Finally finished the office conversion tools. These were pain in the ass. To keep the binary small, performant but still capable to run in browser without cutting off too much.

I have a bittersweet news. I am selling Obviously I am super thankful for it to be valuable enough that I get to sell it. But it's a shame I couldn't figure out anything else to do with it. The buyer is its largest customer. The other one is being off boarded. The longer story is, that I never really found a use case beyond these two customers. I got fooled by the initial traction. I have never sold anything this fast. But once I tried to replicate this, I couldn't get any more interest. There is a business for sure, but not one I am interested in. And I think that's the ultimate problem. Cadastre came together because I found a unique way to obtain valuable data, package it into cohesive system and built a nice interface around it. This is valuable to customers that already do this by hand. But not many do. Most development and real estate companies have enough business in more traditional ways. I talked to some hedge funds and private equity that were interested in the data, but as one off. Not much value in repeated access. Now I know there is more than two customers in this county. And there are 3,007 counties in US. So I could just replicate it across them all. But this is quite a large operation. Profitable one, but not venture scale. Requiring lots of employees. And I am just uninterested in a large operation at this point. The other frustrating thing for me was watching 12 active users every day. I know it's silly. But there is nothing to learn from them. They do their job and leave. Nothing to improve. Every once in a while they would reach out and ask for me to add a feature. It mostly took 5 minutes. I know it's a lot of money. But I will rather work on something with higher usage and less revenue than the other way around. Thankfully I am in fortunate position not to worry about day to day income. So I can pick and choose what to work on. Ultimately this all lead to my decision to sell. The customer is not interested in the brand (never really built one), just the data and the engine. I get to make some money (more than most people make in 10 years) and can focus on other projects. So overall, this was a fun experiment, even though it ultimately failed.

So far the biggest learning is that all the dealers like to talk on phone and refuse to disclose anything in writing. This woman spent an hour reading to me from her papers. I am like: I don't even remember the last number. She just won't send it to me. So that's it I guess

The most brutal part of the original article is how inept and brainwashed the author is. Instead of looking at the facts, she adjusts them to her beliefs. And the NYT just prints it like it’s the truth. What does this say about her own education?

Got a call from an FBI agent about @vaultaire_app last week. They told me they found someone using the app. They suspected he used Capture to photograph classified material. When they asked him to open his vault, they believe he may have triggered a duress vault and wiped everything. They called me hoping I could help recover or access it. I explained that I simply couldn’t. Vaultaire was deliberately designed without a master key, backdoor, or recovery mechanism. I have no way to access a user’s vault. I can’t even tell whether he triggered the duress vault. There are no breadcrumbs for me to follow. The agent was fuming. He essentially asked: why would you build an app like this? I told him I believe in the right to individual privacy. I can’t stop someone from committing a crime. But that shouldn’t require everyone else to give up their privacy. He asked me to come to the field office to explain more. I told him to call my lawyer. Never heard back. I obviously can’t verify what happened on the device or comment beyond what I was told. But that was a pretty surreal way to have Vaultaire’s security model tested in the real world. Was debating sharing this, but my lawyer says it’s ok 😬

I feel like I missed on the whole American car buying experience. Never bought a used car. Never sold a car. Never leased a car. Never negotiated with a dealership. I feel cheated. Itching to try it just to cross it off the list.

What if the Catholic Church transformed all the churches’ basements into datacenters, train their own open weight models,and provided inference to members for free? They would again become more powerful than any country.

For I tried something different. Reached out to local media. Got one response back. They asked me to produce all sorts of custom graphics. Rest was silent. Reached out to IG dog influencers in SD. Heard back from one that next time there is a dog event? I should reach out. Joined a bunch of local dog groups on FB. Reached out to the admins if it's ok to post it. Never heard back from any of them. Shame really.