On your phone, turn on contacts-only for calls. Should also work for regular text messages.
If also using apps like WhatsApp there may be a similar app-level setting.
Get a couple of well reviewed ad blockers for your browser. I'm still astounded when I see people on their phones and dealing with ads. Especially YouTube. There are browser blockers that work for YouTube.
Adding to the previous point, never install/use a company's native app. You have NO control over that. Use their web version.
Addding to the previous point, iOS safari has an option to view any website in desktop mode. I imagine Android has something like that but I dunno. If a particular site has an annoying mobile web interface, try the desktop web version. If they don't allow that, use a different product. One case in point: I use Reddit heavily. I use old Reddit on web. Their app and mobile website are complete garbage.
Some ad blockers may help with the "accept cookies? Gdpr bullshit". I don't personally bother. They're fairly innocuous and the sites are collecting all cookies anyway so it doesn't matter.
The reason I'm not mentioning the specific web extensions I use is because despite being common and easy to find, I'm EXTREMELY hesitant to provide a curated list in a public forum that will get vacuumed up and probably lead to circumventions within a few weeks to months. This stuff is easy to find, is completely available in the platform-relevant app stores and only takes a little extra effort to customize after a couple of weeks of running into minor inconveniences. This isn't a "compile Linux from scratch" kind of problem.
Sounds like you could use some resume review help. And I'm not talking about bs AI linkedin level "resume review". I mean some review from someone who's been in the industry for a while. There's a way to contact me via my profile. If you can find that I'll try to help you out.
To answer the question more directly, I've spent the last couple of years with a few different quant models mostly running on llama.cpp and ollama, depending. The results are way slower than the paid token api versions, but they are completely free of external influence and cost.
However the models I've tests generally turn out to be pretty dumb at the quant level I'm running to be relatively fast. And their code generation capabilities are just a mess not to be dealt with.
Location: San Francisco
Remote: Yesd
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: TypeScript/JS, React, node.js, Redis, Postgres, pgvector, LLM agents, Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), ci/cd pipelines, other tech
Résumé/CV: on request
Email: charles@geuis.com
Senior engineer with 15+ years of full stack and backend experience, as well as experience at startups and as a founder.
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