Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
103 points by e-topy 3 days ago
103 points by e-topy 3 days ago
I'm looking for something novel and interesting, that isn't absolutely crowded that I could meaningfully contribute to.
In 2022 I was toying around with OpenAI's RL Gym, right when the first non-instruct GPT3 model came out. I was thinking about getting into ML a lot more, but hesitated. Before that it was 3D printers, mechanical keyboards, drones, etc. All of these have exploded, and while they are still very interesting, I do love my Browns and manage Prusas for my local hackerspace, they have just, for the lack of a better term, industrialized. I'm also now in a position where I have time and money for it, not like when I was 15 and rating Ender motherboard upgrades I knew I'd never buy.
Right now I'm making a chess engine, but that's already a solved problem.
There's also biohacking, and while designing chips to go into my body is really interesting, I only have one, and don't want to push it too far.
One promising idea is a kind of 'Personal Computer 2', where people try to innovate HCI, and while I really like that and do have some research ideas, I'd like to explore a bit more before delving deep into it.
If you like to work with your hands and have space, build something physical: big and complex, and actually finish it. I built a single engine two seat kit airplane in my garage, did all the flight testing, and now have an interesting way to travel/commute as a result. The "finish it" part is the most important bit. Computer people spend too much time working on projects that don't have a "done" state. Change that up. Put it down over winter but just picking it back up. Bat detection/identification with ultrasonic recordings. It's been fun building the data pipeline to manage the ~30GB+ of WAV files generated every night, run through some identification processes (currently using https://github.com/rdz-oss/BattyBirdNET-Analyzer) and build a UI (mostly vibe coded lol) to help with replay, cataloging, etc. I'm using an AudioMoth currently (https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth), am thinking about extending it to do some of the preprocessing in the field to scale things up a bit. Get your Part 107 federal drone license and volunteer for your local fire department or search and rescue. When the FD responds to structure fires they sometimes have to go up on the roof to cut an air hole. This allows oxygen into the building which helps prevent back blasts. A FLIR equipped drone can help direct the hole chtter around hotspots on the roof. If your local fire department has a drone, it might not have the staff to be able to use it on calls. I got into HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) fencing last year through a club in my little town. Olympic/sport fencing is fun, but imagine (safely) swinging a 4lbs. steel longsword with two hands at your opponent instead. It's a ton of fun, a great workout (I burn ~1500 calories per class), and competitive so it keeps my interest. Then there's the whole nerd layer of reading all the original sources from the 15th century, attempting to retain the historical character of the techniques while engaging in real combat, etc. It's both intellectually and physically stimulating. +1 for martial arts in general. Depending on the art it might not be niche (I'm sure karate and taekwondo are too big for that). But things like HEMA, iaido, eskrima, all kinds of archery, ... are great fun and typically come with smallish & fun communities. Edit: before you think these arts are immune to tech, I once had a student who built a (truly awful) sword fighting "robot" to help train deflecting strikes. Not quite up to par with Dune's robot swordmasters. Using crooked knives [0] for woodcarving. They're essentially a combination of a plane, spoke-shave, draw-knife and gouge but all in a one handed tool. They were primarily used by Native Americans to build things like canoes, snowshoes, baskets etc. I first found about them from reading John McPhee's Survival of the Bark Canoe [1] but there are lots of uses of them on video on the website below (which I created). If you want to get into woodworking but want only a few tools and/or a very portable tool, highly recommend. e.g. in theory you could build an entire canoe with an axe, crooked knife and 3 or 4 sided awl (and a lot of time, patience and materials) My hobby is organizing in-person meetups for random people to get together, chat and make friends. Barely structured, if at all. I've found this rewarding and ended up making friends this way. You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos you probably don't want to be around. And another 10% at any given meetup are autistic or neuro-divergent but well-meaning, kind and full of interesting insights and hobbies, although perhaps difficult to socialize with, at least until they get to know you're well-meaning too. These challenges come with the territory. You end up talking to people you'd otherwise never meet in the normal course of your life, and it's neutral at worst and wonderful at best. Between the genuine weirdos, the autistic and/or the neuro-divergent, is there anyone left, really? Do the "normies" genuinely exist? Happy-go-lucky, knows a bit about everything but doesn't nerd out on anything, picks up every conversation subject and listens and holds their own in a manner that is just right? I am genuinely curious about the existence of these "superhumans". There are many many of these socially-skilled normies. But, by virtue of being socially skilled, most have already pretty much filled up their social capacity and don't tend to show up at the kind of venues dedicated to helping under-socialized people meet up. that describes me but i would never say i'm a "superhuman". I feel like i'm a boring glue guy. While there is often a "normal" (bell-curve fitting) distribution for individual factors, putting them together can be counter-intuitive. > Even when considering just three dimensions, fewer than 5% of pilots were “average” in all. [1] I would guess many/most people probably think they fall into either (1) the normal bucket or (変) the weird/fringe bucket. Either "I am pretty normal" or "I am an outsider". How many think "we're all fairly different once you cluster in any 3 interesting dimensions!"? But people feel that dichotomy, which makes me think it is largely about perception relative to a dominant culture: the in-group versus out-group feeling. For example, atheists might feel like outsiders in many parts of the U.S., but less so in big cities and in other countries. In dense urban walkable cities (like NYC), I think people are more likely to appreciate the amazing diversity. There is something special about seeing people rather than cars. [1]: From "Curse of Dimensionality: Lessons from the U.S. Air Force Cockpit Design" by Maciej Nasinski (2025): https://polkas.github.io/posts/cursedim/ I'm on the other side of this, in that I attend a lot of these. I made a big effort about 12 years ago to go to a bunch of these (like three meetups a week and trying out a variety of different meetups), but now I mostly stick to a couple of them as I don't have as much time or energy for it anymore. But I've met most of my current friends through those meetups. Find one you like and keep showing up until you're a regular, and get to know people slowly, and if they like you they start inviting you to things outside of the meetup, and then eventually you end up being friends. I've done this with three different groups over the years and despite naturally being shy and an introvert I've ended up making friends at each one. At the height of me doing this (like ten years ago), it got to the point where I'd go about my daily life and about once every other month I'd run into random people I've met at meetups also out and about. Like go out to dinner and spot someone I knew from a meetup also showing up to the same place, or run into them shopping at a Best Buy or something. Meetups where you do a shared activity seems to be the best, like hikes or movies (+ dinner afterwards) or board games, since you can always focus on the activity if you don't feel like being social, and you have that activity you can always talk about as a subject. Sounds like a really cool idea. How do you organize the meetup and promote it to people if it ends up being random people? Do you set it up on meetup.com and have a theme at the minimum? I've been to a lot of meetups and it's definitely hit or miss and obviously depends on the sociability of the people that show up. The better ones I've attended are generally ones where people aren't trying to network for work purposes and are there literally to just socialize. The networking ones I find very dull as it's people just talking shop and career and if you've nothing to offer them on the career front, they move on quickly. > ones where people aren't trying to network I have literally never been to any kind of organized gathering where this wasn't the objective of most of the people there. Family and children's events excluded (sometimes). That’s crazy, you’ve never been to a party? > You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos you probably don't want to be around. How have you handled this in past meetups? Be courteous, kind, don't accept invites, tell them you're not interested if they're making unwanted advances, and treat them as humans. If they seem receptive and able to handle constructive feedback, tell them what sticks out to you, otherwise just ignore it and move on. Basically the same way you handle the exact same situation outside of organizing meetups, but maybe a bit extra on the friendly-and-try-to-not-traumatize-people-who-might-be-trying side of things. I use Blood on the Clocktower to do this, it's a social deduction game (that's just not randomly accusing each other) so it gets everyone talking easily It has been my experience that social deduction games are very attractive to folks who have problems socializing in day-to-day life. You can see them almost come alive when they are given the permission. I think a lot of people need prompting for something to talk about. They have no confidence that topics they bring up will be interesting to anyone else. So any kind of gathering that takes that pressure off will be attractive. This reminds me of [0], basically just inviting the most interesting people I know (also transitively the most interesting people they know), and just getting to meet people.
I would really like to do this, but half the most interesting people I know are PhD professors I rant with because I'm next to them in a lab. Maybe once my network gets bigger.
But I would still like to know more about how you do this, as other people doing this accidentally made me some good friendships, and I'd like to repay this favor to others [0] https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/this-might-be-oversharing How I do it is context-specific. I used to live in a place where it's undoable and I was very lonely there. I moved to a place where people are much more open to it culturally and there's enough population to +/- bring in a constant flow of 4:1 regulars to newbies. I advertise on local meetup platforms and in local social media. And I go to so many meetups myself that when people ask me what my hobbies are and I tell them, they get curious and self-invite. Easy two-part process: First part is putting our "feelers", ask/tell a bunch of people "You know, I'm thinking of maybe hosting a dinner party/barbecue/beach day" and see what reaction you get from people. If sufficient people (sometimes just 2) give somewhat interested vibes, ask again what dates people could do it at, then you send out an invite. You'd get a bunch of people who say yes but then don't show, this is normal and don't take it personally. Secondly, maybe the first 2-3 times it'd be hard to get people to commit, but once you do it more regularly, people will find it easier to commit to something they know you're already committed to. Write explicit rules about dogs. Many "weirdos" just like their boundaries and basic hygiene. It is hard to socialize, over barking contest and rar dog humpimg your leg. It will save both sides a lot of time. I organise events as well and I'm wondering if you ever charged for them. I used to do them for free but so many people signed up and didn't attend later that it was hard to put numbers to book a venue to meet. How did you solve this? i would do free venues only. usually restaurants are free because you consume food. if that is not an option, it depends on the cost. i have seen events where people were asked to contribute something when they arrive. you can usually announce the cost of the venue and ask everyone to contribute appropriately. if you fall short then next time ask people to contribute more. or keep a running tally during the event until the venue cost is met. from my personal feeling, if it costs more than $1-2 per person the venue is too expensive. find a cheaper one. Great idea - a lot of the problems in the world are from social isolation, and people finding silos online I think the 10% neuro-divergent is a positive as it being ND can be very isolating for people Makes me think a focus around ND alone would be a great idea How do you do this? And do you find people within tech industry or just random-people, I am sort of curious to know! Just random people, but because of where I post my events I tend to get about 30% ~ 50% tech-adjacent people I’ve started making what I “joy machines” that I am putting up in or near my neighborhood. They’re some combination of public interactive art (e.g. push a button and it prints out a compliment) and little art on display that I design and 3D print for people to take. I've been playing exclusively CRPGs for the last 12 months or so, which was kinda a niche genre before the success of BG3. There are tons of way to beat those games and optimizing how you build your party and characters (what players call "min-maxing") while following a highly narrative story is a lot of fun. Most of them are quite old and often on sales for like 5 bucks on Steam, for which you get hundreds of hours of gameplay. A few recommendations: Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Owlcat's Pathfinders & W40K Rogue Trader, Larian's Divinity 1, 2 & BG3, Bioware's BG1 & BG2, etc… I always meant to go back to Wizardry 7 I think it is. (Or 5, I forget) I was convinced that a party of all Ninjas and Samurai would be unstoppable, but I never could make it work. I recall leveling up to a point where a high enough character would get 3 attacks per turn, and then when hit counterattack twice. Multiply this by the whole party. But realistically, at some point this flurry of attacks every round just fell over because you need better magic users for enemies with certain weaknesses. My memory is fuzzy, but it also may have related to the increasingly large hordes of enemies which would dilute the effects of so many attacks. Nice to see people discovering these games. I wouldn't really say it was niche until BG3 though, there were plenty of highly acclaimed games long before that. You might like this blog, the author plays through CRPGs in chronological order. Currently they're at the mid 90s. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/ These are a blast. I went through a phase in highschool where I exclusively played 90's CRPGs. There are some real gems that find a unique playstyle with tons of freedom due to how low fidelity the games are, while still being visually engaging and beautiful. Definitely check out fallout 2 if you haven't tried it yet, it's one of my favorites! Check out the Epic Encounters 2 mod for D:OS2. Best tactics experience I've ever had. Runners up are LWOTC for XCOM3 and Homebrew for BG3. I started designing my own clothes. The insight was that I spend 80% money on suits that I wear 2 times a year, and the rest was low quality clothing I actually wore. I flipped it, and made suits and pants that I could wear everyday. The fast fashion stores were crap quality, my body is not a template size and I care about fabric and comfort. The process was to learn how to sketch, to determine fabrics, colors and fit. I made pants that stay comfortable even after I eat food, I made suits that I can wear casually. I don’t stitch myself, for that I worked with multiple workshops, until I found one that works for me. Took me about 3 years to reach a point where all my wardrobe is designed by and for me. There were multiple side effects on my confidence, my life, and the opportunities coming my way. That's pretty neat, and we should talk. In my household we are currently producing about 75% of our clothing, mostly out of a desire to avoid using fabrics that generate a lot of microplastic waste + observing that newer clothes/fabrics wear out quickly. I want to hear more Fast fashion forces you to dress for the masses. Loose shirts, baggy pants and shallow pockets is not fashion, its cost optimisation for brands. I didn't want to dress up like a boy. Me and my friend were in Paris when we got inspired by the floor(fashion_sense). I was already working on my clothing, but that day we promised each other that we will not be underdressed anymore. He opted for off-the-shelf formal clothing: high quality shirts, and pants. I went all in. First I found markets that sell cheap fabrics, so I can experiment. I travel a lot, so my clothing had to be designed for all weathers. I'm Indian (Bharat), but look racially ambiguous, so I also wanted my clothing to reflect my roots and culture, yet be modern enough for any room in the world. I run a company, and write code, so comfort was paramount. But I also had meetings or presentations so I wanted to be presentable. Started with pants, because I thought pants are easy to optimise, and I just need a black, gray and dark blue one. Over 5 iterations, I reached a design with elastic straps on the side (because when I eat food, my tummy bloats a little and its uncomfortable to sit down), and loose on the thighs. Imagine pyjamas, that look like pants. Then next step was to experiment with jackets and shirts. I played with fabric, patterns, and finish (zippers, titch buttons, different cuff lengths and styles, different collars). My friends started noticing, and I also consulted some clients. Then I gave a talk about it. This is one of my skills that I discovered by first principles. The best part is that I met my girlfriend because she noticed my aesthetics, and she told me that she makes her own clothes too. I’m a paraglider pilot and powered paraglider recently. Totally recommended, you get to connect with nature in a meaningful way. Also people who practice this kind of sports are nice. From a tech perspective there are a lot of data generated on each flight you can create your own way to capture that data or use already existing apps. I got to do this a couple of years ago. It's super cool! Very much recommend it. But I'll note that it's super...weird? in the sense that it's like halfway between being both relaxing and excitative, nature and machine. I went in expecting a thrill ride and it wasn't quite that, but it wasn't quite relaxing either (though I'd imagine the more you do it the more it feels like the letter!). i've always been interested in para-motoring. how safe or unsafe is paragliding? do you think about that aspect before going out for a flight? I’ve been flying since 2012 and I always think about safety. Safety is relative but if you do the things the right way you will be ok. A good common sense is super important, and then keep on your progression, there’s no need to skip steps. Knowing the air is a lifetime journey so there is no rush. Also I feel paramotor is kind of safer because you get to fly with light wind or not wind at all, mostly early in the morning or near sunset. In my personal experience this sport change my life. Traditional archery. I started a few years back and have been doing it off and on since. It's challenging but a lot of fun. I shoot a lot of older style "recurve" bows, but the main style I shoot are horsebows, that is, bows that were historically shot from horseback. They're very lightweight and you can shoot much more rapidly than you can with a more modern/mechanical recurve or compound. Right now I shoot around 20-25 arrows a minute. Not amazing compared to experienced archers, but a lot of fun. I have a number of bows, but here are my favorites: Assyrian: https://www.bogararchery.sk/image/cache/catalog/product/boga...
Buryat: (No longer available) I also shoot an English longbow from time to time. The horsebows use a technique called "thumb draw" which is very different from the way most bows are shot in the west. Here's a great YouTube channel if you want to explore getting into it: https://www.youtube.com/@ArminHirmer I'm into book restoration, here's a gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/1oNxCfKJp4k6yjoZ9 Much less niche, but I'm also really into acting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=do5PicgU0Jw I've been doing photography for a long time but over the last few years had phases where I got bored of it and tried something new. I had a long time when I was bored and carried the camera in my pack but never took any pictures, then one day I looked out at the sports center out my window and decided to start shooting sports. Posting photos to socials I found flower photographs were popular so I take a lot of them and find ways to not get bored. (Maybe I will start focus stacking one of these days) Since the beginning of the year I have been "going out" as a character who is a bit like a Disney cast member who gets photos like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116326541009492328 from people who recognize my character. Like the Disney cast member it works better when people have seen the movie so i hand out these tokens https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840 which spread virally around a university campus, particularly among Chinese students who recognize the huli jing and all the time I have experiences "that could only happen in a manga" when, for instance, somebody who's heard the rumors is waiting at the bus stop for me. Laugh but all my marketing KPIs have an extra zero on the right! Same, but not the same. I've also been doing photography for a long time and when I had kids I added some gear & skills to shoot them playing sports. After a few years of this I realized since I was already there I might as well shoot the whole team, or both/all teams, since everyone's families would value the photos. When I was laid off at the end of last year I decided to formalize this and now have a side gig (real, insured business) where I shoot local youth & high school sports for free, but make a few bucks (to cover my equipment costs plus spending money) doing portraits, headshots and team media days. It's proven fulfilling, mostly because since I do the events for free I tend to receive a lot of goodwill and word-of-mouth referrals. Far more than I can handle given my day job. Echoing others, Chess engines certainly aren't a solved problem! In fact there are a lot of niches that are absolutely starving for effort. Ones I'm interested in are related to Chess variants and puzzles. Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety of tools to train new neural nets for these variants, generate opening books, puzzles, etc. You can play some of them on PyChess (pychess.org). These are projects basically run by a couple people with huge backlogs of bugs and feature requests. An enthusiastic developer can easily get involved! Or just enjoy playing different variants and getting involved with the player community. Ohh about fairy stockfish, I had actually looked into it for something like spell-chess (which is an completely unsolved problem!) I was playing chess with one of my friends and we played spell-chess which is an clash royale/clash of clans x chess thing where you get two spells of freeze and jump Freeze allows you to select a tile and have a 3x3 square radius which freezes those pieces Jump allows you to select any piece (opponent or yours) and it will effectively allow you to jump over that. When me and my friends were playing, I kept trying to do something wonky to find the most optimal play. I had thoughts for a day or two to find/make fairy stockfish or atleast had the idea to do so but not the experience to do so but I certainly wished even from the end point perspective as to what/if the game was solved. I don't know but these things make me feel as if perhaps, just maybe, the game can be played a certain way where even in the best game, its not draw but rather a particular side wins (effectively solving it), I felt like these spells were too overpowered so there was an possibility about it, you just made me remember a lot of things about these things that I had thought. It was these thoughts which randomly led me to discover fairy stockfish which is an really interesting project! I was into woodworking, then I got into building fly fishing rods from bamboo. Fly fishing has been around for a long time. They used to build rods by hand out of bamboo - a specific species of bamboo native to southern China - before factories started making them out of graphite, fiberglass, etc. for cheap. Modern fly rods are a few hundred bucks. If you try to buy a bamboo rod in a store, they run $2K-$5K. They take a lot of time and meticulous work to build, and the result is a functional work of art. Woodworking is a ton of fun, and challenging. Bamboo rod making is a niche within a niche, and there are not a whole lot of people who still do it ... mostly retired guys with a lot of time. It's a great tradition, and it's about as far away from computers and technology as I can get. I didn't even know how to fly fish until I built my first bamboo rod. Here's a great video showing the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfTvRxcTuV0 I love how every hobby has its inner nested hobbies and you can seemingly go infinitely deep. I got back into making electronic music a while ago, and you can dig in deeper by getting into hardware synthesizers. And go deeper by getting into hardware modular synths. And go deeper by building modules from kits. And go deeper by learning electronics and designing your own modules. It's like a big branching tech tree or tech graph. With fishing, you can get into fly fishing. And when that's too easy, you start tying flies, or maybe tenkara, or, I guess in your case, making fly rods. I love it. This is very cool. Thank you.
...and that video is a pill-quality destressor. thanks again. I’ve recently started making bread, at the moment still with fresh or bakers yeast and planning to grow my own sourdough. It’s not very niche, but as a hobby it’s pretty fulfilling. It allows for a lot of play, and you end with something tasty. Also, makes for a great small gift for friends and family. We got into scuba diving about 3 years ago. Have something like 200 dives now logged across Southern California, Hawaii and the Caribbean. Planning on adding Indonesia to the list later this year. That wow factor you experience the first time you dive hasn't gone away after 200 dives and I don't think it'll go away after 2000. Probably the most life-affirming thing I've ever gotten into and can't recommend it enough. Not sure if it is niche, but focused on one South Asian music genre -- been working on this personal project to compile, and collect resources from reliable sources along with mapping lineages of people. Also, I archive a lot of music for this genre from different sources before it vanishes from internet! EDIT: I have one more page but that is not in navigation yet for people not familiar with the genre. The site is still work in progress -- if you have any feedback, please do leave it here, on the website if you can. The content curation is the most tedious part!
https://www.qavvali.com/tradition/ I’m obsessed with powerlifting. Not only because big numbers get bigger but also the physical changes that occur with a healthy dose of lifting each week. It’s also easy to track lifting stats and there are tons of analysis tools out there if data analysis is something you enjoy. Also, I’m trying to learn guitar - right now following the Justinguitar.com lessons +1 on this - powerlifting is great due to 1) Rapid, specific initial progress, 2) Highly structured programming (e.g., RPE based), 3) Focus on strength vs. aesthetics is a great way to be more holistic about health & performance, 4) Forcing function on all downstream decisions (diet, sleep, alcohol). Adding +15 lbs on your deadlift can become strong motivation to drive discipline, 5) Drives the importance of recovery/rest on long term progress I do powerlifting 3x a week but I don't otherwise view myself as obsessed with it. I don't have a coach, I don't enter competitions. I know my PRs in my head but I don't keep spreadsheets or stats or have any kind of real programming. I don't video my lifts, I don't post about it on social media. I'm just content with getting stronger. I really don't get obsessed with anything, which might be a fault as that seems to be a trait of people who are really successful in what they do. On the other hand, it's the one type of exercise I have actually been able to stick with for any length of time. Started about 5 years ago at age 55. So never too late to try it, even if exercise has never been appealing to you. I am 2/3x more productive on days that I get a powerlifting session in before work. There is no better feeling than overcoming a plateau through hard work and dedication. one of my favorite parts of powerlifting, opposed to hiit or other fitness lifting, is the lack in physical change. i feel like i look the same but can point to numbers that show im much stronger When I started stronglifts, I didn't tell anyone and people noticed just from my physique after like ~5 weeks of training. Noob gains are insane and definitely cause physical change. True - I guess I am more of a power-builder. Which for those that don't know is powerlifting but also incorporates a lot of bodybuilding-type rep work for aesthetics. You lose some specificity doing this arguably so you're expending energy that would be better spent powerlifting if that was your true goal but this trade off is worth it to me. How niche is retrocomputing? I absolutely love my ancient machines, and I use them to explore period applications, much more than games. I also love to restore and preserve them. There’s something magical about a Sun workstation Solaris 2 a Frog Design Trinitron monitor. or a Microvax running VMS and DECWindows. Or a multi-user Altair Z80. I think it’s sad a lot of software was lost and some platforms were denied the documentation that’d enable their preservation (looking at you, IBM - document the AS/400 and release old OS to hobbyists). Almost everything you can do on your own is a "solved problem". Why go into woodworking if you can buy an Ikea stool? The point of hobbies isn't to solve problems - that's called a job - but to learn and have fun. Find a niche where you can resist the temptation to constantly compare yourself to eight billion other people on the internet. Something where success isn't measured in Github stars, Youtube likes, or Reddit upvotes. Once you get in that mindset, almost anything goes. I know people who collect RPN calculators and are having a blast. All kinds of hands-on crafts are great too. I like making electronic music and I'm pretty bad at it. Create custom software for non profits is pretty rewarding. They cant afford anything and have process flow needs that are completely unmet. The software wont be sexy, but will help the non profits and the people they serve Oh damn, I love this one. I’ve been vibe coding a ‘public benefit’ app on the side that has a few hundred users but never thought of doing something for an actual non-profit. Care to elaborate on your process? Curious how you approach them and come up with the best path forward with limited time (assuming you have a full time job as well on the side). Thanks! I don't think chess engines are a solved problem for some use cases. Yes you can make something strong, maybe even the strongest, but can you create a chess engine perfectly tuned to actually teaching a player? Instead of superhuman perfect lines and inscrutable long-horizon strategy, can you teach nearly optimal human play in a way that's actionable, modular and memorable? Can you improve on tournament prep for players against particular opponents or within a particular metagame? Also, obviously it's your life, and we're here on Earth to fart around, but I have spent a good portion of my life dipping into one hobby after another, as my dad did before me, so I'm half speaking to myself when I ask this: why do you think you can't meaningfully contribute to any of these realms, even now? To me that sounds like some deep seated fear or doubt, some aversion to competition, some overriding bitterness. I'm slightly worried you'll just be back here in another couple of years trying to find another new hobby, unsullied by the efforts and achievements of others. You won't find that! I would actually suggest a particularly expensive hobby: going to therapy. Try that, and learn that you're already enough, and if your contributions are meaningful to you, that's all that matters. Happy to be way off the mark here though. This. For those more into reading instead of straight to therapy, Barbara Sher's "Refuse to Choose!" book about living with a multitude of interests can be a good starting point. Also, making (or maybe tuning) a chess engine to teaching sounds like an interesting challenge, actually. Not sure if you were looking only for indoor hobbies, but I picked up Kiteboarding recently, and it is the most outrageously fun thing I've ever done. It's like being a kid and jumping off the house with a bedsheet, except it works. Most mistakes are laughed off by splashing in the water. I'm 3 years in and I can jump 7-10m then fly like a bird for 5-10 seconds without consequences. Even as a beginner, sailing around or just feeling a kite pull you around is such a blast. Keep in mind it's really difficult and pretty much requires 10-20 hours of private lessons. Really fun! I used to do it too, and I miss it. How do you combine it with work? Where I live in NL, there are few days where I’m able to go kiteboarding and I probably won’t know until the day off if it’s possible or not. Very hard to schedule! I saw a few videos of making glasses (cups) out of nice liquor bottles. Seems like a nice cheapish hobby. Try playing Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder (or any number of other systems.) Pathfinder is super deep and complex. There's also an entire community of people who play Table Top Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) solo and use the outcomes of their play reports to blog or write fiction. Also, the tooling around these games is very interesting if you want to build an app: Crafting calculator? Generative hexcrawl maps? Random tables? Statistics tools for dice rolls? I don't think it's a niche hobby, but I really enjoy cooking. Trying out new techniques and receipts, cooking dinner for friends and family or just preparing a delicious meal in advance. I make holiday light shows with an open source program called XLights[0]. I'm sure you've seen the videos[1] of what people[2] can do. Usually the top comment is "man that is cool but I wouldn't want to be their neighbor!" followed by "my neighbors love my light shows". Creating the sequences is time consuming, and lot of people end up buying them or sharing them, but those are rarely as good as the ones you make for yourself. Some folks have dabbled with using AI to create the sequences. I think the biggest issues are lack of training data and it's a very visual art, so there needs to be a better feedback between the text representation and the visual manifestation. So if you're into using AI to make physical world things better, that would be a good place to look! Not sure if this is an established hobby or something I've just come up with myself, but I've been "dashboarding." Essentially I have a Blazor webapp that integrates lots of data sources (some manual, some automatic) from areas of my life and I use that to visualize and analyze goals and habits. The main page consists of rolling-weekly stats that deliver "integration scores." Each score contributes to an overall score that gives me a general idea of how I'm doing on all my habits and goals. So for instance, I use YNAB for our family budgeting, and I have it setup so that if I go a whole week without performing reconciliations, I get dinged -1. Otherwise this sits at 1.0. Then I have a score for journaling - my goal is to journal 4-5 times per week, so each time I journal it resets the score to 1, and then slowly ticks down to 0 over time. Then I have a number of Apple health scores that get imported automatically via REST API. This part compiles all the data on calories, relevant macronutrients (I mostly track protein and fiber currently), steps, workouts, etc. and builds a nice visualization. I consider a total integration score of 0.8 to be pretty good - keeping at that level is actually better than seeking for a perfect 1.0 all the time as my theory is that it will prevent burnout and allow for some forgiveness, because I can't be perfect. It's been a fun project, and one that I generally try to avoid any AI use. Fun to just build and because the stakes are so low I just chip away at one feature at a time, carving out 15 minutes here or there. Do you have more details on this project anywhere? I've been working on habit-building and tracking in my journal for the past year and a half or so, but I'm looking to amp it up a bit more. Your project appeals to my software developer and hobby collector mindset and would love to learn more about it. Not really, but I'm happy to share more here :) In all honesty, under the hood it's a bit of a mess. I may have eschewed some of the software engineering best practices in lieu of building something quickly that I wanted. I'll get around to going back through and retrofitting the app with some cleaner code, but for now I couldn't even open-source it without a self-perceived hit to my portfolio. The project largely started out as something else. I initially wanted a combined TO-DO list and journal. Rather than checking things off I would run the journal content through a local LLM and have it check things off for me based on what I wrote each day. That's yet to be implemented. Then I moved on to an "ordering" system - I was inspired by the way that medical practitioners put in orders once they determined a course of treatment, and thought that might be a useful model to help motivate me to get things on my list done more effectively. I built this, but have utilized it less than I thought. Since then it's mostly been focus on the integrations and scoring system. The whole thing is highly modular, so for each integration I grab a template for the visualization I want to build and then need to reason out how to get the data into the system, which usually involves an API integration, scraping from some online data source, and/or data engineering. It's very fun, because each integration module has its own challenges. I built the app using a standard stack of .NET core, Blazor server, and the data is stored in SQL server and data operations are handled with EF core. I use the Radzen component library, which I like a lot from a developer perspective but it's challenging to retheme and I'm largely unhappy with the look/feel of the app. This is something I plan on getting to eventually. Happy to answer any/all questions. It's such a personal, homebrewed app that I can't imagine anyone else would get as much use out of, but it's very powerful and I think the hobby aspect of it could translate to pretty much any other developer. Railway preservation (full size, not model). It looks crowded when a steam train is running and the moths gather around. The reality, when the trains are not running, is typically quite different, with a small dedicated group. If a place looks too crowded, pick a smaller museum. Think of all the jobs that have to be done to run a railway and you will be able to find a museum that does it: heavy maintenance, boiler work, fitting and turning, blacksmithing, woodwork, upholstering, painting, catering, engine driving, fireman, signalling, customer service, ... It's a great way to meet people, learn new skills and work with physical things. Recreational mapmaking. Every couple of months the family and I will book out some long weekend to just go to an Airbnb in some random town with some copy paper and just go around trying to draw what we think is around us. Inevitably the lines collide and we have to ask some local passerby for help, and if they know any interesting places nearby, and before you know it they're following along with a colored pencil and some copy paper against a hardcover book too. I do gundog training. When I started with our first dog I did not expect to enjoy it that much. It’s hard to express how much it takes mentally and physically, and the bond you build with your dog is crazy. Best of all, you don’t actually have to hunt. You can stick to dummies. In terms of contributing in a meaningful way, your local trainer will always be happy with helpers. If you need to setup multiple 200m retrieves for multiple dogs, it helps if you have someone out in the field doing the work. And lots of stuff to organise and help out with. My strange hobby was going on what I called "leak walks". I lived in a town where on any sunny day I could go for a walk and be almost guaranteed to spot a water mains leak I hadn't seen before, which I'd then report and see how long it would be before it was fixed. The record was over a year for one of them. ( Yes, it was a Thames Water area. ) One of my hobbies is organizing events. I, like to think, I am pretty good at it. Main point is to create good initial conditions, then people take care of the rest. There's a lot of legacy / retro coding out there that despite the output being used by anywhere from hundreds, to thousands to even millions of end-users, it still involves small tight night communities per project, sometimes they overlap somewhat. I've mentioned it before, if you follow people reverse engineering Shockwave, you will note that they are all on the same communities to capture as much wisdom from others as possible. In niche reverse engineering communities, the smallest thing can be a life changer. Synthesizers! I like it because it's tactile and immediate, and you're not glued to a screen, but can create fun-sounding beats. Nowadays there are nice, cheapish groove boxes that are perfect for noodling on the couch. I started with the Novation Circuit Tracks, and also really enjoy the Teenage Engineering EP-133. Not to say that I am any good at this, but it's an enjoyable hobby! Bonus if you are friends who are also into it and you can jam together :) Deep in the Eurorack rabbit hole myself. Trying to avoid anything that has a screen and anything that requires a computer to interact with. Patching cables and twiddling knobs is great fun. Sometimes it even sounds good xD > Bonus if you are friends who are also into it and you can jam together :) How does one find these people? Asking for a friend! :D I've also gone down the synthesizer rabbit hole: prophet-6, full modular setup (rip bank account), subsequent 37. It's great fun! Go to modular meets, music instrument expos like Superbooth, dj sets and live concerts.
I met all my best friends this way, everybody is a record collector, beat maker or techno producer.
Record conventions are also fun, after couple of occasions you will realize how small the scene is. Fishing. But not just regular fishing, life listing. I catalogue and detail ever fish I catch; the conditions, the type of lure or bait, the rod etc. From there you can get into microfishing with tanago rods, surf fishing etc. It's can get quite deep and a good additional hobby for people who love to travel. I also take notes when I fish. It's less about recording a life list, and more about trying to collate what is otherwise very thing spotty data enough to get better at fishing. As someone who has learned a lot of skills and hobbies online and likes sharing info, fishing has been a really interesting different world. Because anglers are effectively competing for a scarce resource, specific information about good fishing spots is understandably not shared widely. So you have to put in the time yourself to try spots and see what produces. But in order to catch fish, you need to be at the right place, at the right time of year, at the right time of day, with the right lure, and the right technique. Get any one of those wrong and the only signal you get is "no bites". That makes it really tough to learn and improve. I've found that taking detailed notes helps me see patterns in what works that would otherwise be hard to see. You have an app for this? Been wanting to do something similar FDM 3d printing is still a wild-west and there are plenty of avenues to explore. Not sure what else to say about that other than as someone with daily and close personal proximity to the 'industry' that cropped up I am well aware that there is plenty of work to be done by enthusiasts and niche-people. Engineering and machinery is still a place full of exploration if you have the chops. If you don't have them yet then there is plenty of topics within that domain to explore; you'll never run out of things to learn there. My 0.02c : learn to disregard the crowds and focus on your own work. Just because people are doing something you used to do doesn't mean they have anywhere near the depth of understanding and 'freedom of movement' as you do as a 'resident expert'. also : the fact that no one is doing something may be a signal; crowds form for a reason. Very few hobbyist bomb-squad folk and rabid-racoon-caregivers, get what I mean? the GPT3 models didn't keep you from learning about ML. The industry didn't push you from keyboard and printers. You did these things. If you're trying to lead an entirely one-off human life with total uniqueness from other people then all I could suggest is hallucinogens , but personally I think that the goal of just being unique for the sake of being unique is ludicrous. Just find enjoyment, that's the goal for me at least. I knew a guy who found an interesting 3d printing niche: 2 way radios for professionals (mainly SAR crews) are always getting fetched up on clothing, and you're often finding the radio turned off because the knobs got moved. Dumb problem, should have been solved by fundamental engineering years ago - but whatever. He built a 3d printed shroud for a variety of popular radios, and now makes a living selling these. He's a tech guy, but no engineer. He saw the need (he works on a SAR team), saw the solution and made it happen. Inspiring, really. I do a bit of 3d printing stuff myself. Personally, I'm attracted that it's getting more professional. I can use it as the impetus to learn real engineering/CAD, etc. Not in an "I'm an engineer" way, but still using real principles to make better things. You don't have to be intimidated if you keep your identity small and let it inspire you instead. Hnefatafl, a simple board game that was played by the vikings and others who had frequent contact with them. Or rather, what we play today is an approximation of what they played back then as we don't really know the exact rules they used. It's interesting in that unlike chess and others, it is asymmetrical, and there are a number of different variants each with their own challenges and different balances between attacker and defender. The main community and learning resource is at http://aagenielsen.dk. https://dejabru.org - The Homebrew Competition Remembering Historic and Long-Forgotten Beer Styles I have been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find the owners of the old Digital Research "Concurrent DOS" operating system. There's a lot of interesting turns in the search and it's been fun to document. I've written a blog post about it [1] though there have been a few updates since I've written that. I honestly think it might be a fun thing for me to keep doing, whether or not I'm successful with my search. I think there is a lot of old software that is just sitting on old hard drives that is waiting to be preserved. [1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/03-March/The-Q... Six months deep now into analog computing. (I have a modular, hobbyist analog computer wrapping up—just writing the manual). Going to have to do something on the other end of the spectrum after this. Maybe RISO printing… I've designed jewellery for my wife's last few birthdays. Nothing fancy, geometries, square kufic and such. Very crude approach: I've been doing it in Blender, if you've 3D skills should be easy. I've got a friend who does the printing and casting, so there's more I could explore there later. I also do dioramas, which grew out of 40K. Got bored with hench guys with guns and moved to 6mm, it's been great fun focusing on buildings. * playing shortlarps * using short boardgames to measure cognitive performance on various metrics * creating simple 3d boardgames with raylib kolibri_engine * dancing and studying vajra dance and the vajra song from namkai norbu * reading and studying about: mahamudra and dzogchen vs christian contemplative traditions and mystics, and transpersonal psychology Is buying hopefully broken electronic test equipment at the flea market, fixing it and then blogging about it a niche hobby? Animal tracking. I picked it up in college and it has been a real source of joy and a true challenge. It's also something you can do almost anywhere: urban, suburban, rural, out in "the wild." A lot of people think of it as looking for paw/hoof marks in the mud, but tracking can actually be quite involved, requiring you to understand the environment and ecology as a whole. For example, tracking birds is outrageously difficult and when I first started out I didn't think it was possible. But the more I learned about birds, their habits (per species), their environment, I started to see signs everywhere. It really got my eyes open and I started seeing the same old places in completely new ways! And in terms of contributing something, there are all sorts of apps/organization that can help you identify different species and in turn you give them data in the form of pictures, location, etc. I use iNaturalist myself, but there are others. Sounds fun! Do you have resources to get started? I do gundog work, it would be fun to do the tracking together with the dog. (I don’t hunt, it would just be to make some walks more interesting) Despite AI starting to crowd this space, I've been spending all of my free time learning music production (doing it the old fashion way without AI). It's a great mix of technical and creative problem solving. Mostly focusing on dark ambient/cinematic composition, playing around hardware synths (Prophet 6, Subsequent 37, modular / eurorack, Digitone II). If anyone is curious, I put out a single recently (remaster from last year): https://soundcloud.com/vectordust/ion-dunes-1 My main personal goal right now is to release a full length album this year. you know the OP has "ion" and "dust" in the middle so this was hard to find. I normally can't stand ambient, but you went a different direction in the middle there. You should put out an album, that probably no one will buy, but maybe eventually you get asked to do soundtracks for things. anyhow, i used to write music. a lot. sometimes you just have to get it out of your skull... https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/valley-boulevard-0237 I'm big into anti tech/work related activities. It reminds me that no matter how much I know, or think I know, that I have so much more to learn. I got into scuba diving while living in NC, and it just happens that there's a lot of it off the coast! The other problem is that it's deep. Diving down to 130 feet sounds cool until you experience hours on a boat only to get a few minutes at the bottom. Eventually I got bothered to learn more about diving. I headed down to northern Florida to dive with GUE. My instructor was a person who regularly got hit up to dive to exotic places all over the world. Missions like collecting/deploying samples, archaeology, recovery. Here were people meaningfully impacting the environment, science, and keeping technical know-how alive. I don't know how to convey a the wonder I feel in text. Check it out maybe. GUE Fundies is on my bucket list. I don't think I'd be interested in cave diving or deep stuff where I need helium, but the level of skill that tech divers show is something I want to be able to do. Do fundies! We all failed, initially. We had a blast bunking up and spending days in the water though. I don’t know how niche they are, but a few I’ve done in the past - 3D printed musical instruments. Print other designs or contribute your own - lock picking. When you really get into it, you modify locks to make them more of a challenge and mail them to people - Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat. I’m currently mainly interested in linearizing switch-mode amplifiers, but was doing fox hunting for a bit (radio direction finding), and periodically do POTA (transmitting from parks) I’ve been learning Gregg Shorthand (Anniversary) since the start of the year. It’s a fun challenge even if it feels fantastically obsolete at this point with transcription models getting better and better every day. I’ve always liked paper-and-pen notes, so the idea of basically learning analog Vim was appealing :) Not a new hobby per se, but the combination of - a good audio book - a massage chair - a mindless idle game that you don't need to think of while listening to a good book and getting a massage Priceless. Boat building is in a really interesting time with new materials allow foiling, along with new battery technology giving new power sources. I'm into innovation in HCI as a hobby, but it does get expensive so I would like to bring in some additional financial support for my unusual builds. I didn't really plan to build HCI as a hobby, but I have a strong interest in hardware engineering and eventually I wanted to switch back to building things that anyone can physically see. Years ago I built a hemisphere keyboard and now I've built an LED globe with a viewing portal. I started building visible things again because I had a vision and it's very satisfying to use the result. I spend more time using it now than I did originally building it, although it is definitely a work in progress. I want to build it again for a 2.0 version. HCI innovation is definitely an interesting hobby - anything you can share or point me towards? I'm a football/soccer coach (youth, U12 and U19). Got started as a "temp" for my sons mini-team (back when he was 5). Temporary turns into UEFA certified youth trainer/coach real fast. It's no longer just about the kids (sorry guys), but a really awesome hobby with lots of personal development paths. Gamey Boy / Modretro Chromatic / LSDJ / Dirtywave M8 / anything F# / MiniDisc community There's a surprisingly high number of people in my extended social circle who picked up archery as a sport. It's actually a complex discipline with a huge range of bows and projectiles to choose from, each having unique characteristics you have to train for. Training using VR equipment is picking up steam, as typically you need a sizeable amount of real estate to practice when the weather is bad. Archery does seem like it's having a moment right now. I wonder if it's some combination of people wanting a more tactile hobby plus some vague apocalyptic undercurrents in society today. Archery is a lot of fun - I go to a monthly archery gathering where the host has a bunch of really nice recurves. Hang gliding. It's good if you are in an area with some hills and consistent winds. There are maybe a dozen well-established launch sites around the U.S. Sadly, I broke down my glider around 2001 -- and did a post-mortem on it to discover it had a minor dent in it. Recommendation -- don't stall the glider at heights between 10 and 25 feet from the ground. Also, avoid barbed wire fences. My brother-in-law did a lot of hang gliding, and was part of a big community that did. That community had a tendency to walk around - if they could walk around - in casts for a large part of their life. He also ended up having a heart attack mid-glide, which was no fun at all. (He survived it, though!) If you like music and technology - there's a massive world of possibilities out there (e.g., software based music production, tone.js, music programming with Strudel). If you have more money - 1) DJing/mixing on vinyl + record digging, 2) Modular synthesis (your wallet will hate you your soul will love you) I got into improv theatre. There are groups in every city, at least here in the EU. It is both fun and developing creativity, alertness, etc. If chess is a solved problem, think about skating to where the puck is going to be, an interest area a bit further away from relatively easier verifiability such as coding, math, and hard sciences. Do you have any interest in digital humanities? Knowledge work where verification is still important but not as black-and-white as does the math check out, does the code run. Do you have any interest in family history or genealogy? https://vibegenealogy.ai/p/the-genealogical-research-assista... I wouldn't say that chess is a solved problem. Just a hard problem to make a better chess engine than current Stockfish. Holograms! It's fascinating how they are made and how they can serve as a metaphor for how the universe might work. I've been pretty obsessed with FSRS in general (tldr: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/awesome-fsrs/wiki/...) It's a fantastic new-ish scheduler for spaced repetition - basically a machine learning model which adapts to you, and schedules flash (or anything, really, it's an algorithm) cards according to how well you are personally performing - surfacing data like retention, stability, recall, etc. It's a massive jump over previous "learning algorithms" like For the past 60d I've been using Anki (a flash card program) and it's FSRS setting to learn my French deck (5000 most common French words) and I'm absolutely zooming. I can already follow a fair chunk of conversational French. I've also been using the same system to learn Chess more deeply (endgames, tactics, openings) through Chessable and a few other websites that offer FSRS. It's levelled up my chess game a lot Basically - the thing that hooked me was the data. Being able to see how many cards I've reviewed, how many cards are at 90/80% retention, the stability of every piece of that knowledge, the decay rate, etc... It's really cool. Somebody already mentioned "Modular Synths". There's incredible resources for building your own synth modules for everything from circuit design to simple kits. Check out LMNC on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCTLeNxge54 Bellringing, specifically change ringing. It’s a type of church bell ringing that is rather algorithmic in nature. Tends to attract mathy types. Religion not required or expected! If you have English-style tower bells near you, it's worth checking out, even if only to listen. Hydrophonic farming at home. You can play with sensors (acidity, humidity etc), LED lighting (frequencies, intensity, etc), vision processing (maybe throw in some AI buzzword here) to keep track of your plants and do some decision making. Bonus: You get to eat the stuff you grow :) It has been learning ,learning &exploring new platforms lately .Well also interesting in Substacking .Do give your precious reviews.https://fortauderdaleseo.substack.com/ Since you mentioned biohacking but are wary of "wetware" risks, consider Personal Bioinformatics via 30x Whole Genome Sequencing. Now that sequencing costs have dropped significantly, you can use AI to take a deep dive into the latest research surrounding your own genomic data. While severall open medical databases and open-source tools exist, they are often fragmented or built for academia. There is significant room to contribute by hacking together better toolsets, localized databases, or AI-driven interfaces to make this data truly accessible. Someone needs to solve barbecue. The entire industry is based on feel and experience. Why can't a beginner replicate Franklin's brisket by following a recipe online? It's probably because the main measuring instrument (a probe thermometer) doesn't provide any feedback about fat rendering, moisture, etc. Plus, every brisket cut has different fat ratios and thickness, which means a recipe can't guarantee identical inputs like bread baking. I'd love for someone to throw some over the top engineering & experimentation at this. I view hobbies as something that I derive value or pleasure from. I do not approach them from the perspective of “meaningfully contributing”. IMO, that sounds more like compensation for career dissatisfaction. I’m not being critical. I just recommend choosing hobbies that you derive value and meaning from, regardless of what the world may think of it. For example, a friend of mine, with high pressure tech management job, quilts in the evening. He says it helps him relax. Doesn’t matter if anyone likes what he does or wants to buy it. As for myself, now that I’m retired I delve into a number of areas, just for me, and absolutely have no interest in sharing them or being recognized for what I do. Good luck on your quest. You might look into applying RL in the domain of low cost robotics and drones. That would draw on some of your past experience but applied to a domain (robotics) which I perceive is seeing renewed interest. Nowadays, apart from stockpicking as a value investor, I use LLMs to develop AIs that don’t use backpropagation and that support continuous learning. > that isn't absolutely crowded I'm sure there are field that should be absolutely crowded but where you can do something meaningful. If I had free time, I would write an app to learn foreign languages I'm interested in. I'm pretty sure that there are good apps, but I tried a few ones, and none really fit my needs. There are also software that I use a lot, like transcribe! which works well, but that I could see how to improve. So as others mentioned, do something that you would be interested in. I used to play Pokémon cards competitively. It was fun going to local tournaments and flying with friends for Regional tournaments. I stopped to focus on night school, and I want to pick it back up with the card legality change happening Friday. Pokémon Champions just came out, so I might give up cards for the video game. We'll see. I do some synthetic biology as a hobby - genetically engineered a baker’s yeast to produce grape aroma and then baked bread with it, and gave it to like 100 people at an event I was at. Also do a few others - learned Esperanto (exclusively through listening and speaking with people), beekeeping, woodworking, etc. After binging on youtube, I am working on learning to do leatherwork, small stuff at first like making your own wallet etc. Baking bread, albeit with a (Panasonic) bread making machine. Might not be niche, however, traditions of giving bread to guests runs deep and people are always delighted if you give them a loaf of extremely fresh bread. There are different directions that bread making can go. During the pandemic there was a rash of people making rock hard sourdough, and sourdough is still the magic word for 'higher status' bread, even though almost every commercially available sourdough loaf is faked with enzymes added to a regular 'Chorleywood' loaf. I gave sourdough a go but I prefer my bread making machines creations that are definitely not sourdough. I like to fortify my bread in two different ways, either with fruits and nuts to make a 'fruit loaf' of sorts, or with seeds and wholemeal flour to have bread that covers many a niche nutrient. Commercial bread in the UK comes with government issued fortifications of folates, B vitamins and whatnot. This might be fine for pregnant mums that can't cook, but I am not one of them! So the challenge is to do a better job of the fortifications, mostly with seeds and choice of flour. Commercial bread is also not very real, with lots of additives that I don't seem to need in my own creations. Emulsifiers, preservatives and everything else are needed for commercial bread, if it is to have shelf life and appeal, but my intestines are not crying out for these sorts of additives and I seem to still be alive without them, with improved digestive tract functionality. Although we have more interesting things to eat than bread, our history in the West is the history of bread, we would not be here without it. Once you start baking your own, albeit with a machine, history becomes so much more interesting. The other optimisation I try is cost. It is easy to produce a decent loaf with very expensive ingredients, however, on a budget it gets to have a different challenge to it. I introduced my uncle to the hobby and he is a meticulous record keeper, so I wrote a simple app for him to record his bakes and ratings. This enables him to make fine adjustments to quantities so as to improve on his creations. I did look for an app before I wrote my own, and the app was called 'Microsoft Excel'. I am sure that could be customised with recipes and whatnot, but I wanted to reinvent the wheel, hence my own app, just for myself and my uncle. With some hobbies that is all you do and an obsession. Bread making is not like that, you can have plenty of more strings to your bow. As mentioned, people are always impressed if you give them a loaf, or if they learn that your sandwiches are made with your own bread. You can insist that it took three minutes with the machine, to downplay everything, however people stay impressed. Not niche, but photography has a way of opening doors because you push yourself to get to places you might not otherwise. Maybe learn a new language that isn't European or Japanese. If "niche" matters to you, anything currently receiving any type of investing (ML etc) is probably not gonna work. You mention chess, Chessboxing is an interesting niche hobby where you play both chess and boxing. I play chess but not chessboxing but hey, you asked for some interesting niche hobbies! It seems that what you do is mostly related to computers within the niche hobbies but what if you can do something else too? > Right now I'm making a chess engine, but that's already a solved problem Not everything should be done for the end-result, sometimes its the process which matters, there was a great hackernews post about it (https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/) If you want something niche, perhaps make some portal-2 mods or make more efficient versions of using GlaDOS TTS within browser etc. (this is just something that I want to be honest, but I feel like it can be a niche hobby in its regards seeing your interests) Let me know if you want more ideas and have fun and have a nice day man! I do boxing as a form of cardio so I'm not weightlifting all the time.
So I've just invited a friend for a 1v1 and he accepted, time to start training both properly I guess. I do want something related to computers because that's where I'm skilled the most, but it being mixed with something else is fine (i.e., biohacking).
But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel.
Maybe the next frontier is becoming an electrician? > But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel I feel like it depends, there are many sorts of projects which are still low hanging fruits. you might not get appreciated to do things anymore because of the amount of competition but you can feel proud of yourself. Breaking NATs without root permissions (try searching dropbear without root and building it and running it with something like pinggy to then make a minecraft server beneath a nat work), making a free crypto chain have data embedded within a loop of transactions to embed data on crypto for free, recently using single-file to somehow archive archive.is pages on archive.org* anonymously using piping-server. I have used AI/LLM assistance in most of these but I feel like aside from being frustrated at the code aspects, I had some good ideas and even with everyone else having AI, I didn't see anyone else doing these things (the reason I say this is because if they did, I would've just used their services :] ) Not sure if a lot of these things sound novel, programmatically not, but idea-wise I think* they might-be novel. A lot of my novel ideas come out of proving things. Can I prove that I can run minecraft on a free intel server that me and my friends can play on? Can I prove that I can save archive.is pages on archive.org anonymously-ish since the issue with archive.is So my point is, out of personal experience, there are so many novel-ideas within things which seem obvious but nobody has really implemented them and to be honest, everyone is just creating yet another chatgpt wrapper with AI. Much of these experiments are prototyping/proving these ideas and I believe that there are some low hanging fruits in such sense of these ideas which can be interesting to think about. So I don't suppose that you have to go bio-hacking to find things which pique your interest, there are some practical things too in my opinion which can pique your interest. Not sure if this might be the answer you are looking for, but I hope this helps within the context you asked it. Sometimes two normal things combined together can be the novel thing to do. My opinion is that people with money chase money oriented things, the people with passion/hobby-tinkering will do things that chase passion and so sometimes you have nothing to worry about :-) So are there any things that you feel is similar to this for you, perhaps? What you're doing is interesting but those are side-projects.
I have plenty of random side-projects, just now after reading Gibson's Burning Chrome, I'm making an OpenBSD server where you can only log in using SSH keys in my implant, and logging in makes you a completely new but very restricted user with 1GB of free storage. Kinda like Johnny Mnemonic. But I feel very disorganized when most of my attention is on distinct one-off side projects, I want to work on something novel and big.
But thanks for your suggestions.
It is true that most industries begin when passion oriented people finally meet money oriented people, but most time they are separate. Design whistle sequences to get dolphins to respond in ways that will help you figure out their meaning. A few multi-million $ projects could use that, such as Google, Baidu, and SDRP. Invasive species removal, bird identification, trail running, mountain biking, audiobook listening while walking. All are best done out of doors. :P Most are teh opposite of the posture and brain patterns that intensive computer usage encourages. I am trying to build microphone capsules in my garage. Trying to go below 14dB (Primo EM272 level), under 1". It is difficult but rewarding. I do not expect any financial benefits from it, even if I make it under 10mm, because it is very time-consuming. Big players already have massive factories doing 10,000x of what I am doing. This is the most niche tech-related hobby I have currently. I've been making a seabed simulation of the seabed for interacting with polymetallic nodules. The idea is these nodules contain a lot of cobalt, but due to their location on the seafloor they're had to access, making mining difficult. It took me a while but I finally got my hands on some polymetallic nodules (basically the rocks you find on the seabed that contain cobalt) which I'm scanning and will hopefully have uploaded soon. Tragically the nodules were damaged through shipping but it's all I have, especially since the first shipment was stolen off my porch lol. It's build with Project Chrono using C++ https://github.com/thansen0/seabed-sim-chrono I had a route around San Francisco that I would visit, and all the places on the route were where there were good blackberry bushes. I’d take a bucket. Around Golden Gate Park and the Inner Sunset mostly, heading down into the Forest Hills area as well. I did that for a few years. Would pick up some plums along the way as well. Now on the other side of the Bay I have a couple spots, not as dense a network. About an hour away there are masses.
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