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Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

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Why This Matters

This article highlights the importance of niche hobbies in fostering innovation and personal growth within the tech industry. For consumers, engaging in unique projects can lead to new skills and insights, potentially influencing mainstream technological advancements. Exploring less crowded areas allows enthusiasts to contribute meaningfully and push the boundaries of current technology.

Key Takeaways

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.