Ben West
Some of my projects, mostly of the useless variety
We Rate Dogs is an extremely popular twitter account that purports to rate dogs, but actually gives all of them a score >10/10. In an attempt to make this more rigorous, I used a neural network to evaluate the picture of the dog in the tweet, then created a twitter bot to automatically respond with the dog's actual rating.
The project was… divisive. Has been defunct since the account was blocked by We Rate Dogs October 2020.
I discovered old documentation from TikTok indicating that part of their recommendation algorithm is based on how attractive actors in each video are. I adapted a neural network from Liang et al. (2018) and created a site which let users evaluate their own attractiveness.
Some users tried to use it to optimize their appearance. Has been defunct since receiving a cease-and-desist letter from TikTok in 2020.
I made a TikTok video about using machine learning to evaluate cosmetics, which was popular. This site lets users run that code on their own images, to identify how well various cosmetic products cover up wrinkles and match their skin color.
All US regulations are published in the Federal Register. These are usually plaintext documents which are thousands of pages long. Pretty Federal Register is a browser extension that adds navigational features like a table of contents, and indicates where in the regulatory hierarchy each section is.
Browser extension which browses the web at random the background, to confuse anyone attempting to build a profile of your behavior. This project was briefly featured on the cable news channel RT.