TehPers

Have you considered doing it in Rust instead? You can even do the frontend in Rust for extra internet points.

Some of these key findings seem a bit overblown. The number of domains persistently connected to shouldn't really matter - one is enough. Update checks are standard for software. Unique IDs/device fingerprinting are so common that browsers build in ways to try to prevent it at scale. JWTs are standard authentication tools - who's the security concern for? ByteDance? Or are you saying the JWTs are from the local machine? And MessagePack isn't exactly a secret format either.

The TL;DR of this seems to be that ByteDance's AI IDE collects a crazy amount of data and offers free AI services in exchange. I'm not really sure why you'd want those services, especially at the cost of all your code potentially being stolen or other data being collected, but it should be obvious that nothing in this world is truly free.

I would say run Doom, but I'm not confident in that. At the very least, Skyrim hasn't been rereleased on it yet.

An alternative could be to use something like postgres with the pgvector extension to do semantic searches instead of just text-based searches. You can generate embeddings for the text content of the story, then do the same for "sci-fi" or something, and see if searching that way gets you most of the way there.

Generating embeddings locally might take some time though if you don't have hardware suitable for it.

SQL is designed for querying (it's a query language lol). If the stories are huge, you can save them to individual files and store the filepath in the database, but otherwise it can hold columns with a fair amount of data if needed.

You can probably get away with using sqlite. A more traditional database would be postgres, but it sounds like you just need the database available locally.

Can't speak for everywhere, but in the US, if your first questions are about salary, they're going to be left wondering if you're even qualified for the job and if money is all you care about. Even if it is (which is fine most of the time), that's not really the impression you should give if your goal is to be hired.

Asking about salary later on is usually a much better idea. You know whether you actually are interested in working there, the interviewer knows if they are interested in you, and wanting money it isn't the first impression you give.

As for Python - leetcode style interviews are common, but almost always worthless. The only real value the company gets from something like that is to check that you actually can write code. They're pointless beyond that, and a company doing leetcode interviews should be a red flag.