While I can’t tell you how it works for everyone, I can tell you how it worked for me. I too grew up in the deep south, small town of 100 people, middle of absolute nowhere. I do have a college degree but in a field entirely unrelated to what I do.

It boils down to playing the game a bit. General rule of thumb is that you should never stay in a position for more than about 2 years. You SHOULD if possible stick with a company for 3-5 years. This will cover two things that recruiters are looking at on resumes, promotability and tenure. The basics of it is that at 2 years you should be seeking a promotion, if it doesn’t come, you’re looking for a different company. It’s annoying, but ‘raises’ at most companies are ass and won’t outpace inflation. You’re chasing a ‘raise’ through either a promotion or a new job.

My journey. I started out in the hotel industry, thought it would be a good way to go (Protip, it isn’t). Pay was shit, work life balance was awful, working with the general public is a nightmare. I made something dumb like $10 an hour as a Secretary. But at 2 years I got promoted to Sales Assistant, 1 year from there I took a slight promo/side-grade to the Front Desk (Not a pay increase but into a position where I had more promotion opportunities). 2 Years at the desk before I was manager of the FD. Still shit pay, still shit hours. Realized pretty quick that was where my upward mobility would stop, but even in the south 35K a year won’t pay bills… What I did have though was 6ish years at a company and 2.5 promotions.

I found a small tech company that would let me answer phones on their support team. Pay was roughly what I made before (But I was already living on ramen and cold sandwiches so whatever). What it really was, was a place where I had chances to move up.

1.5 years before I made senior, 1 more before I made tier 2. From there I had a chance to work directly with clients as a tech consultant. It was a job that I truly didn’t like, but what it did was put me in a place where I could regularly interact with a bunch of people that owned business. A place to make connections. Not the job I wanted but I took it. Another year and I made senior as a tech consultant. It was at this point that my long term clients actively started trying to headhunt me. For the first time in my life I got to choose my job. I took a job for a company I liked making roughly what I made as a senior. Got another promotion, and that’s roughly where I am now. I fucking love my job. The people I work with are good humans, the pay is sufficient, just bought my first home :).

Now, it didn’t actually take all 20 of those years for me to be comfortable. The first 6-8 where rough, I ate ramen, cold turkey sandwiches, and slept on a mattress on the floor in a one bedroom apt with 0 furniture lol. About 8 years in I could afford real food and furniture. By year 12 or so I had enough money to actually do things like take a vacation.

The moral here is, it sucks, but play the game a bit. Your degree or lack there of is almost irrelevant. My degree is in Historical Culture studies… I work in Tech :P. Your resume showing you got promoted every 1-2 years is what people wanna see. Pick a job with upward mobility, even if it isn’t what you want, actively apply for promotions, position yourself to know people, suffer through the ramen phase.

Side tip, look for jobs in big cities that allow remote work. If you’re in the south, think Austin, Dallas, Atlanta, etc etc. They typically pay better because they’re used to paying people based on what it costs to live in or around those cities.

Sorry for the book. Hope it helps :).

Maybe I’m confused here. My Linux server has like 162 days of uptime. I reboot my home computer (arch BTW) like once a week when I remember. But my windows work laptop? If that thing stays on for more than three days shit starts falling apart at random, so it gets turned off nightly.

As a side note to this I didn’t meet me partner until I was 26. And honestly I’m glad. Enjoy your life. Its hard to see that from the other side but its fine but you should be ready to settle down before you do.

Didn’t get my DL until I was 18. Didn’t have sex until I was 22. Best friend was a virgin when he got married at 30. Everyone is different. Everyone’s experience is different. You shouldn’t feel bad. Just do you.

As a lactose intolerant individual, I can assure you that once a quarter or so Mexican food beckons me and a willingly walk into that dark night. No regrets… at least not while I’m eating. Afterwards there are regrets.

The real kicker is how you even decide what quality is. A one line script that updates a driver may be a solution to your issue. A four page walkthrough that rambles and gets you to your answer but only after an hour is still a solution, but is it better quality? The issue is that you can’t quantify quality. Even if you managed to for something like programming, you couldn’t apply that same logic to horticulture. The issue is that quality isn’t something you can stick in an algorithm.

One can dream. I need a new graphics card and it would be super helpful if a sticker change lead to a price drop :p

Honestly, it depends on how the clients handle it. If they’re cool about the things you can’t provide, agree to pay for the cleanup, don’t absolutely burn the place down… eh, who cares? You get paid, they get to fuck, the place is still rentable the following week. Now if they’re asshats, this conversation is very different lol.

The history. Jesus fuck, it’s the history. I swear in the south we talk about things from the 1920s like that shit is ancient. Meanwhile in the UK you’re just casually staying at a hotel that was built in the 1600s.

If I remember right .world is hosted in Finland. Who likely doesn’t care about MS politics. They’d have to lobby the Finnish government, who, if they did capitulate would start an awful president. So they won’t as MS has 0 authority there. But, lets assume that they did, or that MS went to all of the ISPs and had them block .world. That’s thousands of dollars, hundreds of hours, lawyers, and paperwork. And the .world users in MS just download their config files and move to .de, .ca, or .uk. And now MS gets to repeat the entire process at three more countries who couldn’t care less about their laws. The would waste unfathomable dollars and hours chasing this mouse and get nowhere. So they just won’t. It’s posturing for the big tech companies. Same as with porn. The big 3 or 4 will just block the state and move on, and the rest and those hosted in other countries will continue like nothing happened. The conservatives will claim they won ‘for the children’, nothing will really change.

Immune, no, insanely hard to police? Hell yeah. The thing with these laws is that it’s pretty easy for MS to sue Reddit and force them to comply. They have one centralized location to complain to. You can’t just call John Lemmy and have him comply. Would it be impossible for a state government to contact every single instance owner? maybe? But they’re not going to do it. Even if they made an attempt the instances hosted in other countries couldn’t give less shits about some southern US state.

Nostr is a whole other beast… it’s currently littered with things illegal in just about every country on the planet but that shit’s still there so I can’t imagine MS could do anything there either.

TLDR: Immune, no. Neigh impossible to enforce, yes.

No, you literally can see the code, that’s why it’s open source. YOU may not look at it, but people do. Random people, complete strangers, unpaid and un-vested in the project. The alternative is a company, who pays people to say “Yeah it’s totally safe”. That conflict of interest is problematic. Also, depending on what it’s written in, yes, I do sometimes take the time. Perhaps not for every single thing I run, but any time I run across niche projects, I read first. To claim that someone can’t understand is wild. That’s a stranger on the internet, you’re knowledge of their expertise is 0.

In practice, 1,000 random people with no reason to “trust you, bro” on the internet being able to audit every change you make to your code is far more trustworthy than a handful of people paid by the company they represent. What’s worse, is that if Microsoft were to have a breach, then like maybe 10 people on the planet know about it. 10 people with jobs, mortgages, and families tied to that knowledge. They won’t say shit, because they can’t lose that paycheck. Compare that to say the XZ backdoor where the source is available and gets announced so people know exactly who what and where to resolve the issue.

Most of the options mentioned in this thread won’t act independent of your input. You’d need some kind of automation software. n8n has a community edition that you can host locally in a docker container. You can link it to an LLM API and emails, excel sheets etc. As for doing “online jobs” I’m not sure what that means, but at the point where you’re trying to get a single AI to interact with the web and make choices on it’s own, you’re basically left coding it all yourself in python.

Ollama can be run from CLI.

Not entirely sure what you mean by “Limitation Free”, but here goes.

First thing you need is a way to actually run a LLM. For me I’ve used both Ollama and Koboldcpp.

Ollama is really easy to set up and has it’s own library of models to pull from. It’s a CLI interface, but if all you’re wanting is a locally hosted AI to ask silly questions to, that’s the one. Something of note for any locally hosted LLM, they’re all dated. So none of them can tell you about things like local events. They’re data is current as of when the model was trained. Generally a year or longer ago. If you wanted up to date news you could use something like DDGS and write a python script that calls Ollama. At any rate.

Koboldcpp. If your “limitation free” is more spicy roleplay, this is the better option. It’s a bit more work to get going, but has tons of options to let you tweak how your models run. You can find .gguf models at Hugging Face, load em up and off you go. kobold’s UI is kinda mid, and though is more granular than ollama, if you’re really looking to dive into some kinda role play or fantasy trope laden adventure, SillyTavern has a great UI for that and makes managing character cards easier. Note that ST is just a front end, and still needs Koboldcpp (or another back end) running for it to work.

Models. Your “processing power” is almost irrelevant for LLMs. Its your GPUs VRAM that matters. A general rule of thumb is to pick a model that has a download size 2-4GB smaller than your available VRAM. If you got 24G VRAM, you can probably run a model that’s 22G in download (Roughly a 32B Model depending on the quant).

Final notes, I could have misunderstood and this whole question was about image gen, hah. InvokeAI is good for that. Models can be found on CivitAI (Careful it’s… wild). I’ve also heard good things about ComfyUI but never used it.

GL out there.

The Expanse is by far my favorite Sci-Fi universe ever. I’m not sure how it’ll go for Owlcat, but damn does this make me excited.