J7K

hi frens, nakamas, and homies 👋🏼 i'm jakk my locals call me aj; wizard in training, known for my perma-beard. 🚧minor rebrand moment as i start rolling out my solo builder blog + developer resources. gotta serve the algo gods that hate when you take up more than one lane. i'll still be giving snarky hot takes and sharing my creative work at my legacy @jakkvega ~ my more focused soloprenuer+developer takes will land here with you can we catch up late game and build something great? let's find out 🏴‍☠️ ~J7K

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@jakecastilloooo from one jake to another, congrats fellow jake

My actual income breakdown from the last 13 years: 2013: $13/hr 2017: $32,000/yr + free tuition (grad school) 2018: 60k/yr 2020: $100k/yr 2022: $120k 2024: $150k Late 2024: $0 Most of 2025: $0 2026: Not worried about money anymore

Today is America's 250th birthday. 1 year ago, I became of citizen of the USA. America is the one place where chasing your crazy idea makes people root for you. Whatever the idea is. A startup nobody asked for. A pop-punk band at 30. A weird little product you can't stop thinking about. You say it out loud here and people get excited and ask how they can help. That's the magic. Other places I've lived, I've gotten torn town. Not here. The USA celebrates you for going after the thing you actually want to build. 250 years in, the best thing America still gives you is permission. Permission to try. Permission to reinvent yourself. Permission to believe you can do better than the people who came before you. It isn't perfect. No place is. But I think it's worth celebrating. Happy birthday to the best place on earth to build your dream. I'm grateful to be part of it.

building is not about delivering the perfect product in one go it's about the iterative process needed to discover what works and what makes sense if building is iterative then there is nothing to fail at

i refuse to say substrate

Let me know if this is just me: Noticed someone I know who is very "AI-pilled" and uses agents 24/7 to... start to talk noticeably more like these LLMs write. Eg more heavily using adjectives like "geniune", frequently terms like "the shape of" and many more examples

@CodeWithTamara its in stages, at different levels you get to post different things lol. down here in the gulag we have to fight over the scraps

I post my thoughts, nothing. I post my dev work, nothing. I post my face, thinking that would work, nothing. I post about my transition from biochem to developer at 37, I get some reactions. I post the 💩 let's connect post, X explodes. So sad.

@unfernaonx @audiencon you missed the premium promo it was worth it lol

@audiencon Unemployed here ☠️ I’m still wondering I should get a job or go all in

4 things I did to escape the 9‑5: 1. Built a side project while employed 2. Reached $3K MRR before quitting 3. Saved 12 months of runway 4. Started posting daily on X (took 18 months, worth it)

@SahilBloom just missing the star spangled running shorts

25 Miles for America’s 250th Brutal in this heat wave, but we got it done. - First 20 Miles: 7:22 Pace - Final 5 Miles: 6:38 Pace Do hard things.

@IamAroke the best time to talk about it, id argue. learn anytime

I think the best time to learn a technology is just before it goes mainstream. Not after everyone is already talking about it.

@_dylanga seasons are cattle -- waiting to be a hamburger

Long running sessions are a smell. Seasons are cattle, not pets. You should be able to clear the entire context window of a task at any point without fear.

people always forget to asterisk with *for me

If you say “ads don’t work,” you’re really saying that you’re ceding that growth channel to competitors who know what they’re doing. You might say: “Yes, of course! I prefer SEO and Social and building attention over time. More fun, better customers.” Good answer, but that’s different from saying “ads don’t work.” Cross-apply to all other marketing channels.

@yacineMTB my paranoia runs deeper than what if daddy takes my ai away -- more like what if they take my compute away? ill drop any one of them in a heartbeat.

controlling your stack is non negotiable. the fact that I rely on openai for all kinds of personal stuff like managing my linux systems puts me in a deep uncomfortable panic. And I actually *like* openai. Imagine how much I'd be losing my mind if it were anthropic only

What do you think would happen if everyone except 'trusted enterprise' suddenly lost access to github?

@JamesonCamp working on this as we speak. you gotta share the sauce boss

You can brainwash yourself into success. I'm dead serious. Your brain takes in 11 million bits of data per second and filters it down to roughly 50. Your Reticular Activating System decides what makes the cut based on what you tell it matters. Tell it you're going to win and it starts finding proof you will. I've moved across the world twice to reprogram my brain. Both times I surrounded myself with people who had zero idea who I used to be. Everyone I met only knew the version of me I decided to be that day. It worked both times. If you're just stuck, if things aren't changing, they're not going to change on their own. How can you expect anything in you to change if you don't change the inputs you're getting? Go. Right now. If you want to be different a year from now, start today. Brainwash yourself.

@angellilix thats so sweet. literally

“She walked in, wearing a pretty blue sundress with white pinstripes. She was aglow… What’s this? … Cupcakes. Red, white and blue cupcakes, to be exact. In honor of Independence Day.” - Prince Harry (SPARE, 2023) #4thJuly 🇺🇸 #HarryandMeghan ❤️+ ❤️= ❤️

Happy Birthday America. Terrible twos; here's to 250 more. #4thJuly

@craigweiss also plants

most people are going to be completely thrown off guard in the next 1-2 years when we are suddenly capable of talking to animals

@steipete cosmic humor laid bare.

I fed Fable 80.000 of my tweets so it could roast me even more. 💀

@FrancescoCiull4 every small win counts as the big ones. looking forward to more rust videos

These past 2 weeks have been a bit slow on X because I had to take care of many other things. Still managed to have X covering parts of my subscriptions. This is a phase of my life that I would simply describe as “busy and happy.” I just wanted to stop by and say thank you to everyone who shows up, supports me, and cheers me on whenever I post. Twitter, well, now X, changed my life. Working on my social media presence instead of just coding alone in a dark room, which I did for so many years, changed everything. The goal today is to record more videos, then hopefully we’ll go live. Stay tuned.

@leerob writing is so insanely personal that you mostly don't want to play a quantity game here on that note, the best play ive found for quantity is giving it a corpus of work that distills your voice + word choice to generate derivatives from but not for creating primary work

Are current LLMs incompatible with great creative writing? I can't tell if it's cope or not, but it seems like even with the best models, I still can't get them to write like humans would. For coding, there is a verifiable reward like it compiling or tests passing. But for creative work like writing, it's much more subjective. I have struggled to prompt / harness the models to write truly amazing work. They are fantastic for spell checking, grammar suggestions, and taking on different personas to read and critique work. Maybe it's because I'm only doing nonfiction, and to write something top 0.1% means that you need to think over a long horizon and develop an interesting insight about the world. Great writing is clear thinking. I've even asked models to try 10 different versions of a blog post, then have a council of models grade and critique the results and pick the best parts... and still I end up with this lowest common denominator slop. Skill issue? Someone show me the way.