AI, Business

Building a CMMC Readiness Calculator That People Can Actually Finish

Most compliance tools look great in screenshots.

Far fewer are useful on a random Tuesday afternoon when someone in operations, IT, or leadership is trying to answer a simple question:

“How ready are we, really?”

That’s the problem we set out to solve.

Not certification.
Not auditing.
Not replacing consultants.

Just helping defense contractors get a realistic picture of their CMMC readiness before investing weeks of meetings, spreadsheets, and assessment calls.

The result is a simple CMMC Readiness Calculator that turns a short questionnaire into:

  • an estimated readiness score
  • an estimated SPRS score
  • a count of missing or partially implemented controls
  • a three-year compliance cost projection
  • a comparison between traditional and managed compliance approaches

Nothing magical.
Just useful.

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Futuristic cockpit with holographic compliance and cybersecurity monitoring dashboard
AI, Business

CMMC Certification Cost: How AI-Native Compliance Can Cut Expenses by over 70%

If you’re pursuing CMMC certification, one of the first questions you’ll ask is:

How much does CMMC certification cost?

The answer depends on your current security posture, the size of your organization, and how you approach compliance. For many small and mid-sized businesses, the total cost of achieving and maintaining CMMC Level 2 compliance can range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The surprising part?

The audit itself is rarely the biggest expense.

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AI, Business

AI and Compliance: The Most Boring Billion-Dollar Opportunity Nobody Is Talking About

The US compliance sector is massive, expanding rapidly, and heavily strained.
It represents over $40 billion in annual labor spend with more than 400,000 officers. Despite ballooning teams, compliance work has remained stubbornly manual, bureaucratic, and paper-based (“schlep work”), leading to high employee churn (>20%) and massive backlogs (e.g., TD Bank’s $3B fine over a 70,000-alert backlog).

Here’s a weird data point:
Over the last 20 years, the fastest-growing occupation in the US was manicurists and pedicurists.
Right behind it?
Compliance Officers.

Not AI engineers. Not data scientists. Compliance officers.
That says something important about where the real work has been hiding.

The Problem Nobody Wanted to Solve

Compliance is painful. Bureaucratic. Paper-heavy. Repetitive.

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AI

Unlock WhatsApp Data with Local Analytics Dashboard

Most people think of WhatsApp as “just messaging.”

But after years of conversations, support threads, customer discussions, team coordination, and random life moments… it quietly becomes one of the richest personal datasets you own.

So I built wacrawl-ui — a local analytics dashboard for WhatsApp archives generated by wacrawl.

The idea is simple:

  • Your data stays local
  • No cloud sync
  • No browser extension
  • No scraping APIs
  • No “AI magic” uploading your chats somewhere
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Modern office building with digital graphic illustrating secure data, verified access, and network integrity
AI, Business

Bridging the Cybersecurity Gap for SMBs

I recently joined the MSP 1337 podcast with Chris Johnson to talk about something I’ve been thinking about for years:

Small and midsize businesses are being asked to operate with enterprise-level security expectations — without enterprise-level resources.

That gap is becoming impossible to ignore.
And AI is accelerating both sides of the problem.

Attackers are moving faster.
Infrastructure is becoming noisier.
Compliance requirements are multiplying.
Meanwhile, SMBs and MSPs are still expected to somehow manage everything with limited staff, fragmented tools, and endless alerts.

That model is cracking.

Btw, you can listen to it here:
– Apple Podcasts
– Spotify

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AI, Business

Ransomware Risks: Why SMBs Need AI Security Now

Last week I was staring at my EnduraCoach dashboard, watching it yell at me for sneaking in an extra sprint session that my body wasn’t ready for. The AI caught the overtraining pattern across heart-rate, sleep, and power data and shut it down before I wrecked my Ironman build. That same evening the April ransomware numbers landed. SMBs got hammered again. And I thought: if only every founder had an always-on coach like this for their security stack.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth from April 2026: ransomware didn’t slow down—it accelerated. A new player called JanaWare quietly encrypted files for hundreds of Turkish home users and small businesses through targeted phishing campaigns. Low-dollar demands ($200–$400) but high volume. Attackers are learning that SMBs are softer targets and faster payers.

The broader picture is uglier.
Verizon’s 2025 DBIR (still the gold standard) showed 88% of ransomware breaches hit SMBs versus just 39% for enterprises. Unpatched vulnerabilities caused 29% of incidents; stolen credentials another 30%.
Sophos and Black Kite reports confirm SMBs in the $4M–$8M revenue band are now the sweet spot for attackers.

Most of us simply don’t have a 24/7 SOC or the headcount to patch, triage, and remediate at machine speed.

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AI

Understanding MCP vs Agent Skills: Key Differences Explained

There’s a lot of confusion right now between MCP (Model Context Protocol) and “Agent Skills.” They’re often mentioned in the same breath, but they solve different problems. If you treat them as interchangeable, you’ll either over-engineer simple workflows or underpower serious integrations.

Here’s the clean way to think about it.

The Core Difference

MCP is about connecting agents to systems.
Skills are about teaching agents how to do things.

That distinction alone gets you 80% of the way.

Integration Model

MCP is a client-server protocol. You stand up an MCP server, expose tools, and now multiple agents can talk to multiple backends through a consistent interface. It’s a hub.

Skills are much simpler: a folder with a SKILL.md file. The agent loads it when triggered and follows the instructions. No protocol, no network layer, no abstraction.

Implication:

  • MCP scales across teams and services
  • Skills scale across use cases and workflows
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Business

Key Lessons from Sorkin’s ‘1929: The Wall Street Crash’

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book “1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation” (published in 2025) provides a forensic, narrative-driven account of the most famous market collapse in history.
Sorkin, who also wrote the 2008 crisis definitive history Too Big to Fail, focuses on the human psychology, hubris, and technical failures that turned a speculative boom into a generational disaster.

Here are the top 20 takeaways from the book, followed by specific lessons for you as a long-term investor.

1. Euphoria is the market’s most dangerous condition
Pessimism had gone out of fashion by the 1920s. Government commissions, governors, and economists all declared boom-and-bust cycles relics of a vanished age — it was a fatal illusion. When everyone agrees the good times will last forever, that’s when risk is highest.

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Business

Effortless Techmeme Summaries to Slack and Telegram

Every morning starts the same way: open Techmeme, scan headlines, open too many tabs, and somehow end up 20 minutes deep into something you didn’t mean to read.

That loop is the problem. Instead of trying to “summarize the internet” or build another bloated AI dashboard, this project does something much simpler: take a strong source, rank and summarize it, and deliver a clean digest to Slack or Telegram.

That’s it—and that’s why it works.

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webdev

How to Clean Up Homebrew (brew) and Maximize macOS Storage

At some point, every dev hits it.
You’re installing something routine—npm install, a Go build, whatever—and macOS throws it in your face:

Disk Full.

You check storage, expecting the usual suspects. Not your videos. Not even Docker (okay, maybe a little).
It’s Homebrew quietly eating your SSD in the background.

Left unchecked, Homebrew turns into a museum of bad decisions:

  • tools you needed once, 14 months ago
  • duplicate runtimes “just in case”
  • dependencies of dependencies of dependencies

Let’s fix it—without nuking your setup.

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