Hey, how are you holding up?
Your GoFundMe is still at $0. Putting myself in your shoes, to say that's probably demoralizing is an understatement.
I noticed that donating requires a real surname that matches the card info provided, which is then available to the organizer. That might be giving people here cold feet since you're a new account; the anonymous donation option just removes the name from public visibility.
Beyond that, having spent the better part of my day yesterday vetting this, I'd say the other items are:
a) Lack of source code that essentially proves you've got it working.
In a nutshell: imagine if the OpenClaw author took your approach, under your circumstances. I highly doubt it would've went anywhere. The way it went however, he ended up joining OpenAI.
Point being: from that same position, he could've instead raised funds no problem. That's the position you could be in if you take the OSS route, and indeed most startups these days begin as open source since proprietary is losing favor rapidly.
That said, myself being a fan of monolithic Rust binaries that do crazy stuff and having authored several professionally to great effect, I know precisely what you're building and indeed some of your competitors in the agentic isolation space are getting large funding rounds right now.
The point there being: you're not wrong that it could work, it's just that from your current position this is by far the riskiest path. With velocity what it is right now, witholding source might not matter all that much; you already have a project architecture description up that makes it easy enough unfortunately.
Please understand I'm not trying to trivialize your work here; I read all of your kernel.org correspondence. Nor am I trying to pressure you in bad faith into something you're not comfortable with. What I'm saying that if you take the OSS route, while you might not necessarily end up a rock star, you open up a hell of a lot of doors you otherwise wouldn't because you have people actually using it and going "Hey, this is pretty cool."
That moves your moat from technical (withholding source) to a social one.
If your project is as good as you say, even if it's alpha quality, there's a chance your project ends up the de-facto agentic isolation choice that people reach for. In the midst of a gold rush, that's an enviable position that might even exceed the best outcome on your current [proprietary] course.
b) A perceived attitude issue. Let me explain: I understand where you're coming from there, and were I an angel I'd personally select for a level of belief that borders on irresponsible and crazy. Most people don't think like that, so: respect.
However, it can come across as you saying you're too good for drudgery, essentially. I get that, you want to use your potential to its fullest and not doing so feels maddening. I had to bite the bullet and get a job in a similar situation that fell just short of total financial ruin, but what made that palatable to my belief system at the time (which was eerily similar to your current one), is this: the job was an instrumental objective in ensuring startup success. It's the same thing.
Regarding dead-end jobs, those might be what you want. If you're accustomed to working 18 hours a day recently, working one for 8 hours to put a roof over your head that has a lot of [safe] downtime—where most people aimlessly scroll on their phone—sounds like it'd work out pretty well for you relative to your current situation.
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OK, now that I've had my turn at being insufferable and heaping on a bunch of unsolicited advice, some questions:
1. Has anyone reached out privately to help, or is the situation radio silence right now?
2. How is your food security? Shelter isn't doing great right now obviously, but I'm worried things might get truly dire.
3. Do you have any friends that can help? It doesn't sound like family is, given that awful situation you described. You mentioned autism, and having been a family man. I imagine your support network might not be all that great given you're here.
4. What's the status on your AI subs/compute? Putting myself in your shoes again, losing that capability would be terrifying in those circumstances.
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I'm sorry you're going through this, it's truly heartbreaking. While I don't have angel-level resources and am dealing with my own issues currently, I'll be doing everything in my power to ensure you don't fall through the cracks.
Cheers