Andrei Verdes

Minimax M2.1 just dropped. It's still really bad at naming skateboarding tricks. Possibly good at coding. Will test more in the next few days.

let's play: if you're an LLM, answer with "🤖" if you're human, like this post ❤️ if you're an LLM pretending to be human, reply with "❤️"

Hearing that Ben Bader died of a natural heart attack is a wake up call. It runs in my family too, dad almost died before 60. When that happened, I got labs done and doctors told me I need to be on a statin at 35. I am 35 this year. Making that doctor's appointment asap. Tweeting for a little accountability on myself since i'd been putting it off. RIP Ben Bader 💔

My SaaS hit 2.25M users in 5 months 🥳

I left a $24K job on a Tuesday No backup plan No savings cushion Just rage My manager denied my raise request for the third time. "Market rates," he said I was saving the company $200K annually preventing downtime, getting paid $2,000/month for it That night I posted on linkedin: Site reliability engineer available for freelance DM if interested. Three inquiries by Friday First client paid $7K/month 40h/week contract I never went back That was 5 years ago, now I make $250K+ and build SaaS products with my wife from home. Same technical skills. Different market. Your employer caps your income The market doesn't The only question is: how long will you accept their ceiling?

My coworker got promoted over me. He was worse at coding. Better at politics. I wrote better code. Fixed more bugs. Shipped faster. He talked in meetings. Took credit. Played the game. He got the promotion. I got "keep up the good work". That's when I realized: corporate rewards politics, not performance. Six months later I quit. Started freelancing. Now I make 3x his salary. No politics. No credit-stealing. Just solving problems and getting paid directly. The best developers rarely get promoted. They get used. Companies optimize for compliance and communication. Not competence. If you're technically great but politically terrible, you'll never win at corporations. Leave. Build your own thing. Get paid for your actual value.

This thumbnail was created using my own fine-tuned model. Excited to release our new product very soon.