Ask HN: I was made redundant yesterday, and I want some coding ideas

You know javascript and live in London, I wouldn't worry about it - you can get a new job easily.

Here's something I think ought to be more or less straightforward but don't yet know any of the relevant machine learning theory for and so I've been putting it off. I could find a variety of handy uses for it if implemented the way I'm imagining. If it exists already, I don't know how to search for it.

It should ideally be a simple/minimal-dependencies CLI program that can take a command and arguments for that command, go ahead and run the command with given arguments, and record those arguments in relation to each other. When called with any of the command arguments missing, it will run the command filling in the blanks with a prediction for the best values for the missing arguments, based on the historical usage patterns.

My example use case is that I currently manually run a terminal command to adjust my external monitor brightness to a comfortable level at various times of day, and I would love to have a simple cron task scheduled to have it auto adjust throughout the day based on time of day and possibly other variables I can retrieve such as ambient brightness or whatever else. The dumb version would just be a predefined lighting schedule hardcoded in cron, but I specifically want to continue making adjustments as needed based on comfort and have the automation trend towards optimum over time, minimizing the frequency that I need to adjust without replacing my option to do so temporarily. The ML part I don't have the education for yet and I've been putting it off, but I can imagine a lot of other use cases for something like this implemented in a very generic way. The way I first imagined this working, I'm not entirely sure any sophisticated algorithm is even necessary, it might be doable with some high school level math run against the stored data. I presume that with such a generic approach it won't perform impressively well right out of the gate but with an accumulation of training data can be coerced into remembering what the user wants/expects gradually. As I said, I'm not educated in machine learning but I suspect this should be straightforward to do at least a crude version of given some of the libraries available.

Somewhat off topic, though perhaps something for consideration...

Whichever job I had, I always considered it my prime objective to make my own position obsolete. In other words, I measured my personal success to whether or not I had made myself redundant.

At first glance, one might think it contradictory that - save one exception - I was never laid off, found it easy to navigate to (more) interesting projects, etc.

Same rule here!

My prime objective is to be able to go on vacation without any call of emergency, but the point is I showed that I was not necessary when I was ill and not at work for a month.

Two weeks after my return, the up management shows me the door...

Nevertheless, I think it is my best move to make my own position useless. I need peace of mind in vacation, I need autonomous coworkers, I need challenging problems to solve, and more, my whole team is happier that way.

The up management did not understand that... too bad for them.

Have you considered looking for a freelance project? You'll get given the idea and get paid for it. Try messaging friends and people you've worked with for leads along with your story.