As the other person said, something is wrong if your machine is shutting down instead of just giving choppy playback.

Do you do much heavy CPU with with that machine at all? It’s possible that AV1 decoding is the only thing you’re trying to do that pushes the CPU to that degree. 7th Gen Intel CPUs have hardware decoders for h.265, so the CPU is barely used to play these back, but lacking a decoder for AV1 means it has to be decoded in software, which hits the CPU hard.

There are definitely ways to run partial testing suites on modified code only. I feel like much of what you’re complaining about is an already solved problem.

Ah, if you need to build a .NET project that makes sense

Nuget is a the .NET package manager. Like npm or pip, but for .NET projects.

If you needed it for a published application that strikes me as fairly strange.

This is probably a diffusion model. LLMs don’t create images.

What compression settings are you using for each? If you’re just accepting defaults it’s quite possible you’re comparing against a lossless webp, which is quite likely to be larger than jpeg at typical quality settings.

486DX2/66 my beloved

Two and a half months is insane for a practical skills demonstration for a job interview. Those should be a couple of hours at most.