FL350Cruise
I fly.
It's the one thing I do where the instruments don't lie and you find out right away if you were wrong.
It's also the honest explanation for the panel above, and for the fact that I can't describe anything without putting a number next to it.
GNDTwo companies
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Open
A brokerage built around its own demand instead of renting it. Agents get a pipeline that already knows who it is talking to, rather than a list and a wish.
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Lending Soon™
The other half of the transaction, in-house. Same pipeline, one fewer handoff to a stranger who has to earn the trust all over again.
Ring 3Systems
I run everything except the conversation.
I used to sell houses. Now I build the machine that finds the people who buy them, and then I get out of the way. I do not talk to the end consumer. My agents do, and they are better at it than I am.
Everything upstream of that conversation is mine. The ad accounts and the paid media. The automation and the lead nurture behind it. The SMS and email campaigns. The websites. And the internal software both companies actually run on, which is the half nobody sees and the half that breaks first.
All of that is userland, Ring 3, and I build most of it myself, because the tooling sold to brokerages is mostly bad and always expensive, and because a system you didn't write is a system you can't fix at eleven at night.
The floor is a 10× return on ad spend. Below that I would rather switch the account off than keep feeding it. A campaign that cannot clear 10× does not have a creative problem, it has an offer problem, and more budget has never once fixed one of those.
I still hold both licenses: real estate agent and mortgage loan originator. That is less about doing the work than about understanding it. It is hard to generate demand for a transaction you have never had to close.
Ring 0Kernel
Before real estate I lived one level down, in the kernel.
Kernel mode drivers. A lot of Windows internals. All C and C++, by hand.
Most of it was adversarial, and I worked both sides of it. I reverse engineered systems that were built specifically so you couldn't, then turned around and wrote the auth and anti-tamper layers that make it expensive for someone else to do the same thing. Doing both is how you actually get good at either one.
The targets updated constantly, on their schedule and not mine. So the first break was never the real work. The real work was the pipelines that figured out what moved and re-derived it themselves, without me touching anything. I was building automation because I had to, years before it was a product category.
Ring −1Hypervisor
And one level under that, hypervisors.
Ring −1 sits below the kernel. The hypervisor runs there, and the operating system runs on top of it as a guest without knowing it. I wrote them.
vmx_init.asmx86-64 · nasm
1 mov rax, cr4 2 or rax, 1 << 13 ; CR4.VMXE 3 mov cr4, rax 4 5 mov ecx, 0x3A ; IA32_FEATURE_CONTROL 6 rdmsr 7 test eax, 1 ; lock bit set by firmware? 8 jz .set_it ; no, we get to write it 9 test eax, 1 << 2 ; VMXON outside SMX allowed? 10 jz .locked_out 11 12 vmxon [rel vmxon_region] ; enter VMX root operation 13 jc .fail ; VMfailInvalid 14 jz .fail ; VMfailValid 15 16 vmclear [rel vmcs] 17 vmptrld [rel vmcs] ; make it current 18 19 mov rax, 0x681E ; GUEST_RIP 20 mov rbx, [rel guest_entry] 21 vmwrite rax, rbx 22 vmlaunch ; the OS is now our guest
All of this was pre-AI. Nothing was writing it for me. I'm not nostalgic about it, it's just why I can still spot generated code that's wrong but sounds right.