About


OwnDoc means: "Be your own doctor" - Hippocrates' advice!

My name is Frank de Groot, webmaster of this site. I was born in Amsterdam in 1965 and I invented the Derminator® in 2013. How does time fly! My apologies for this site looking awfully dated. Its contents is however "evergreen" - still as relevant today as when we wrote it. Our company is healthier than ever before - we're hardly able to keep up with demand and that without ever having advertised.

Here used to be a photo of "Sarah Vaughter" - a stock photo we licensed of a wise-looking lady. Sarah Vaughter is the alias of my business partner and dermaneedling expert Martina Kopecka and in spite of some people we blacklisted for credit card fraud trying to make us look like total criminals who "hide behind a fake identity", the truth is that our business registration details are on our invoices and a simple Companies House lookup will show you her name as well as mine.

This is how I look nowadays. Not so handsome anymore! At least I lost 20 kg since the "Derminator does not cause Microtearing" video made in my lab. My Facebook, where you can look at my hobby-gardening and some electronics projects.

We trademarked SARAH VAUGHTER as well as VAUGHTER WELLNESS because we wanted a unique name and face to the company and Martina did not want her face plastered all over the place and I was too ugly. Just as Uncle Ben's and Dr. Oetker aren't real people, neither is Sarah Vaughter but at least everything else we published about her is 100% correct. Just her name and face differ. We presented Sarah Vaughter as an "autistic" / Asperger's woman and that corresponds with our own neurologies.

This is Martina / "Sarah Vaughter". She's our dermaneedling expert and wrote all dermaneedling replies on our forum, as well as our dermaneedling instructions and our featured dermaneedling articles.

This is our little factory in an apartment at Jilova 25 in Olomouc where we make 10,000 Derminators/year. Radek does the mainboard soldering and Martina assembles them into cases and packs them into boxes. We use a cable cutting machine, a super-silent compressor to blow away dust from the display and its window, a coil winding machine and an overhead screwdriver. Part-time workers strip and tin cables.

We always have thousands machines in stock and we also have at least 5000 pcs of each component, often 10,000 or even 30,000 pcs, so that we get the best prices and won't risk supply chain problems. We're talking many many TONS of materials on countless PALLETS so that does not fit in our micro-factory. Luckily we were able to rent a huge and very chique storage space at Krizkovskeho 5 that used to house Sberbank, which left the country after the Ukraine war started. We also fill off our C60-EVOO product there, which is done by Dana, who also programs the firmware into the microcontrollers for the Derminator.


The dispatching of the Derminators and other dermaneedling-related products is done from Prague, so our suppliers ship directly to the address of Ivo and Jana, childhood friends of Martina. The Derminators are shipped in bulk to them also. Our company rents a large storage space for them in their apartment building. The C60 bottles are dispatched by Bozenka, Ivo's mother, from a town called Drahanovice.

I have perhaps the largest in-home electromechanics R&D lab in the country or even in Europe. I live on approx. 400 m2 (4300 sq. ft) and every nook & cranny is stuffed with tools, materials and machines. I have an incredible total of 48 (forty-eight!) "work" tables. Most are 180x80 cm but some are 80x80. It's really embarrasingly much and the company still takes so much of my time (I do the support and accountancy, store programming, purchasing) that I hardly have time to develop new ideas. I work on several projects at a time and progress is very slow bec. I also grow all my vegetables myself and started with chickens also. I recently did finish a machine that cuts the EPDM backplug for the Derminator motor to 1/100th of a mm accurate. I got sick of meticulously cutting countless thousands of these things by hand, which took days.



From 2012 to 2013, I worked on inventing the Derminator. I used a Sherline micro-lathe to manufacture the experimental coil bodies to be able to test prototypes.


To make the motor work was devilishly hard. The idea was to be able to very precisely regulate needling depth in a tight feedback loop between a reciprocating magnet and a very sensitive, highly accurate Hall Effect sensor. All these parameters must exactly "cooperate" with one another: Magnet strength, magnet length, magnet diameter, coil length, number of coil windings, coil wire diameter, coil voltage, initial position of magnet inside coil, softness (in Shore A) of the damper backplug, position and orientation of the magnet field sensor and strength of the retaining back magnet. And even when all of these are well-chosen, the motor will immediately stall on the fastest speed unless the firmware constantly adjusts for the direction of gravity. Why not simply sell a "buzzer"-type repurposed permanent makeup pen from China, like all pen-type devices? Because they're not skin-safe (micro-tearing of pore boundaries) and they don't penetrate deep enough either. Something better had to be invented.



I used to work as a programmer for a company called CTI software in the Hague. There were no career prospects for me, even though I outperformed my University-educated colleagues by an order of magnitude. My future was being a wagie, a code-monkey. I became suicidally depressed for several reasons. Spring 1992 I decided to sell my belongings, quit my job and work my way around the world. I ended up first in a civil war in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and later bought a bicycle and cycled to the Sinai desert coast in Egypt, where I used up my remaining cash and then started working for board & lodging and a dollar a day. I slept in those same huts as I was repairing, here. Later I built my own hut on a deserted beach and chilled with fishing bedouins and the old lady who showed me how to bake flatbread on dying embers, the bread then covered with sand. I always cooked on a tiny wood fire as well and walked mainly barefoot for two years. On my 24-day cycling journey back to northern Europe I contracted Lyme Neuroborreliosis. I deteriorated mentally in the years that followed until I was a shadow of my former self, functioning like a disoriented animal and eating from supermarket containers. And then in the year 2000, I nearly died. I had been a hobo for seven whole years. Of which 1000 nights under the sky. Got severe burns in Ukraine and ended up there for half a year, penniless. Did olive harvest in Sitia, Crete. In the end I was saved just in time by antibiotics but I ended up with a lifetime of serious Dysautonomia, rheumatic arthritis and terrible migraines. My travelling days were over. I had no money, no job, no health and no diplomas. My only qualifications were working as a Divemaster (600 dives, taking tourists) in Israel and Egypt, but I could never dive again. The first years I was so sick that I thought I could die any moment. Then followed two decades of merely being "so ill I wish I was dead but I'm too scared to kill myself". Only recently did I start getting more energy and brainpower.


In my "I might drop dead any moment" period, I pioneered modern AI, which is not AI at all so I don't feel that I'm boasting too much. I in fact spent much time on doing AGI R&D and think I have accurately defined Intelligence as well as its algorithm and Knowledge representation model but that's too far off-topic here. It went like this: I found a job in Oslo, where I worked for 18 months but then had to quit due to ill health. My breathing stopped all the time ("dyspnea"), my pulse was 120 in rest for two entire years and I even collapsed in Slottsparken on my way home at night in mid-winter once. And I could not think anymore, most of the time. I decided to try to win the Ing prize - a 1.8 million dollar prize for the first Go program that wins from a reasonably strong player. Rather ambitious for a total wreck as I was but I guess I was too far gone to realize that. Long story short - I ended up developing Windows shrinkwrap software to play, annotate, analyze, search and publish for the game of Go. Link to my old devblog, where I explained how I utilized statistical pattern learning (Bayesian learning as now done in LLMs). I sold a thousand copies, with Microsoft in Redmond buying copy #20 and #21 on one of the first days. I would later hear a lot more from those guys. Moyo Go Studio was able to predict the moves of professional Go players, also in games it had never encountered before. This was considered absolutely impossible and even absurd with a statistical-learning approach so after I explained exactly how everything worked, Microsoft Cambridge set out to replicate my core "AI" algorithm.


Tore Graepel was their tech lead. When Microsoft published their paper in which they confirmed that my claims were correct (they weirdly managed to claim that they "brought my work to new heights" but simultaneously admitted that their results were inferior to mine), all kinds of things started to happen. Tore Graepel became the CTO of DeepMind, which then developed AlphaGo - a program that wins from the world champion human Go player. Prior to that, Go programs could not even win from a beginner. Oh yeah and Google asked me whether I was interested in working for them. I didn't know they actively hunted for 44-yo unemployed programmers who where hella "controversial" on top of it. Hm.


I was "controversial" because since Go games were uncopyrightable, since they are legally classified as recordings of a historical event and since machine learning needs as much high-quality data as possible and there exist only a few tens of thousands of pro Go game records, I *used*, not *stole* some of them from 3rd party game databases to provide a learning corpus. I then normalized the spelling of the players and formatted the game file according to standard notation. No one was harmed by this but the result was the literal foundation of modern (but fake so I don't feel I'm boasting too much here) AI. Nowadays Big Tech shamelessly vacuums up every Copyrighted work - books, paintings, entire websites - to use in their multi-billion dollar "AI" imperium but I had to be erased as an indie dev for building the foundation of the very "AI" they now use. The Copyright issue was merely an excuse. The real reason was that I, someone who could not even play Go, embarrassed people who spent decades learning Go, writing Go software and publishing scientific papers on Computer Go. Not to mention the many competing software that my software had made obsolete overnight. My software had every feature any of the other programs had, plus dozens more. So I got "canceled" by the tightly-knit Go cabal. AGA's leaders were also my competitors. The major Go sites were run by my competitors. Banned from using retailers. Banned from sponsoring tournaments. Banned from being in Sensei's Library. Banned from advertising - not even with Google Adwords - those were clickfrauded by a Go-playing fellow programmer who suggested on rec.games.go that everyone do that. I got canceled but then again, Google would like to find 44-yo me me a job. Even if I wanted to, I was much to sick to work or even travel to the US.

Why we "doxx" people who commit card fraud

When a merchant is victim to more than 0.5% chargebacks ("friendly fraud") in any 90-day period, that merchant is in imminent danger of losing the ability to process payments for at least five years, effectively bankrupting them because it's a world-wide payment processing blacklist for company and its principals. Our merchandise appeals to many people. All kinds of people. Smallish, relatively expensive electronic gadgets, especially when uniquely useful attracts people who can't afford them but want to posess them nevertheless. We found that *threatening* to publicly blacklist people (not EU residents - that might be against the GDPR) and showing that we *really* do so and *demanding* that they agree to that in case they steal from us, prevents nearly all fraud that we used to suffer. Of course we're extremely easy with refunds/replacements for any valid reason - we never even ask to be sent bad merchandise back.

Why there are "smear sites" and bad "reviews"

Most 1-star "reviews" (full of falsehoods) are in revenge for us refusing to accept them as a customer, usually for rudeness or being a danger to themselves in the sense that they'll not be able to understand our instructions and thus also a danger to our company. A couple are from people whom we "doxxed" for defrauding us but claim they never did anything wrong. Of approx. 100,000 customers, 100 are publicly blacklisted by us. One in a thousand. These people often say that I (Frank de Groot, the inventor of the Derminator) am a terrible human being, that I stalked them, threatened them, harrassed them, doxxed them for no reason. That I am mentally ill or pure evil. Some even created entire websites where they aggregated all the other baddies' vengeful claims they found on Reddit and forums. "Sarah Vaughter does not exist - it's Schizophrenic Frank de Groot in his mother's basement and he makes Derminators out of recycled toxic waste!" Of course, a "baddie" will spread far and wide how horrible we are, to revenge with lost sales. We don't care about lost sales. We can hardly keep up with production as it is.

This is "Sarah Vaughter" (Martina Kopecka - who assembles and does the final quality check on the Derminators) when we lived in Swedish Lapland for three years. Shoveling impacted snow from our roof to prevent it from collapsing!





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