Regarding communities, this was one of the strongest features from Orkut. I remember having lots of fun hunting niches/bizares communities (and not so much fun when I found out some communities I was part of got sold/traded, and then got renamed to something completely different, mostly for advertising purposes).
That was my conclusion as well. I didn't get fancy about setting cronjobs. I just run a script every now and then, and it is enough for my case.
I'm still looking for a good player that would behave somewhat like Youtube Kids (auto play, fullscreen, no volume/brightness controls). All players I've tried have controls that kids don't understand and, accidentally or intentionally, end up ruining everything.
If we could restrict the app to just play videos of a single playlist, life would be great. But today it is very easy for kids to exit playlist mode, thus defeating the purpose of curating a playlist.
I know you are talking about Desktop OCR, but I had a very good experience with Google Vision API. On my previous gig we were trying to automate receipt scanning, and it gave very good results with no previous image manipulation whatsoever (meaning, no special camera alignment, lighting condition, rotation, skewing, etc).
It was not perfect, but I was very impressed with the quality, speed, and price.
Github projects are not as important as people might think. They are a plus, for sure, but not the meat -- unless you are a legendary open source contributor, but then you wouldn't have problems finding good work anyway.
I'd say build a non trivial, non toy project, from scratch. No need to be novel or groundbreaking. Something that really works and is not just the fun part. That is, both functionality and design must be professionally looking, it must feel thought-out, polished. It doesn't matter if your code is a masterpiece if the product looks like hacked together over a weekend. _Then_ use that as portfolio, independently if the source code is available at Github or not. People really like to see you can deliver a finished product.
I'll skip the details about resume and interview tips. There are plenty of resources out there.
Not just that, but remember not everybody can afford health care in US, so it's not unfathomable to think some of those bad statistics is due to people not being able to afford proper care, not just that they don't live a healthy life (which can certainly contribute to that).
Disabling Javascript has singlehandedly fixed several annoyances I had, even with ad blocking. No more tabs draining my battery (ok, css animations are still a problem), no more things jumping around, no more page popups, no more Intercom chat windows from people eager to talk to me, no more 3rd party crap Javascript tracking me (ublock prevented them already, but it's nice to know there's no way they can bypass adblock). Things load and render fast.
Some pages still require Javascript, and SSO is usually a pain, but for those cases I have a Chrome profile with Javascript enabled and a simple Hammerspoon script that launches that profile in incognito mode for the url I have on my clipboard.