Maybe you could describe what you mean by self-hosted and resilient. If you mean stuff running on a box in your house connected through a home ISP, then the home internet connection is an obvious point of failure that makes your box's internet connection way less reliable than AWS despite the occasional AWS problems. On the other hand, if you are only trying to use the box from inside your house over a LAN, then it's ok if the internet goes out.
You do need backup power. You can possibly have backup internet through a mobile phone or the like.
Next thing after that is redundant servers with failover and all that. I think once you're there and not doing an academic-style exercise, you want to host your stuff in actual data centers, preferably geo separated ones with anycast. And for that you start needing enough infrastructure like routeable IP blocks that you're not really self hosting any more.
A less hardcore approach would be use something like haproxy, maybe multiple of them on round robin DNS, to shuffle traffic between servers in case of outages of individual ones. This again gets out of self hosting territory though, I would say.
Finally, at the end of the day, you need humans (that probably means yourself) available 24/7 to handle when something inevitably breaks. There have been various products like Heroku that try to encapsulate service applications so they can reliably restart automatically, but stuff still goes wrong.
Every small but growing web site has to face these issues and it's not that easy for one person. I think the type of people who consider running self-hosted services that way, has already done it at work and gotten woken up by PagerDuty in the middle of the night so they know what it's about, and are gluttons for punishment.
I don't attempt anything like this with my own stuff. If it goes down, I sometimes get around to fixing it whenever, but not always. I do try to keep the software stable though. Avoid the latest shiny.
A high-cpu small machine will have noisy fans, there's no avoiding that. The fans have to be of small diameter so they will spin at high RPM. Maybe you can say what you're actually trying to run, and make things easier for us.
I gave up on this approach a long time ago and it's been liberating. My main personal computer is a laptop and for a while I had a Raspberry Pi 400 running some server-like things. The Raspberry is currently not in use though maybe I'll get it going again sometime. All my bigger computational stuff is remote. So the software is self-hosted but not the hardware. IDK if that counts as self-hosting around here. But it's much more reliable that way, with the boxes in multiple countries for geo separation.
I'm not a checkers player but really strong players do win games against each other. Also it was 8x8 checkers that was solved. Human competitive play is sometimes 10x10 which is probably beyond current technology to solve the same way. Tinsley played 8x8 though.
I got my current phone in 2023 and the one before that in 2017. The 2017 one was my first android phone. The previous couple were Maemo, which tbh would be better for servers.
At that time it wasn't solved and it was unknown whether Chinook was at Tinsley's level. Now it's solved in the sense that a humongous computer search has proved it to be a draw, but there is still competition between humans. Chess is generally believed to be a draw too. A mathematical or computer proof of that wouldn't change things very much though. The best way to beat another human might involve playing into positions that are lost for you, if you can get into a complex enough position to confuse your opponent into a mistake.
Marion Tinsley died at age 68 while still holding the World Checkers Championship. A number of chess players including Ivanchuk and Anand are in their 50s and still mighty strong, though not WC strength.
Um no, phones are terrible for that. My old phone in particular is a PITA to even keep powered, because of its flaky micro USB connector. Then we get to the lack of Ethernet, the difficulty of remote reboot, and the Android OS even with termux. It's .much better to scrounge an old PC or raspy pi or the like.
Dunno about algebra 2, I took that class but don't remember how synthetic division works and haven't missed it. I'd replace it with some basic probability and logic for non-nerds. They don't even have to be treated as math topics. More like: how to avoid some common mental errors. Lots of people don't think mathematically and that's ok.
Web browsing is monstrously demanding of CPU so if the laptop can do it, it's not so slow. A 20 year old laptop can email or word process perfectly well today, but it can't browse. The modern web is just too bloated.
I've found Costco membership to be worth it, ymmv. If you have family at the same address (or maybe your non-campus address) you can put two people on single membership. That helps too.
Look also for Grocery Outlet, Costco, and places like that. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=canned+foods+surplus looks interesting. There was once an actual store chain called "canned foods surplus" (there was one near my school) but I guess it's gone now. The other hits from that search look promising.
I think as screwed up as the US currently is, there aren't actual food shortages in most places, so you can get by one way or another.
You should get a pressure cooker. It lets you cook dry beans in 45 minutes or so, instead of soaking overnight then cooking for hours. They have lots of fiber.
There's someone on ebay selling MRE's for way less than $5 a pouch. I can try to find the link if you want. But it's not that great a plan imho.
There's a youtube video of a prepper who survived on stuff like MRE's for a month at home, just to see what it would be like. It was miserable.
See if chefstore.com has an outlet near you. It's a good place to get bulk ingredients.
Flavor does not matter, presentation does not matter
You will get sick of it pretty fast. You can do ok on rice and beans (protein combination) and a few spices though. Take some vitamin supplements if you can. Don't stay on this diet for too long. Add some fats too, peanut butter is a decent source. For free food, no idea if dumpster diving is still a thing, but it was back in the day.
If you're in a rural area maybe you can grow a small vegetable garden. If you're in a city you are probably hammered by housing costs even more than by food costs, so that's another thing to work on.
Rust has exceptions? Is that new?