Talk to student affairs. They have many students face this question every semester. They will have access to lots of relevant resources.
The only thing I would suggest is to broaden your horizons a bit. If you don't have a meal plan at the school, you need to be looking for food assistance programs, soup kitchens, church breakfasts/dinners, etc to reduce your cost of food. In terms of income, I'd consider whether it is true that you truly need a full time job or if a part time position (ideally working from home) would fill enough of the gap.
Given that you're in CS, you could look at bounty programs, book keeping (I'm sure you can figure out quicken or excel or vibecode something to automate a majority of the workload).
There are companies that pay people to train their AI models via chatting and providing feedback.
You could work remote tech support.
You could set up a side hustle providing tech support for students, start a faceless youtube channel, start a real youtube channel, etc.
If your dad is no longer contributing due to some medical or accident situation, there are sometimes hardship grants and loans for students.
In any case, if the worst case is that you end up having to take an interest bearing loan for a single semester, that's not the end of the world. If you're agressive with paying it down via being agressive with your personal revenue, you could be done paying it off in as little as a few years.
I firmly believe that the quality of HN comments is made worse by people complaining about LLM generated content than by the LLM generated content itself.
At least the LLMs are contributing to the discussion.
If people generally thought the LLMs were contributing anything of value, then the high volume of comments against them that you're describing wouldn't exist. Instead, LLMs are contributing bad content and also the downstream criticism on top of it.
On the one hand, I agree that LLMs wherever perceptibly used do nothing to aid legibility, and much to hamper it. That is legitimately irritating.
On the other, it isn't at all new, is it? How LLMs write best, or at least how they write most, is just an outgrowth of the same methylphenidate style that's characterized online writing broadly construed since the days of the original Buzzfeed, which might as well have been called "Slopchute" if we were using those words that way then. Certainly it more than any other one source is responsible for the decay of cultural discourse that made the current troubles first possible and then inevitable - especially thanks to the huge volume of such useless crap (and its worse imitators) in these models' training sets.
I would certainly like less of the slop, as much as anyone. On the other hand, it's surprising to me at this late date to encounter people who read a lot online, and have not become accustomed to dealing with wordy junk written by Adderall casualties - that is, accustomed to dispassionately filleting a longform article on sight, skimming and glancing back and forth to identify what thesis may be present if any, and only actually settling in to read sequentially in the uncommon case where something initially mistaken for "content" has proven to be worth that level of effort.
It's surprising to me because I expect people to respect the value of their own interested attention, and not permit it be idly wasted. Sometimes someone has something worthwhile to say, but not the skill to do a competent job of actually saying it, and so the reader is required to meet the writer considerably more than halfway. I described above what that process looks like in practice. It isn't really something I tried to learn, just something I began doing out of frustration with having my time wasted. (Is that unusual? A little while back someone here had to explain to me, with obviously strained patience, that most people experience pleasure as a direct effect of opiates, and not only as a side effect of the sudden surcease of pain. That clarified for me why so many people get hooked so easily, but it also suggests I may not be the best judge of what's "normal" in these matters, I suppose.)
In terms of difference in practice, LLM output is a little wordier, a little more of a slurry, sure - but on the other hand, precisely because the results tend to exhibit such a strong or "pattern language" form of stereotypy, I find it's actually often simpler to dissect a large quantity of LLM output for the sentence or two of actual thought underlying it, than to do the same with something of similar length which was written by a human, whose paragraphs will almost never be instantly dismissible en bloc, the way most LLM-output paragraphs are.
I suppose that last may sound distasteful, but consider: the paragraphs we're discussing, wherever originating, are filler and that's why we don't like their presence. These paragraphs have been filler since this was The Atlantic's unique house style back when that was still a real magazine, and these paragraphs were never not going to be anything but filler, so whether they were excreted by a human or a robot has nothing to say about the artistic quality of what we've already agreed, indeed taken as axiomatic, is not art. It's styrofoam! It's packing material, which we were never going to care more about than the minimal effort required to throw it away. So why care all that much whether it's hand-blown or machine-extruded?
I've often used this in silly pseudo-proofs demonstrating that words have little to no value.
Given that a picture is worth 1000 words, a film (being a string of pictures) at 24fps is 129600 pictures in 90 minutes, and viewing a film might cost $15: a word can be rented for $0.000116 or at a rate of roughly 86 words per penny.
This also tracks well with paperback novels as 70k words would be a little over $8 and 100k words would be just under $12.
That said, I have nothing but the vaguest sense of what an average movie or book costs these days. Are movies $15? Does walmart still have the $5 bin?
What about books? I know that the last time I was in a book store I was somewhat shocked by the prices but that was years ago.
Although, the local used good probably still sells both media for $1/ea. If that's the case, there's an easy frugality argument in the 90 minute movie being worth ~130k words against most novels topping out under 100k.
People getting better at writing is only going to increase the quality of the output.
Increasing both competition and tooling (by providing every writer with the world's greatest encylcopedia/thesaurus/line-editor/brainstormer/planner/etc) is only going to make writers better.
Will there be lots of people who misuse the system? Are there lots of people who use thesaurus words without knowing what they're talking about? Can't you tell the difference?
I see in LLMs a lowering of the ground floor making it easier for people to get in. This will increase the total availability of content.
I also see in LLMs a raising of the top bar making it harder to be the best. If more people are writing and more people are trying to be the best, the best is going to get better.
Consider chess. Have we suddenly stopped playing chess now that a phone can beat 95+% of people? No. The market is stronger than ever and still growing. The greatest player in the world use the chess algorithms to refine their play and the play keeps expanding in new and interesting ways.
In both writing and chess, yes, there is an explosion of low and middling play. But since when have we not always had people producing content and playing chess that when compared to the masters of the field is generally viewed as substandard?
But here's the kicker. Some people's favorite genre is badly editted fanfic. Some people genuinely derive actual pleasure from things that you or I might call garbage. And what's wrong with that? Who am I to say that you can't love clutzy firecop loves suburban housewife paperbacks? Or Zelda/Harry Potter crossfics or whatever.
ah, no fun, I was going to continue the semantic deconstruction with a whole bunch of technicalities about how you're not quite precisely accurate and you gotta go do the right thing and retract your statements.
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