ran the idea past a friendly compliance person (Hi Debs!) who advised against it: big companies don’t like to be shown to be wrong, and have expensive lawyers to set on anyone who implies otherwise. (Yes, I could still do it if I anonymised the companies involved — I might still do that, but it’s extra work with screenshots, etc.)
[Aside: There was one particular online calculator, not affiliated to a particular company, but it was flexible enough that it covered the ways in which car finance is different to usual consumer lending. I played with it for days, but could not replicate its results. In the end, the CFO wrote to the author of the calculator, and paid good money for a copy of the code. Not only was the code bad, it was quite wrong, provably so. No wonder I couldn’t figure the numbers out!]
A few weeks ago, I idly started playing with the payment calculators on various lending sites. One in particular caught my eye, because it had a unique feature to it (which I’m not going to expand on, or it gives the company away). I realised that, behind-the-scenes, the website called a publicly-accessible API, so I coded up loops in SQL to automatically query the API with random values, and then analysed the results:
- The code on the website that called the API had at least two minor bugs, which meant changes to the UI elements weren’t reflected in the calls to the API.
- The JSON returned by the API call had some… interesting variable naming. I expect the code was imported from the US.
- The figures were being rounded, intra-calculation, in a way I’d not seen before.
- I could only replicate the results about 95% of the time — the other 5% only made sense if the interest rate was different to what was stated.
I’ve no idea how my investigation would be received if I emailed the company about my findings. I’ll keep it under my hat for now.
LoanSims
It’s been at the back of my mind for years to create a lending company simulator: that is, starting with a budget of X, lend out Y new loans per day (according to some distribution of terms/amounts), collect payments from pre-existing loans (subject to parameters relating to propensity to pay back), and track the performance of the company day-by-day. As part of my long-term goal to make my ‘go-to’ coding language Python, I wrote LoanSims, my first pass at this app (named for legendary ‘Carry On’ actress Joan Sims).
I was flush with enthusiasm for it, but then spoke to a friend who has much more experience in the industry — he said he’d tried in the past to sell something similar to lenders, but weirdly there was little-to-no interest. Which dampened my excitement — there’s no point spending ages on code no-one will ever want, even if it is stimulating, academically, to build it. Onto the back-burner it goes!
Sus(s) Udio?
Udio is the latest AI music generator, easily stealing the crown from Suno. From their About Us page:
Udio builds AI tools to enable the next generation of music creators. We believe AI has the potential to expand musical horizons and enable anyone to create extraordinary music.
udio.com allows users to create music from simple text prompts by specifying topics, genres, and other descriptors which are then transformed into professional quality tracks.
At time of writing, I have generated 315 pieces of music using Udio — it’s currently in beta, and free (there are daily limits, but I’ve not hit them yet). You start off by giving a text prompt — e.g. “A song about beating the devil at poker, then drinking his whiskey and stealing his horse. Nineties shoegaze” — which returns two 33 second pieces of music. You can then extend either piece of music (choosing between intro / before / after / outro), or ‘remix’ it — then keep repeating the process.
The results are stunning. Eight times out of ten, the music is indistinguishable from a genuine track. It’s not perfect, and the auto-generated lyrics are cringey — but the vocals are so strong, it doesn’t seem to matter so much. (And you can provide your own lyrics!)
Because it’s one of my favourite periods, I’ve been generating music that sounds like 1970s art-rock, and while I can’t get anything that sounds close to David Bowie (you can’t use real artist names in the prompts), it’s pretty easy to get vocals that resemble Russell Mael (from Sparks), Jon Anderson (from Yes), or even Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins! (Although, so far, not Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull.)
I’ve had trouble with it not adhering to the prompt, e.g. trying to get a Eurovision-sounding song from the 1970s, it gives me 80s metal, or 2000s pop. But because it only takes a few seconds to re-generate a new piece of music, you can just try again.
It really is quite addictive. I know some people out there will be horrified at the idea of it: “music is art, it’s not the domain of algorithms”. Really, I have no answer; I have a houseful of keyboards and guitars, and I don’t feel it’s taking away from my enjoyment of making my own music. But then again, I don’t earn my living from making music.
Other ‘stuff’
- Applying for jobs: It seems it’s not a good time to be applying for tech jobs: it’s very difficult to get recruiters to call or email back, I’ve not had a single acknowledgement for any role I’ve applied for, whether directly or through a recruitment site, or LinkedIn. Trying times!
- AI not coming for us — yet: A few weeks ago, a story did the rounds about an AI developer, ‘Devin’, that looked like it could replace a whole software engineer; luckily, the truth was rather less sensational. This video is well worth 25 minutes of anyone’s time: Debunking Devin: “First AI Software Engineer” Upwork lie exposed!.
- Pete Tonkin, Hardware Guy: I am not a hardware guy. Yes I build my own computers, but inside they are a MESS. However, I had to replace the screen on my son’s laptop recently, and it went smoother than these things usually do! I’ll take the win.
- General file admin: I have 25 years of hard drives, CD-Rs and DVD-Rs with umpteen projects in various states of completion, so I’ve tasked myself with collating all the files, with a view to creating ONE single repository of all my work. It’s a nice goal to have, but realistically the chances of me completing the task are slim-to-none, because something more interesting is always just around the corner…
I might do more of these ‘diary entries’, if only to remind myself what it is I’ve been doing, and what tech I’ve been playing around with!
SQL Pete 