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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
What are the meetup themes? What brings the interesting people in?
> 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?
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'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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.