If this was a bank with a bank teller, you told the teller to never speak to a single customer, and then celebrated the fact that no one was able to social engineer them.

In security the interesting and challenging part is to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate behavior. And that's different than just refusing all behavior outright.

Gonna give you a zero out of one hundred on "interesting"

Consider the Olympics instead. Judges score, and 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place simply fall out of the scores, nobody had to design a tournament bracket to make that happen. Give voters that same instrument: score every candidate on desirability. For a pooled multi-seat district, take however many winners the pool needs, ranked by score. Nothing stops someone from voting like they do now, give the candidate you despise a 0 and the one you want a 100, but most people think in preference, a first, second, third choice, not a single binary mark.

The numerology of district size and pop-per-rep will always be heuristic at best. If the goal is to improve representation, we should focus on the mechanism of selecting people and elevating them into office. That's the biggest bang for the buck.

Be very discerning who you share your projects/pursuits with. Most people will be filtering it through their experience and their own internal critic will be applied to you. I too would rather have silence than unmotivating or demotivating banter , which sadly means some people just need to be avoided or left out of the loop. Simple as that.

The "build it and they will come" mentality is only true of prisons and swamps (gators, snakes, and birds). You must orient around a need, an exigency people have, and build the bridge that connects them to their destination.

Anyway, if most customers can't pay, they're not customers in the sense you need. The "custom" around "custom-er" is they hand you money when you hand them some good or service. If they don't hand you money, how can we say they are participating in the custom of commerce? Whatever you build needs to bridge a gap or painpoint so annoying or challenging or riveting or worthwhile that people will thrust money into your pocket to have it.

2) Sounds like you need both supportive morale-boosters (rare) and a cool co-founder (even more rare).

3) Go to some in-person meetups for startups or even ETH conferences (I have no idea what you are working on but you need supportive people around you)

4) Consider joining a large company where you can work as an engineer of some sort and use it as a place to meet/network with potential future co-founders. You can meet sharp-and-cool people this way.

5) Focus on one project.

6) Don't sell the product, sell the dream. People don't buy products, people buy what the product enables them to do. (Mario doesn't buy the fire-flower, he buys the ability to shoot fireballs - as I heard in a video once)

7) Read all the biographies/autobiographies/essays of people who are successful in startuplandia to glean insights into what to do next. Your acquaintances who have never embarked on this journey before will be of limited help, not due to lack of want , but due to lack of expertise/experience.

8) People owe you nothing; until you provide/give them a service or an experience people will not feel the need to reciprocate, and even then reciprocity is increasingly rare in 2027 / the kaliyuga.

Actual grade meaning would require criterion-referenced assessment: define what mastery looks like, grade against that standard, and let the distribution fall where it may across years and cohorts. That's hard and unsexy, so instead we get an administrative quota that launders the appearance of rigor while the underlying problem, that Harvard's admissions process selects heavily for wealth and legacy, goes untouched.

Harvard A's will now tell employers that a learner beat ~80% of a nepotism-filtered, endowment-curated cohort in a single semester. That's a relative rank, not a measure of exceptional work.