Bitcoin Power Law Model
It's the power of laws! *huey lewis intensifies* 🕺🏻
Ok, maybe that's not exactly what Huey Lewis & the News sang back in the 80s, but the Power Law is definitely one of the more fascinating curiosities of our world. While it's in principle a very simple formula (y = a * x^b) with just two parameters and one variable, it's incredibly capable of describing patterns in nature, society, and technology.
Who would have guessed that you can estimate an animal's metabolic rate from its body mass? Or that the distribution of Nobel Prize laureates follows predictable patterns based on city populations? Or that follower counts in social networks like Facebook follow power law distributions? Or, and that's why we're here today, estimate the price of Bitcoin from the number of days since the Genesis block?
Probably not too many people would have guessed that. But it's actually incredible. And while we can't predict the short-term highs and lows with that formula, we can quite accurately estimate the long-term trajectory.
If you got curious, check it out at powerlaw.jamann.io.
PS: Previously available as a Telegram bot, now web-based. No more Raspberry Pi fan noise!
Forever-on-Bitcoin.com
Wouldn't it be cool to be able to leave a mark in the digital world forever? Indeed, it would. And it's possible!
When a friend of mine got married, I was thinking about a present. I came up with the idea of gifting some bitcoin. But just giving money kinda sucks. So, I had the idea to inscribe their first names and their wedding verse on the blockchain.
After hours of reading documentations, playing around on the Bitcoin testnet and a lot of trial and error, I finally found a way to do it! Then I thought: wait a minute. I guess other people would like to do that, too. So, I spun up a website to offer exactly that as a service.
Now live on forever-on-bitcoin.com. My first startup if you so will. Curious to see if it'll be going somewhere!
Trimm. The Social Workout App
People are fat and lonely. Let's change that! :)
This basically sums up the idea behind Trimm. We had to develop a prototype for a digital product. And after conceptualising the idea, I thought to myself: wait a minute. We're living in the age of AI. How far can I push this?
The answer is: very far!
With little experience in web design, I spun up Cursor with Claude as my personal code monkey and built a fully functional progressive web app with the backend on supabase. The app has a small wiki for exercises & nutrition, some social features like making friends or creating challenges, an interactive map with data from OpenStreetMap to find workout spots and, of course, you can track workouts! A fun little project!
ToolPool 🧰
During my stay in Canada, I took a course in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Why should a Data Science student take a UI/UX focused course? Good question.
But it was a great course! We were assigned to a group and had to realize a project of our choice that benefits the local community in Kelowna. I proposed an idea that I had already some time ago: ToolPool - A local tool sharing platform.
The idea is simple. Nearly everyone has tools they don't use very often - and on the other hand, we often need tools we don't have. So, why not just lend a tool from a neighbor? We finally get to know each other and maybe I can help them in the garden or with the computer. Bringing people together, reducing waste, giving access to tools for cheap.
We built a fully functional Android Application. Shoutouts to Ishaan for going crazy on the app! But overall, the whole experience was really cool. Working in a team of strangers, going through all the steps of a design process and finally ending up with the actual application that we've been thinking about for the whole term. Great experience!
Bitcoin Top Bot
Being into Bitcoin, you soon realise that there are cycles. In these cycles, the price tends to move extremely to the upside in a short window of time, followed by a sharp decline. I'm not a good trader and missed a lot of gains in the last cycle. But since I know my limitations and have now accrued some Data Science skills, I decided to use my knowledge and coding abilities to create a Telegram Bot that provides me with updates about potentially relevant indicators. The bot is freely available on Telegram (@BitcoinTopBot). Feel free to test it and of course: this is all no financial advice! :P
Politricks
In the context of a course called Social Informatics of Large Language Models, we examined if state of the art LLMs like GPT-4 can fake German politicians. And long story short: they can.
We had the OpenDiscourse dataset with about 800 000 speeches from the German parliament. We focused on 24 politicians across all parties and focused on the topics of COVID-19, migration/refugees and the war in Ukraine. Our results showed that this model was able to create speeches that were basically indistinguishable from real speeches. We classified the speeches using MANIFESTOBERTA and speech embeddings with a principal component analysis.
Of course, the AI speeches were not perfect. Sometimes they were more extreme than the original speeches of the respective political parties, but overall they did a great job in mimicking the actual politicians.
Why is that relevant? Well, we're already living in times with hyper-individualised advertising. If LLMs can just create accurate copies or fakes of political speeches, tailored to the audience (which might just be a single person!), then our democracy might become a really big issue. What is the public discourse if we all see different things? How can we believe anything we see or read online, when you can create convincing copies easily? And now we also have convincing video generating models. We also have to remember that these models will never be as bad as they are today. Fun times ahead!
AI Audiobook
A couple of years ago, between finishing my bachelor's and starting my master's program, I helped a friend writing a book. Then, he approached me and told me he wants to publish it as an audiobook. As I've already been working with AI audio generation, I offered him to take care of this. We recorded some test audio where he's reading the book and I used that to create a voice clone. It worked great. The overall costs were about $100 which is very cheap for a high quality audio book. To be fair, it was not perfect from an accentuation standpoint, but it was clear and an overall pleasant listening experience!
Sadly, the audiobook never got published as he struggled with the regulatory boundaries from the platform he wanted to use. It's sad that the technical feasibility is not the decisive factor, but the ability to navigate regulations. But still an interesting project!
Voice cloning
I'm currently working on creating content with artificial voices. In this field, I've been working with German and English text-to-speech models. From my experience, I can confidently state that you shouldn't trust any voice you hear online. Voice clones are nearly perfect with a lot of training data and extremely good with just a couple of seconds of any voice. Sadly, the open source models can't keep up with the paid models, especially not in German. For the English language, the open-source models are already quite good. But I have to admit that ElevenLabs seems to be state of the art regarding speech capabilities.
Shoutouts to Thorsten-Voice for providing his voice and doing so much for German Open Source text-to-speech models!
KleinanzeiGenAi
I love Kleinanzeigen (probably, what non-German people know as online marketplaces), but I hate writing descriptions when selling stuff. So, what is the solution?
Obviously, a Telegram Bot with an LLM running in the background!
I decided to work with Claude via the Anthropic API and the results were actually quite good. Just send a few pictures to the bot, optionally, add some keywords. Click "Generate Description" and get a title, price and a nice description for your article in no time.
Sadly, I couldn't get Selenium to work with the Kleinanzeigen web page, so I couldn't automate the whole process. But still, this little bot was quite helpful. Shoot me a mail, if you're interested in the code!
Pumpinc Bot
What's better than doing 100 push ups per day?
Of course doing 100 push ups per day with friends! What started out as some kind of challenge between roommates and friends, where we tracked our daily push ups in a shared spreadsheet, developed into a small coding project. It was the first time for me creating a Telegram Bot, using a SQLite database in the background. Sadly, by the time I was done, we stopped doing our daily 100 push ups. But hey, now I know that I can easily do 100 push ups a day and I know how to create Telegram Bots. I think you could call this a success!
Why'ne not
One of my first projects a long, long time ago was building an app-based drinking game with a friend. Starting from an idea drawn on a big piece of glass I found in a wardrobe, when I moved into a new flat during my bachelor's. We designed and developed a progressive web app, hosted our game online and played it probably twice. Tbh, a lot of effort, for just a few games. But it was fun!
Maybe, I should ask my buddy for the code again. Our original website domain also seems to be free. So, maybe there will be a Why'ne not revival at some point! 🍷