I've had this idea forever, and mentioned it here many, many times... the BitGrid, which is an FPGA chip without all the routing and long lines, but with added latching so you can banish timing constraints.
I honestly think it could be as important/useful as Von Neumann's CPU architecture, for AI and other highly parallel compute tasks. Every time I start to work on it, something stops me.
For instance, last week I had a good chat with Github Copilot about it, and it was way too nice and encouraging for comfort[2] Unfortunately, you need a Copilot account to read the chat I shared. 8(
I was hoping to get it into TinyTapeout, but they're now only in Europe. 8(
Hobby electronics & robotics. I can make an LED blink on a ESP8266 (it's been a while), but that's it. I'd like to get more familiar with a multimeter, figuring out broken kids toys, etc. but it's a bit daunting. Maybe there's too many options and not enough constraints. I'm not sure.
This gotta come up with a project you want for yourself and make it. I remember soldering one of those 2x16 LCD screens and it had a short so it would start smoking to designing/3D printing my own quadruped with an IMU/navigation. I did cheat and not use inverse kinematics, I watched videos on other insect-style quads walking and I programmed it manually.
I think main gotcha is power distribution and shared ground eg. using a boost converter or regulator to boost/downgrade voltage and which servos/sensors uses what. Later have to be concerned with too much current being drawn but yeah.
I used these green proto boards you can solder onto as a step up above breadboard but not my own PCB.
I highly recommend downloading Understanding Signals with the Propscope from Parallax (available for free online) and following the tutorials from it with an Arduino+Analog Discovery 2/3 device. You can use the Digilent "Real Analog" learning course along with it - https://digilent.com/reference/learn/courses/real-analog/sta...
The real motivation in Electronics comes from understanding in visual form (using a Oscilloscope/Multimeter etc.) how things work in a circuit and how your calculations match up to what you see on the screen. Even as simple as the beginner LED circuit can teach you a lot when you use a potentiometer and see how voltage/current graphs change.
Would you recommend the Real Analog course independently?
What does the Propscope one offer that Real Analog doesn’t?
The Propscope one looks kinda old so I was wondering what I’d miss if I only used Real Analog.
Also not sure if there’s a parts kit for the Propscope one that I can buy.
Sure, you can do the "Real Analog" course independently. Study it with a Parts Kit from Digilent+Analog Discovery 2/3 device(AD2/AD3)+Arduino board. That would be a nice entry point into Electronics+Embedded Systems.
I was referring to the tutorial pdf of Understanding Signals with Propscope containing very nice step-by-step lessons in using a USB Oscilloscope for measuring various circuit parameters. The Propscope itself is very old/underpowered (not being sold anymore) and not needed. You just use AD2/AD3 with its Waveforms software to do the same experiments with any board.
Note that if you use a AVR-based Arduino you can learn to program at the higher Arduino API/library level and then at the lower direct AVR level both with the same board. For learning Arduino Programming see Exploring Arduino by Jeremy Blum and for direct AVR programming see Make: AVR Programming by Elliot Williams.
Nice. You also need to get the BNC Adapter board and probes for AD3 (available separately or as part of the pro bundle). Might also want to take a look at other available adapters for AD3.
I'm starting out as well. If you prefer coding in python, raspberry pi or anything adafruit is a good place to start. If you're cool with c/c++ Arduino ecosystem is quite mature . I decided to stick to the former so it's a less steeper learning curve for me and my little one. Get a BBC Micro:bit v2 and/or a CircuitPlayground Express. Both have a ton of sensors on board (temp, tilt, light, humidity etc) and some leds/neo-pixels to play around. Once you play with some of that, and want to get your hands dirty with breadboarding and soldering, get a basic kit (e.g. raspberry pi pico etc) and use MakeCode to try out some simple circuits with your microbit or circuitplayground express as the signal provider, play with servos, hobby motors, do some basic projects. Once you feel you're a bit proficient, might one to check out LeRobot for an open source robotic arm that you could train with reinfocement learning.. this is not exhaustive or the only path, there's many others, this is just my 2cents. Hope this helps!
For this, what takes a while is to just tinker and fry components several times. Get a breadboard, get several sensors, try to design something and iterate on your design. Plan to fry sensors and IC's. Also helps to read some basic electrical theory and know what the role of different components are.
The way I got proficient is with hobbyist PCB design. What helped me is starting with schematics and datasheets and planning to finish with an assembled board. I started designing PCB's and having them assembled with JLCPCB (quite cheap: $20 or so for a run of 5 boards; $120-$150 fully assembled). I fried 2 boards before the 3rd rev booted up, then from there it's optimization. I consider the $200/mo or so in PCBA, whether boards work or not, to be my "EE education" -- cost efficient compared to university fees! And $200 is sort of like the "exam," it's costly enough to make me really think twice about component selection/placement/etc.
Not saying that's the approach you want to take because that might be hardcore / not someplace you want to get to. But I spent a long long time really wondering how electricity really works and like why you need capacitors, inductors, op-amps, etc. It never made sense to me until I created my own schematic, chose my own parts, and understood why I chose the parts I did and connected them the way I did.
$200 is for assembled boards. I learned electronics and spent about $200 on it in two years, that includes cheapest soldering iron. Don't order assembled boards when you are starting. Order cheapest bluepill (STM32F103C8T6) or non-original arduino clone and start on breadboard with that. Make pcb's only when you're ready to learn more. Expect that your first one will not work or will require some "rewiring", but second one may already work. You might start with some cheap through-hole components, they are a little easier to re-wire or re-solder, it's a good idea to put your first microcontroller in socket.
I'm a EE masters student and I also want to reinforce how inaccessible EE is and that I don't really recommend it as a hobby. EE is a very mature field and it's very math heavy for a reason. The second you move past the hobby boards, stuff becomes really difficult and really expensive really fast. If your end goal is to create toys for kids, then it's fine as a hobby. But without the formal training and lab access you are going to struggle to get past that point so it's pretty much impossible to turn the hobby into something more. Unlike software, where tinkering genuinely has the possibility of turning your side projects into careers. Hell, if you don't live in EE hotspot locations, I wouldn't even recommend it as a career anymore. Software is where it's at, even in the age of AI.
That's only for the heavy analog stuff. If you're into the more modern digital stuff, you basically never for any reason need to breadboard prototype, everything can be done with I2C modules and the like.
Burning a part is incredibly rare with this kind of stuff, if you're willing to put in the time to learn about it before actually building it.
Check out the Arduino starter kit. This is how I started with electrics. It comes with everything you need including a great book which walks you through everything. Very much worth the money.
You should check out Ben Eater's channel on YouTube. He has a series about building an 8 bit computer from scratch + another one about building a 6502-based computer. It's very very accessible if you know some really basic hardware stuff (and for the things that you don't know already, he gives enough context to start googling).
I want to help small businesses in my area, those who want it, with technology solutions that can improve things (and in-turn learn about the needs of real small businesses). I can pretty much do full-stack (ranging from something basic that improves things for them to something elaborate like backend, UI, AWS, K8S etc). However, I don't have any idea how to identify customers, approach them, price my work fairly, deal with wiring/hardware, deal with the local laws regarding running a non-full-time business etc. I guess what I'm after is that end-of-the-tunnel satisfaction in helping others using technology but a pretty long tunnel is getting in the way :)
What I've learnt is that it's for businesses to productize SME solutions unless they're dirt cheap or free, but getting hired as a consultant (who actually adds value) is always an option. It need not be done for compensation either initially - you just want to build trust with the folks, advise them, maybe sit with them and evaluate already existing technical solutions on the market (instead of building your own!).
If you're in the US, you could just set up an LLC if you find some potential customers through the above method, very straightforward. Or you could set up the equivalent of a sole proprietorship in Europe if you're based here.
Most small businesses don’t need UI, etc. They need lots of integration work though. Like my friend who has a jewelry business needed help integrating Etsy orders to Asana which we did using Zapier.
So lot less custom code and more linking things software focused on their specific needs.
Thats good to know - I love integration. The most fun I had was to design and build a ci/cd setup for my team (which spread to other teams). I guess I am a plumber at heart.
I am fascinated by the idea of building something like the Lisp Machines or Smalltalk 80 from scratch. Build a Forth in assembly, build a Lisp in Forth, build an OS and computing environment in Lisp. AOT-compile only the Forth interpreter, load and compile the rest from source during system boot, maybe with later stages optimizing the previous stages as the system is assembling itself.
I imagine two languages - Langsam and Schnell - intertwined in some sort of yin-yang fashion. Langsam is slow, dynamic, interpreted, Schnell is fast, static, compiled. Both would be LISPs. Schnell would be implemented as a library in Langsam. If you said (define (add x y) (+ x y)) in Langsam, you would get a Langsam function. If you said (s:define (add (x int) (y int)) (+ x y)) in Langsam, you would get a Langsam function which is a wrapper over a JIT-compiled Schnell function. If you invoke it, the wrapper takes care of the FFI, execution happens at C speed. Most of the complexity typical of a low-level compiled language could be moved into Langsam. I could have sophisticated type systems and C++ template like code generation implemented in a comfortable high level language.
This latter part I managed to partially implement in Clojure and it works (via LLVM), it would be just too much effort to get it completed.
> Build a Forth in assembly, build a Lisp in Forth
You might already know it, but Dusk OS[1], which is a Forth, has a Lisp implementation[2] which includes a native code compiler for i386, amd64, arm, risc-v and m68k. You might consider it a good starting point for your project.
Being able to spontaneously speak with people and slow thinking. I am ok at writing with people, because it gives me time to think and refine my message. But I really suck at live events and talking to people in real life. Did anyone overcome it? And how?
For very clear, very specific advice, succeedsocially.com is the best website I’ve ever seen.
Besides that, you just need practice and if applicable a bit of therapy. Practice comes with interacting with a lot of people until it seems easy. Therapy clears some of the roadblocks that might hamper you.
For me, it was a skill issue.Most people learn it when very young. Just repeated practice helped... and someone close to me coached me on things that seemed common sense to others, but were counterintuitive to me. But over time, my neurons rewired themselves. I'm fairly good at small talk now. People dont believe me when I say I couldn't even order pizza over the phone at one point.
Are you young enough to have grown up in a house without a land line by chance?
I think land lines are where many current adults (who grew up before cell phones were ubiquitous) learned a lot of that common sense, because in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever picked up the phone first - chatty mothers, asshole brothers, mostly-deaf grandfathers, etc.
The French have a term for this, "the wit of the staircase" where one doesn't think of the clever rejoinder until heading upstairs to bed later that evening.
I've found asking folks about themselves, trying to get their story works best as a start, then if they reciprocate, things should flow naturally from there.
Seriously, make it a habit to say “Good morning” or “Good evening” with a warm smile the first time you make eye contact with another guest at a hotel, whether it’s during check-in or at breakfast. This is especially important if you’re staying more than a few days. Once you’ve crossed paths with someone three times without saying a word, starting a conversation later becomes both unlikely and a bit awkward.
Any advice you get is going to sound rudimentary, as with much of life advice. Now that I've put a disclaimer, here is what helped me the most:
When you are shy, there is sometimes the one kind person that introduces you/breaks the ice to others. You love this person because they lubricated the social interaction. I harness this feeling of being saved by pretending that everyone around me is the shy person waiting for someone to break the ice. I frame this internally as myself doing the shy others a huge favor that they'll appreciate. I want to be "that guy" that helped people feel included and involved.
I used to do this consciously. At this point, I rarely have to invoke this thought as I've now put in the reps and it's easier.
Tldr: pretend you're being a social savior and repeated practice
For years I had a little project here to rebuild the iPod Nano 7g in Open Source Hardware and software. Not that small, but at least in the same size category (a lot smaller than the smallest smartphone).
The iPod nano 7g is not designed to last forever... it is hard to repair - the battery can be replaced but the internal 16GB flash memory is a job for professionals.
There are lots of <= 4 inch Android players which could simply run an app, but these are draining a battery so fast after a while it isn't even close to the experience of a specific device.
The main pain point is controlling the device via headphone remote. The iPod supports play/pause, next, prev, vol+, vol- and fast-forward as well as rewind. Nothing comes close to this in android.
However, I was aiming to take one of the newer RISC-V boards with USB-C (like LicheeRV Nano or Luckfox Lyra), add a 2.4 inch display and a battery + gauge to it and 3D print a case, work out a UI via LVGL, but having 2 children is just too time consuming for such a project.
Sticking to my iPod Nano 7g hopefully lasts another 5 years until I can focus on it again :-)
I don't know anything about electronics design, but I'm really into backpacking so a high efficiency battery system with a solar panel is really interesting to me. I came across this project[1], and wanted to improve upon it for my usecase. I want to add the ability to have multiple 21700 cells in a lightweight charger, instead of a single cell with a builtin USB charger. I want to learn more electronics, but it definitely feels like a multiyear process, and it'd be nice to shortcut it for the projects I'm interested in.
Learning just enough for your needs is a valid approach to learning electronics design, unless you're planning on becoming an actual EE.
It provides a huge amount of self-motivation and as much as I hate to admit it (as a one-time electronics design engineer), you can skip a lot of the middle-layer concepts. Sure, you should understand Ohm's law and what basic components (resistors, capacitors, transistors) do, but you can jump from that right into understanding how a battery charger works without having to understand how the components actually work.
The hard part is finding good tutorial material that starts at the right level: most of the professionally written stuff presupposes that you're either already an EE, or have one at your disposal to translate things for you.
There's a few that come to mind, but none that feel actually as daunting intellectually as much as they are qualified by other factors.
I'd like to go from indoor bouldering to rock climbing, but coordinating with a belayer doesn't seem super interesting and otherwise it's just a matter of expense, gear, and a slight pivot in my leisure time to start going at it.
Otherwise, the skill that seems most out of reach is keeping a job for longer than a year. I'm in a decent spot now, after a year and a half prior of being unemployed, and I feel like this might be my last real shot at a career of any kind. Other people seem to handle it fine, but this is the thing that seems most out of reach. Unlike engineering problems that are made up of abstractions with ways to break them down and piece together systems, keeping a job is as opaque of an abstraction as I'm aware of, that doesn't necessarily depend on a measurable skill or even on anything within one's control. I've never once felt stability or been able to bet on money coming in next year, and if I had the money for a mortgage, I'd be stopped by the knowledge I can't count on an income flow at any time in the future. I'm thankful for what I have and what I've learned nonetheless.
I haven't done much climbing at all but I would encourage you to go for it. Being outside is a whole different level and a great excuse to spend time in nature.
Start by talking to people at your bouldering gym. If you hear anyone discussing going out climbing, ask if you can tag along and just watch for a few times. Watch some videos about climbing basics to get an overall feel for it and some of the concepts and terminology. I'd say you should start out "top roping" on smaller walls. As for equipment for that you don't need much especially since your partner will probably have a rope and gear to build an anchor, etc. You'll need, shoes, a harness, and a helmet.
Going from gym bouldering to outdoor climbing _does_ require being a little more social. It's a minimum 2-person sport usually. But going as a small group and rotating roles and just hanging out watching works too.) You just need to find people you like hanging out with and you can trust. (If you don't find them at your gym, try another or ask around at outdoor stores, your local university rec department, etc.)
About jobs, I can't help you. I tend to stay too long if anything.
Thanks for the advice! After re-reading my comment, I should have articulated the thought differently. I've already been taking the path you and the sibling commenter described, all the variables are already more or less in-place, and I already have a strong love of the outdoors, long day hikes with sketchy scrambles, many wall climbers met, invitations received, etc.. So what I meant was, "One of the things I'd like to do is outdoor climbing, but I have a pretty clear path with no particular hurdles in the way of going for it, it's not as abstract as not getting fired or laid off from a job"
That said, I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless; more encouragement to get out and do hard, rewarding things, especially social things, should never be frowned upon.
Personally, I love hiking. I like getting out in nature, seeing all the things I can observe along the way, and getting good exercise. That being said, I don't get up and go on my own as often as I'd like. My wife OTOH, also loves hiking but is adamant about going once or twice every weekend if at all possible. So, I take advantage of that extrinsic motivation and am the better for it.
I would encourage you to speak to the wall first in case they run outdoor sessions or see if there are any clubs in your area. This assumes you live in an area with some outdoor climbing. Outdoor bouldering can be done with little equipment, but you need to start way easier than what you'd do at the wall. The ground is surprisingly hard and I've seen someone break their ankle right in front of me a few times and it does not look fun.
Outdoor sport climbing is pretty easy to get into if you have bolted climbing in your area, but as you get higher the ground gets even harder so make sure you know what you're doing. Lots of good books and resources available.
If you really want to get into trad climbing be prepared for a longer apprenticeship, take your time and start easy.
Yep, this is pretty much the process I had in mind for going about it, and yes all the other variables are conveniently in place. I have a lot of respect for nature, mountains, and difficult potentially dangerous recreational sports, so I don't mean to trivialize the endeavor. I should have articulated the thought in a slightly different way, such that I meant something more akin to "One of the things I'd like to pursue is outdoor climbing, but I have a sense of the path to doing that, it's not as much of a mystery as this other thing"
There's a certain change of perspective with modern AI (by "modern" I mean Resnet and beyond). When I was deep into neural nets in the 1990s, they weren't that large, and I would think of them in terms of the number of weights and nodes - but modern deep learning seems to have has moved up a few levels of abstraction. (I stepped away from the field for a while). And there's a certain understanding people seem to have now regarding the "gradient flow" through the net and why certain architectures work well (Resnet, Unets etc). I must say I'm finding it tricky to shift into this new level of thinking. Also Transformers - still looking for an intuitive sense of how they work, haha.
I’ll admit that part of my problem is chronic depression over a decade+. The idea of gamedev excites me, but I have a hard time feeling passionate about anything these days. You definitely need that for games. Hell, I’m barely able to sit down and even enjoy games anymore.
Try Roblox (YouTube but for games essentially). You can publish a game just a few clicks, and even quite simple games can get popular enough that you get the satisfaction of seeing others interact with the thing you made, which is very motivating.
Gamedev is weird. I want to do it, and am trained to do it, but the working conditions are horrific.
Like half my graduating class ended up in a real estate company making directx based 3d walkthroughs for minimum wage.
Even if you are successful, the crunch is oppressive. The bigger firms will make you labor hard for your art, take all the cream off the top and then terminate your contract.
And yet heaps of people, even me when I am bored, want to do it.
Ah yeah I love the concept of these small fantasy computers. I’m familiar with them because of Celeste, but never played with one.
I’m interested in traditional roguelikes these days (Tales of Maj’Eyal, Qud, Brogue). Ofc the dream is to make something with wider appeal, like Balatro, and get out of the rat race all together.
Genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Synthesizing DNA and transforming cells. Designing better methodologies to improve efficiency, robustness, cost or scale up of common bio lab processes. Mapping out all bio lab processes used in genetic engineering. Unfortunately without going back to school to PhD options are very limited. The Thought Emporium guy and the 4-6 community bio labs in major US cities are the only counter examples I know of doing this outside of academia / industry.
I have a theory that if society could unlock a hobbyist class of synthetic biology tinkerers it could unleash rapid growth similar to the computing industry. I'm not sure if the problem is technology not being low cost and high safety enough or a lack of social institutions supporting people like this.
For me, it's gotta be Asahi Linux development. I've been following the work of Asahi Lina and the team for a long time, watching their progress in awe. It just seems incredibly cool to get macOS hardware running Linux so well. But every time I think about actually diving into it, my brain just screams "super complicated!" and I have no idea where I'd even begin to contribute or understand what's going on under the hood. It's definitely one of those things I admire from a distance because it feels so far beyond my current capabilities.
On the development side, I feel like I just don't have the "brain" for Rust even though I have built a couple of useful things with it and have also contributed to an open source project (checkout hurl.dev, great tool!) - I would love to get into low level OS development, VMMs and microVMs . It's probably just an issue of effort
Outside of programming, I'd like to get into welding so I can make some things. I recently learned to use my angle grinder but welding feels like it's out of reach because of not having the right tools and experience.
We're trying to write "simple" Rust as far as we can, without going into too much optimisation: very little lifetime usage, no async stuff (just classic multi-thread directly from the last sample of the Rust book), liberal usage of clone, no macros, reusing crates for C libcurl and libxml binding, limiting dependencies. We could certainly gain a lot of performances but with this first simple approach, the binary is already "fast"... The only advice I would give for someone going into Rust is to not try to optimise everything from the start to get a first "feeling" of the language.
Hurl is definitely one of the more approachable Rust codebases I have looked at and worked with. The test suite is one of the best I've seen - so thorough! Definitely, one of my fav projects
Yeah, Rust was... nontrivial for me too. I feel like I understand it now quite well, but it took more effort than I'd expected to expend on anything. Prolog was a similar but distinct mindfuck too.
Yes. I could theoretically do just about anything, with a reasonable amount of ramp up time. And am interested in many things. Even willing to study ahead of time for free.
Yet, my main obstacle these days is gatekeeping by others. People won’t let you work in a field without previous experience (in the exact thing) or significant credentials. Seems to have gotten worse over time, although ageism may contribute.
Not to mention the more interesting, the more popular, and less likely you can get in the club—inversely proportional. Hobbies are fun though.
Usually, a good way to start is to try working for just getting experience (directly ask to people who are working in your desired field to till you get one). Maybe work for free for first couple of months and make connection and get an idea how things work...
I've wanted for years to take the research paper "Coq: The World's Best Macro Assembler" through several of its more and less obvious next steps, including re-implementing it on top of a formal specification of ARM (or RISC-V) machine code, and introducing a concept of virtual registers on top of a (light weight) register allocator. I really feel like there's a path here to a system in which low-level non-portable code can be written comfortably (if perhaps at a somewhat slower pace than C), with arbitrary correctness properties proven on it; but the learning curve to get there (through Coq, etc) has been a struggle. Every few years I set myself the goal of a proven-correct implementation of a min/max heap in assembly built on this approach, and every few years I give up.
I've just taken a quick glance at this, and will explore further -- but at first, it seems like it's really a good application of ad-hoc proofs to assembly code; which is a subset of what I'm interested in, but for me the more interesting thing about the paper was the structured safety proofs for things like memory safety, no read-before-write, no overflow, etc., and thinking about how this can be expanded and generalized. While for something like a bignum library (or a heap) the actual conformance to the behavioral contract will be somewhat ad-hoc, having a lot of safety contracts also proved along the way "for free" (or at slightly reduced cost, anyway) is what really draws my attention. I can see spending 2x the time writing the code, and 10x the time proving things about it, in exchange for not having to spend the 100x (DAL B) or 1000x (DAL A) time testing it.
Yeah, I hear you. Many things are simplified in this crypto code, for example there’s no dynamic allocation. At the same time it’s incredibly difficult to get a realistic model of the hardware instructions because they all have side effects. And it gets incredibly more difficult if you try to prove real world, hand optimized code (vs academic proof of concept code).
With all this said, I think this could be a good inspiration and look forward to seeing advancements!
I want to build a large format, real-time, physical music visualizer that could orchestrate an artistic light symphony for any song.
I'm imagining physical visualizers that are columns of multiple, discrete light nodes, each able to have variable brightness and color.
The real-time music processing is the hard part (for me) to crack.
There's some standard tricks here: FFTs, bandpass filters, etc.
But I want to do more: Real-time stem separation, time signature and downbeat tracking, etc.
Imagine hearing Sweet Caroline and, when the horns kick in, the whole installation 'focuses' on the horns and bright yellow light jumps between each column on each horn note, before returning to tracking the bass line or something.
I've been noodling on this idea for a long time and slowly digging into the music and CS fundamentals. The rise of LLMs might finally be the piece that enables me to close my intelligence gap and finally build this thing...
Well, I'm have a little guilty bias towards spacetime non-substantivalism and I've always been interested in getting back to physics in this area. I've particularly found the Shape Dynamics program to be at least somewhat interesting and while I have a sort of ok grasp of the language and mathematics of GR translating that to the SD world has been a persistent challenge. If I had time I'd try to figure that out.
Briefly, one usually formulates the theory of gravity in terms of a a 4d spacetime with curvature but you can also formulate it as a theory of curved 3d shapes if you allow the lagrangian to carry more structure. This is often performed in GR, in fact, by decomposing the metric into a "spatial" and "temporal" part but shape dynamics kind of runs with this idea in an attempt to formulate a totally relational version of the theory of gravity.
Shape Dynamics apparently produces a reasonable theory of gravity which agrees with GR in many situations but forbids, I believe, closed timelike curves, and may be more amenable to quantization since it re-separates space and time.
Anyway, it all seems very beyond me, maybe even if I had the time, which I do not.
For a while now, I've had the desire to make an AI that kills enemies and beats levels like a human would in the game Crypt of the Necrodancer. Here's[0] someone doing it as a human without ever taking damage.
There's something close called ChoregraphAI[1] on GitHub. It simulates the entire map and does a brute force search for what will get it to the stairs. That doesn't satisfy me because it just skips most of the enemies and takes advantage of things that a human couldn't know, like where a bat will move (bats move randomly, while other enemies are completely deterministic). Also, it can't control the game and is for an old version of it (although those problems themselves seem not that big).
But, I do not know what kind of AI could be written to perform the kind of long term planning and strategizing that a human would do (e.g. isolate each enemy to beat it more easily) and to beat the enemies like a human would (with special, pre-practiced strategies for certain enemies or groups of enemies), and even if I did, I get the sense that this would be really complicated for a first try and that I should gain experience making such an AI for a simpler game, though I don't know what.
It might be a self-constrained challenge. It's just been floating around my head for a while because I don't really know where to start.
Quantum computer programming. I've dived a couple times into Qiskit from IBM. Also tried to get into dwave and ocean sdk but they never got back to me.
Qiskit tutorials are easy to blow through and i think even understand. But when trying to use it for my own purposes, just never get anywhere.
The other one for me with no success. Training my own specialized predicting AI models. Tensorflow, pytorch, and another.
I certainly prefer pytorch. Super simple to build models on simple stuff.
I'm trying to do something that literally nobody else has ever done. My lack of success has probably a lot more to do with that it's not perhaps actually doable.
Flipside, I might be re-approaching this now that i have the pycharm ai to help me in this progress.
>you've been there and figured out how to get past similar hurdles – please chime in! Share some helpful resources, dish out general advice, or just give a nudge of encouragement on how to take that intimidating first step.
Never be afraid to try. Always dare to fail; you only truly learn when failing. The easier you make it to fail, the quicker you learn.
My concern with quantum computing is there's already such an outrageous overabundance of quantum computing PhD's the marked will likely be saturated for decades to come. It would be a ton of fun to learn, but I can't justify the time because there's no career progression
Lol where are people getting such ideas. First of all there are probably like 10 QC people graduating a year in the whole world (okay maybe 20). Second of all y'all people have no idea how far off usable QC is. It's like 50 years at best.
I'll bet a lot of money PQC becomes commonplace before quantum breaks anything meaningful. (although I'm one of the people paid to work on PQC so maybe I'm biased.)
what are you trying to suggest? that they are doing to much already? and if they were to do less they would have time? wouldn't that then lead to the same situation, that they would like to work on some of the things they are working on now but could not because of lack of time?
also we don't choose all our commitments. family, work, friends, etc are commitments we can't just give up. it comes down to choice and priorities, and the problem is that we have more things we find interesting than we can focus on.
but i consider that a good thing. i know that whenever i retire or am unable to continue some of my interests there will be others that i can pick up instead. i know that i won't be bored...
Just a quick prompt for reflection. I do not suggest anything how people actually live their lives. But many have said that they got caught up in being too busy to actually enjoy life. Don't fall into that by accident!
Manufacturing. I have no idea where one would start with learning it that doesn't begin with having at least $100,000 in machinery and industry knowledge.
Start by asking yourself "manufacturing what?" and go from there. I've worked at companies that did some form of manufacturing my entire career. "Manufacturing" covers even more ground than "software" does. e.g., textile manufacturing has a completely different set of concerns than manufacturing airplane parts does.
Over the past several years I have slowly patched the .NET version of Shen to run on Linux and modern .NET releases. I also learned about Higher-Order Perl the other year and have a dream of going through the book and implementing the exercises in Shen while tuning the compiler.
But while I have had a broad interest in compilers for years and years, it feels difficult-to-impossible to actually complete any of it. Part of it's general depression and time management, part is looking at the long story of these projects and the lack of progression: Stuck in a rut of mediocrity.
No worries. One of my personal compiler projects took over ten years to complete. Still worth it, though. Sped up my programming by at least 20x. (Not kidding.)
Edit: Within confidence intervals that is a 22% per year improvement. Way ahead of Proebsting's law. Surprising.
Speaking of which, I've always been fascinated by audio signal processing especially the idea of writing code to synthesize sounds or emulate vintage synthesizers. It feels like magic to turn mathematical formulas into actual audible melodies. But every time I look at a tutorial, I get intimidated by all the Fourier transforms and equations. Maybe I just need that one real opportunity to get started from scratch.
I'd like to establish an index fund that jumps through the necessary hoops to allow US expatriate citizens to invest from places like the European Union.
Last I checked, there is no fundamental legal barrier preventing this - just an enormous amount of compliance work that has to get done. But as we would be the only real option for 1 or 2 million well-monied people, I imagine we'd be able to start with a very eager customer base provided we could jump through those hoops. And uh, the actual algorithms for index based stock selection are pretty straightforward, too - I'm not Jane Street level clever, so that's an attractive point for me.
If anyone's interested in this hare brained scheme, let me know via the email in my bio. It's been a problem I've been rolling around in my head for a few years now. I have no idea how I would get started, but I'm pretty sure I could do it.
Another area I'd be interested in is automatic document conversion between the IEEE and EN standards.
I know most of you guys have never had to deal with these, but I've spent my professional life in high-regulation fields. Documents which adhere to these standards are table stakes for getting software sold to, say, the freight train industry, but neither is a subset of the other. They're more like parallel universes, one from North America, the other from the EU.
Getting them to play nice in an automated, LLM + human aided review way would unlock an enormous amount of value for software firms looking to work across these two markets. I'm one of only a handful of guys in the world who understands this well enough to see the value add, and I don't know how I would convince anyone to help me go to market with this either. So I broadcast it here, in the hopes that some other capable software engineer with more time on their hands takes it off of my plate. Please build this business!
I'm using 'index fund' broadly to refer to the cost structure - very low management fees, very "dumb" wide market tracking. Plenty of these already exist in the EU, for EU citizens, you are correct.
But yes, they are taxed differently. A US-domiciled fund is much easier for US expats to invest in without risking losing over 100% of their return (I am not exaggerating), but only if you can actually find one which will accept money from you while resident in the EU. None do, to my knowledge, An EU-domiciled fund would probably be classed as a PFIC and have to fill out reams of paperwork to avoid messing up people's taxes. One that US expats love is possible in theory, but no one has brought one to market yet because it requires dealing with a lot of US taxation errata.
digital signal processing for synths and audio stuff.
maths :/ brain hurt.
i did some digital signal processing in my phd but i need to go through and implement a bunch of things from scratch to learn/relearn and it’ll just be a bit of a grind. i’m avoiding doing that by working on data file parsing / project management utils for the elektron octatrack instead, which is useful, but tangential to what i want to do.
long term would be rad to build software for old synth hardware and the like. sort of like midiquest, but without the price tag.
thanks, although i’m a member already. it’s not really resources that’s the issue. i’ve read Julius Smith’s books in the past etc. in the rust audio discord etc.
i just have a mental block similar to the one i had with rust. avoided learning it for a long while until i made a decision to finally to do it.
i just keep avoiding making the same decision here for some reason. not sure why. probably the old “it’s going to be really hard” thing i had with rust (which turned out to be rubbish, it just took time and repeating stuff over and over and learning from mistakes over and over).
Electronics. Have a hard time thinking about it conceptually. I tend to always take a step out and just find components from other projects and tie them together with code. Would love to design my own PCB.
Creative Writing - Although LLMs seem to be a good help with replacing whatever I am missing. Mostly organizational issues. I enjoy the meat, writing certain scenarios. But fleshing out a whole book I fail from both top down and bottom up methods.
Arduino and, specifically, the ESP8226 (basically an Arduino+Wifi) and ESP32 (Arduino+Wifi+BT) development boards are a fantastic place to start!
For most hobbyist-level electronics, it’s just a matter of becoming familiar enough with using the Arduino IDE to flash your C(-like) code to your board, or using something like MicroPython, then following the wiring instructions freely available online for common parts like servos, LEDs, displays, etc. Every once in a while you may have to reach for something like a transistor, capacitor, or resistor, but those can also be learned in an afternoon.
Google really is your friend! I taught myself hobby electronics over 15 years ago using the same, and they still hold up!
Its just like, in terms of my abilities, I find it easier to grab Arduino + wifi and arduino + ledmatrix and get them speaking together in code, when I should be able to create a simpler, and cheaper circuit of LED's and just use electronic signals to do the work for me.
Python packages written in low-level languages like C/C++ and Rust.
There are currently so many cool open source projects in the python ecosystem that involve writing python packages in low-level languages. But unfortunately, I've barely written any low-level code since university, so these projects are effectively out of reach for me at the moment.
However, I do plan on learning Rust sometime later this year and there are number of smaller projects that I plan on working on!
C is not as hard to get into as you might think, and probably necessary to be at least a little bit comfortable with if you want to write Python libraries or understand Python internals. I would suggest Beej’s guide, if you’re looking for a place to start!
Yeah I have quite a few examples. However, they're pretty niche projects that require a bunch of non-programming domain knowledge such as Japanese linguistics or using a Rust-based machine learning framework to optimize the parameters of a spaced repetition model.
pybind11 is your friend. Focus on small self-contained functions first. For numerical functions you can then take it mostly our of a book. See if you can speed up some simple and common operation within your problem domain of interest.
Reverse engineering. Each time I start I seem to get overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge required, then I decide to check if these skills might be useful in getting a better paid job... and there just doesn't seem to be that much jobs involving these skills, neither in my area nor remotely. And my motivation instantly evaporates because learning all that stuff just to sometimes poke around in some weird program.
I love reverse engineering, but it is strictly a hobby (fortunately? Unfortunately? Honestly I’m not sure!).
Anyway, I’d heartily recommend Microcorruption[1]. It’s really good fun, uses a fairly simply assembly flavour (msp430), and introduces new concepts at a nice cadence.
Shameless plug: I’ve written up a bunch of the solutions in “tutorial form” on my blog[2], but I am incredibly slow at getting new posts out (although I do have the next ~4 levels in nearly-complete drafts).
1. Training my own LLM and other kinds of neural networks, e.g. a network for discriminating cheaters in an online game. I feel like it's very hard for an amateur to get their hands on enough training data.
2. Building my own weather prediction engine. Again, accurate prediction requires highly detailed and accurate data to start from and as far as I can tell that's not publicly available.
I want to make my own music streaming app. Fix all the UI problems, improve discovery, remember all the musical phases I went through.
Unfortunately, you can't just sign up for API access to millions of songs. And the streaming apps either don't provide a playback API, or their TOS limits what you can do with it.
You don't need to do a monolithic design, and kludging things together is just fine. Start with local playback from the server or something equivalently small and work from there. If you need to background play a youtube video and forward the audio stream elsewhere, so be it haha
I've looked into this before. You might be able to pull this off with the YouTube API and Stream Rip using Deezer. Would require a bit of hacking but it could work.
Same! There is a huge knowledge and skill gap between knowing how resistors, capacitors, and transistors work to the point where you can build a little light blinker, which I can do, and actually troubleshooting a (even 1980s through-hole technology) device to find the component that is broken, which is way beyond me.
For kernel dev and eBPF, what kinds of resources or tutorials have you tried in the past? Have you ever tried building something small or contributing to an existing project?
For kernel, I have tried to write simple modules and it's okay. But when I am going deep in the internals, things become really complicated and my memories from OSes exam are rusty.
For eBPF, I wrote a quite simple DNS visibility tools and while I am okay with the logic, I struggled on writing low-level C code that parse the network packet.
Moreover, I found documentation incomplete and really confusing, for example: I would like to understand how the different queues are working and the only solution was to read the code. Right now, anyway, it seems that this aspect is improved; probably it's the time to play again with that!
For Linux kernel dev, I found Linux Kernel Programming: A Comprehensive Guide to Kernel Internals to be a really helpful resource. For eBPF, the early chapters of Brendan Gregg’s BPF Performance Tools gave me the context I needed to get started.
From there, what’s helped me most is a cycle of reading new material, building prototypes and exploring how an open source system solves similar problems. I've definitely hit that wall as systems programming can get confusing fast.
I’ve also noticed that I sometimes get stuck trying to make something perfect before I’ve even started experimenting. Forcing myself to build the lowest-effort version of an idea has been surprisingly productive. Debugging things that don’t work is frustrating, but that failure often reveals insights I wouldn’t have discovered if I were overanalyzing.
You’ve probably seen some of these resources already, but just sharing in case any of it’s useful. I work with eBPF full-time and had many similar challenges along the way, but recommend jumping back in when you have the time.
Look into real-world examples in e.g. The Bugs Book (Lunn et al) or any of Gelman's books. Pyro and PyMC also have good real-world examples in their tutorials.
I once took a stab at Ladybird browser but had to back out due to the complexity of its build chain. I couldn’t get it run on Xcode/CLion on macOS but would love to give it a try once again.
Does anyone have any tips on getting started again?
if you are not already, stay connected to the ladybird dev community. don't complain to them about the difficulty to build, but keep an eye out for others having the same challenges. see if there are others also trying to build on MacOS and share your experience. perhaps together you can overcome the issues.
the majority of ladybird contributors are probably on linux, so mac support may take some extra effort. consider if you can work with a linux container or VM instead.
i just checked their discord, there is a "build-problems" channel, where you may be able to ask for help.
don't give up. one step at a time. we need more alternative browsers, so i hope you will be able to contribute.
note that i am not at all involved in ladybird (i only just joined the discord myself), i am just an interested bystander with some experience mentoring FOSS contributors. i would say the same things for any other project someone is interested in
Have you tried 3D printing? It’s a pretty cheap and forgiving way to get into manufacturing. You’ll get a lot of practice with CAD. Autodesk Fusion 360 is free for hobby use and very good.
For machining, I’d start with wood (wood lathe or router, cheaper than a real metal lathe or mill). Very similar concepts as real machining (feeds and speeds, toolpaths, CAM). Up to you if you want to start manual or CNC. The Shapeoko routers are very nice and relatively affordable (in this domain). You can also find used manual machines locally, but it’s hard to know if they’re in good condition if you don’t know anything.
If you want to read, the Machinery’s Handbook, aka the Bible in any shop, is enormous and contains pretty much anything you’d want to know.
Oh, and get a set of Mitutoyo digital calipers. Expensive but the only way to go, in my opinion. Measuring is fundamental to manufacturing.
I've been trying to make this sort of thing more tractable by modeling the movement of tooling in a CNC machine so as to make 3D parts using Python in OpenSCAD (https://pythonscad.org/):
That said, the only 3D CAD tool where I was able to follow the tutorial (after a fashion) was Dune 3D: https://dune3d.org/ --- if you haven't tried that, I'd highly recommend it.
The usual way to get started w/ molding is to make a vacuum molding machine:
Electronics. Especially the concept of ADC/DACs. Connecting Analog to Digital in to an FPGA, etc. I read a document about PLLs and I barely understand the block diagrams, the math I can't even begin to understand the symbols. I'll start learning from a book, but get to a certain point, then a few days go by, then many days -- by then I feel like I have to restart from the beginning.
Electronics - I recently bought a decent DSO, the "Pinecil" soldering iron, a whole bunch of components. I had some ideas but then sort of hit a wall and lost interest. So now I have a workbench with tools that I will hopefully get back to some day. I think my starting projects were either too difficult, or not that interesting after I implemented them on a breadboard.
Plasma simulation - I really want to understand how fusion and advanced propulsion systems can be simulated and maybe even contribute in some way. E.g. The fusion propulsion being developed by Helicity Space is very interesting. I wish I knew enough to understand their work and maybe do some simulations myself. I tried doing this "Particle In Cell" course I found online but quickly lost interest after a week or so.
I guess I just have a wide variety of interests that come and go. Some of these just seem to be passing interests. I have sort of learned to live with that.
Game dev. I like the idea of programming the core loops, but cannot fathom getting into assets and art design as I do not have a single artistic bone in my body
Try Pico-8 - The low pixel approach makes it so that those of us with lower artistic abilities don't have to focus on the art since everything is pixelated as the baseline. (Not to say that people aren't doing insane art with it anyways, but the baseline is much lower quality than something like Unreal).
What is out of reach for me is space to perform the hobbies.
I have welders, metal and woodworking equipment, 3d printers, auto mechanic tools, etc and years of experience and knowledge and interest in building stuff. But I have only a tiny garage to work from. I don’t really have room to do much so it feels like waste.
I’ve looked into renting a small shop but Seattle is so expensive that renting even a one car sized shop space is prohibitively expensive for a hobby (for my income level).
I’m sure I could turn a profit with my work on the side but then it’s a job and you have monthly overhead expenses to cover and all the stresses that come from that.
What is even the actionable step to take? Make more money? That usually comes with less time unfortunately.
Moving away to somewhere I can afford a larger workshop at home was the plan until return to office happened for me.
Surely there is a makerspace in Seattle? The one near me in Atlanta has all the things you mentioned and more, plus an abundance of space, a neat community, and classes for most skills you could use there
A useful tool for me would be an app/site that instantly provides a short list of available events/activities that a) are happening soon, b) match/complement my unique set of interests and c) is in reasonable geographic proximity.
and I've been trying to read through _METAFONT: The Program_ and https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/ and I keep wondering if I shouldn't just try scripting Inkscape....
I want to do a couple of different things, and not sure if they all fit in one project or no:
Two things and they are both grinds more than anything else and hard to squeeze time in with work, travel, exercise and just spending time with my wife.
The first is traditional machine learning - not “AI”. I know what I don’t know and I can fake it well enough to talk to a subject matter expert when leading projects and I have a dual math/cs major from three decades ago. But it would take years to be good enough to be at the same level of seniority I am in my existing niche.
The second is more important for my life is learn Spanish well enough to be conversationally fluent. I know some. But my wife and I are going to start living in Costa Rica during the winter and I want to actually learn it to embrace being thier.
> But my wife and I are going to start living in Costa Rica during the winter and I want to actually learn it to embrace being thier.
Tangential thing: years ago, a guy in a hedge fund I was working at left this very high-paying job and lifted and shifted his family to Costa Rica. He shared that his motivation was being able to spend more time with his kids (which is a absolutely fantastic goal). I think I have heard a few more examples of this and your comment is an addition. What is it about Costa Rica? I can obviously google the pros and cons of Costa Rica from a blog or whatever, but I want to directly hear from someone who presumably has been on the ground and shares the HN mindset, whatever that might be.
I work remotely at a cloud consulting company for company context.
First time zone and proximity to the US and more specifically for me, short flights from cities we consider “home” - Orlando where I live and Atlanta where we are from and where many of our friends and adult sons live.
Second it’s safe, they don’t even have a military,they have a good public health system, it’s relatively easy to become a permanent resident and have access to both their public health care system (caja) and private health care.
Nice apartments and AirBnbs in San Jose are really affordable - $1500-$2500 a month.
You aren’t going to find that combination anywhere else in US time zones besides Panama City Panama and from what I read, it is much more urban, crowded and less tranquil than San Jose Costa Rica.
We went to Costa Rica this year on vacation (Manuel Antonio). Next year we are going back twice - once for a week to get a local “relocation” guide to take us around the different neighborhoods and then going back for a month once we know the lay of the land.
So it’s really not lifting and shifting for us. We pack everything we own and put them in suitcases and put our condotel unit in the rental pool to offset our mortgage and HOA fees when we are gone for months. We did that domestically for almost a year between late 2022-late 2023
I specialize in computer networking in my day job. Most of what I do is Cisco routers, Cisco switches, and Cisco firewalls. I would be interested in learning more about cellular networks. I haven't put any effort into exploring this for myself. If there is a track similar to CCNA → CCNP → CCIE then it isn't well-known (well, not known to me).
Same background as me, however I moved into cellular/mobile - not really any official routes I know of in the industry, certainly not like a Cisco track.
Typical route is work at a Telco or IoT company as Network Eng or Developer and naturally pivot into telco learning on the job.
Vendors will run training courses when you buy their kit which helps a little, but it’s mostly self learning or on the job.
I love the idea of computational experiments that replace testing on animals. Reading about what we do to animals in the name of science is heart breaking, but learning there are computational models and experiments being developed to take place of animal cruelty is exciting. However, such projects feel overwhelming given I know next to nothing about biology, and I'm not sure spending the time learning is worth the payout given my age and other areas of expertise.
The reason we use animal models is that we don’t know enough about animal biology to be confident we can simulate it accurately.
However, computational tools that help biologists “replace, reduce, and refine” animal experiments are helpful. That catchphrase is a good one to Google to look for previous efforts.
Building computational tools to help scientists improve the design of necessary animal experiments is certainly worth working on.
Nothing intellectually, but some things are financially, spatially, and/or temporally out of reach. A long term goal of mine has been to make machines which are decently precise with wide dynamic range measurement capabilities for all of the SI base units & some commonly-used derived units. Somewhere in the 6-8 digits of dynamic range for each.
E.g. be able to measure distances over a 50cm range to a resolution of ±500nm. Easy for a coordinate measuring machine, very challenging and expensive to DIY.
Validating anything I build means finding a calibration lab willing to check it, which is also rather pricey. I don't have the space, the time, or the money to do this.
I saw an article recently on a shock absorbing material and a biohacking method of manufacturing it with a bioreactor. I’d love to pick up something like that.
That and
Effective 3D printing or hobby manufacturing.
I love reading about projects where someone has taken a combination of used bicycles, bicycle parts, metal tubing, sometimes batteries & electric motors, aerodynamic skins, and built something new: a bike for transport, a recumbent, something aerodynamic, something light, something electric.
I wish I had the project space, the skills (welding, mechanical), and the tools to build human and electric powered bikes.
Running with an idea and starting a business. Some people are naturally entrepreneurs, but I don't feel that I have the bug for it. I'd like to find a niche in soft robotic actuation and run with it, renting a garage somewhere in my hometown after I finish my PhD.
I wish I could devote to build my dream programming language (https://tablam.org) that has several hard questions and troubles (mainly I wanna rebuild in full something like FoxPro).
But, there are things I truly have dream but have dedicated almost not effort trying:
* Play (rock) bass
* Draw comic/manga style. I wish to make histories and think I could do it but refuse to write plain words (idiot!).
I recently gave up on a native JavaScript only PTY. You absolutely needs third party binaries to make use of OS APIs, namely open_pty and fork_pty from pty.h in posix and some C# functions for ConPTY on Windows. Xterm.js already does this. The only pure JavaScript solution would be for Xterm.js to become a core Node.js API module.
Presentations, including video ones. The ideas feel pretty clear in the head long before you can describe it in a manner which ideally could be a pleasure to watch. What tooling to use, how to work with all that, how to even plan the layout of words, scenes, images seems pretty puzzling, and solutions are like a slow walk in a dark room.
I'd recommend Beyond Bullet Points by B. Atkinson; it's a book about PowerPoint but teaches you how to synthesize presentations, including videos and in-person presentations.
As far as career upgrades, this book was decisive for me in making the lightbulb go off so I could share my vision with others and have them see it, too.
Storytelling is the skill you're looking for. Visual aids and recording/editing are incidental.
What makes presentations, video essays, etc, great is having a great story to tell.
It's all about the archetype of the hero, and plot arch (normal life -> problem -> departure -> toll -> return).
You have to present people with a reason to embark on the story - which is the reason the 'hero' leaves on their journey; a clear understanding of what's at stake, the price to be paid, the confrontation and the return to a new, better normal.
One option is to put your thoughts down in great detail on paper, then feed it into AI and ask it to design you a slideshow with text and suggestions for visuals.
Currently, just making a game. I have finished like one game in my life. There is something about the huge scope of things I need to know from music to UI to art that just seems daunting. I tried to do a couple game jams but I am now of the opinion that is too much stress for me.
I think game jams are a bit overrated, but when you're feeling stuck they're great for getting unstuck. For my big passion projects I get hung up on all the peripheral things you mention like music and art too, but game jams force you to move past those things quickly and learn the value of terrible placeholders and horrific hacks in service of maintaining momentum.
Check out the Week Sauce Jam [0]. You still make a game in seven days, but it can be any seven days of the month; there's no voting or ranking either. Jams are typically too stressful for me too, but this one is deliberately as low-pressure as possible, you can take on as much or as little accountability as you want, and release whatever you have done with no judgement.
There is a tiny airport near my house for small personal planes. I see them through my office window above the tree line. I'd love to build a dashboard/screen on my desk to easily identify each aircraft. Ideally something more complicated than querying an existing api. Radar?
If the airplanes have ADSB transponder you can buy a cheap RTLSDR dongle and get data from there.
Another way, can be to record ATC conversations, translate them with an LLM and then track the airplane properly. This is harder and can be problematic from a legal standpoint (listening ATC is illegal in some countries)
I'd like to learn about malware analysis and threat intelligence, especially dealing with zero-days and vulnerability exploitation and tracking how APTs do that.
I'm also interested in electronics, like building my own drone.
Playing music. I love playing, but my sense of rhythm is not quite there and I make mistakes too easily, plus a few years ago I had some nerve issues that makes it that much more difficult to move my fingers in the exact way I need to play music.
Messing with EEG headsets, like the ones by OpenBCI. Being able to perform some operations by just thinking about them sounds so incredibly cool - I've been thinking about this for several years, but it looks like quite an expensive hobby.
As an ex-EEG researcher I can say that acquiring an EEG device is probably the least difficult thing. EEG signals are messy, not reliable and hard to interpret. Without a solid foundation in cognitive psychophysiology you won't have a lot of fun with an EEG device. So, before investing a lot of money into an EEG device you should watch a beginner course on cognitive psychophysiology or get some literature to get the basics down.
On the other hand, you could probably hack a cheap ECG device to measure EEG signals.
I'd like to build an e2e encrypted distributed version control system and platform with homomorphic encryption. Think, something like git and github, that's end to end encrypted.
What is the threat model against which you are protecting version control? It seems like you are either thinking about using GitHub as just a backup system, which is almost certainly better solved by actual encrypted backups, or posting encrypted patches to a mailing list to just collaborate with your friends
1. I'd like to store code without a company using my code to train their language model.
2. I'd like to store code without a company deciding my code's merit (Github removing youtube-dl, Sourcehut not allowing crypto projects, etc).
3. Something about storing private code on a closed source forge feels wrong. It also feels wrong that company can read my code, and any of its employees can.
I can code a little but I've never done a large project. I want to create something like softimage XSI but open source. a 3D program that is built entirely around usability, because the paid options are too expensive and blender's usability pisses me off.
I recently built an optical encoder from scratch, and it was a ton of fun. More recently I've been looking into how force feedback works, and I'm currently gearing up to implement it using a motor/encoder/controller setup and ODrive.
The problem with firearms is of course the "thought crime" aspect of the recent/current? BATF stance on making a firearm w/o an FFL, using it, and selling it, as well as ITAR concerns.
Naturally, there are DefCAD/Defense Distributed and the like and a couple of very active subreddits/forums and some new developments/techniques.
Arguably, 1st Amendment + 2nd Amendment == the right to 3D print firearms, but of course, no one aside from Cody Wilson wants to be the poster child for that court case, note the example made of Philip Luty in England and his writings.
For internal combustion engines, small models are popular things (have you at least purchased a Revell Visible V8 model?)
"Am I a dinosaur?" and "Is anyone else struggling with this?" I think you're asking the most honest questions in our industry. Thank you for this thread.
My skill that often feels "out of reach" is building a truly great Go-to-Market machine.
I'm a product-obsessed founder. I can spend all day architecting our 'Workspace OS' or fine-tuning our AI, MAKi. But when it comes to sales funnels, marketing channels, and building a repeatable sales process, my brain just fogs over. I truly feel like I wasn't born with the "sales gene."
After 10 years, multiple pivots, and learning to survive like a cockroach, here's the only method I've found for tackling any skill that feels too big: Make it small.
1. Don't read 20 books; talk to one person. I find one person who is great at it and just ask: "What is the very first, smallest thing you would do?"
2. Don't build a complex system; do one dumb, simple action. I don't try to build the perfect marketing funnel. I write one LinkedIn post. I send one cold email. The goal isn't to succeed, it's just to start and get a single data point.
3. Don't guess what the market wants; ask one customer. I ask, "How did you really find us?" Their answer is always more valuable than a market research report.
4. Don't try to master it in a week; just survive to the next day. The goal is just to learn one thing today, so I can be slightly less clueless tomorrow.
I don't think any of us have the "right brain" for everything. But cockroaches don't have big brains either. They just keep moving, adapting, and refuse to die.
We just need to find the next small, tangible step. That's how we get unstuck.
This is quite cool. The CPU has only four instructions, which can be applied to immediate arguments or run in sequence to get six more, which can then be used to write real programs!
My time to shine! I'm a computer programmer but I've been making music digitally for about 15 years now
The software you want is called a DAW - Digital Audio Workstation. There are 300 DAWs, you need to find the one that fits your 'style' or 'workflow'. There are a multitude of paradigms, as making music is not a single technique.
Once you find your DAW, my recommendation is to just make lots of music. Make the music you imagine in your head. Make the tracks that don't exist but you wish they did. Your first 100-200-300 tracks will all be extremely crappy in hindsight, but when you finish them you'll think they are, at the time, a magnum opus each. Keep iterating that process over and over and after many years, you'll start making something that you'll feel semi-proud enough to be able to show your friends!
Your enthusiasm is shining through. For someone wanting to do exactly what you said "just make lots of music. Make the music you imagine in your head." and faced with the issue of "There are 300 DAWs, you need to find the one that fits your 'style' or 'workflow'.", how do I choose? I am not a music maker, I have never made music - I would like to though. I don't even have a style or workflow. I don't know how to start.
I would buy a synth and learn it as you would any other instrument, something on the simpler side and not a work station or the like so you can focus on it more as an instrument. Modern technology makes it all to easy to just have an entire electronic music studio which is a great deal to learn and few are going to ever learn any of it well if they start with a full studio. Build out from there, once you are getting the hang of the synth install a DAW or something to record with on your computer and start learning that, record an entire album worth of songs with just that one synth. I always liked using SoX as a multitrack recorder, ecasound was nice as well, kept things more about making music instead of being an engineer.
Back when I was more active with electronic music I would do an entire album worth of tracks with each new synth I got, software or hardware, good way to learn a synth.
I've been having a lot of fun getting started with Max/MSP following Cipriani & Giri's "Electronic Music And Sound Design" books. Max is a paid program though; Pure Data is similar but open source.
Fastmail is fantastic, has a standards compliant calendar, a notes space, webdav, and a pretty decent mobile app
I still have a Gmail address because getting a bazillion people to update their address books is a monster problem but otherwise I'm glad I at least halfway won't lose my digital life if some Google bot decided it doesn't like me
Gold recovery from scrap circuit boards and electroplating solution. I worked in a PCB shop until 1998 and have a small collection of scrap that I would like to process.
1) Revisiting one of my past projects, using Hashcash as a rate limiter. The original one I worked with was Camram/2 Penny Blue, which embedded proof-of-work tokens in an email message as an anti-spam method. It was the wrong solution, and proof-of-work tokens should be embedded in the protocol itself, which would enable dynamic pricing based on reputation.
Why I'm not doing it: I'm not sure it would be accepted. I took a lot of lumps for trying to use Hashcash in email, and I'm not sure I want to go through that again, but it does have value. Embedding proof-of-work puzzles in a protocol is a great way to limit abusive requests and patterns. SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS are easy to modify and probably could be done via a proxy. I'm not sure how easy it is to change the SSH protocol, but that would be useful as well.
2) Low-income living space electrification.
I tested this idea out on a friend who works for a Housing Authority, and their eyes lit up. However, they warned me that it would take a few years for everyone to sign off on it.
The original idea was to provide a kit, a bag of parts, that an affordable housing authority could use to improve living quarters and housing for low-income people, and eliminate/reduce the use of gas.
a) Replacing gas stoves with a set of three induction plates. The significant challenges are filling the void created by the original stove, ensuring sufficient power to operate the induction plates, and addressing how to handle the absence of an oven.
b) Filling the hole is easy. This is something a halfway decent carpenter could do, or we could provide an adjustable-size box that fits in such a space, not quite an IKEA flat-pack but roughly similar.
c) Power is a little more difficult. One company is solving this problem by putting in a battery to handle the load. This is possible, but the baseline cost would now be approximately $2,000, just for the parts.
d) window mount heat pump. New York City has funded in-window heat pumps as part of a design project. The problem is they run around $4,000 to $6,000, but an ordinary handyman could install them.
3) Recycling car batteries from crashed vehicles into home power banks.
This project is a bit of a stretch for me. I know people are doing this, but not in the States as far as I can tell. The off-grid solar community has a variety of inverters and solar chargers that may be suitable for this kind of situation, but I don't have enough knowledge.
4) Ad hoc virtual power plants
Many people have rooftop solar. The grid gets overfull on bright sunny days. People who can't have solar often have space for batteries. Work out the instrumentation and accounting so that solar producers can charge batteries, and everybody gets compensated when the grid demands the battery's power.
It seems to me that this would be a great application of distributed system concepts, providing a win for the local community and grid resiliency.
I need a second life to make progress on these ideas
Interestingly, just yesterday I found out 4 already exists, but it's inverse of what you're thinking: top up excess battery capacity overnight, when grid prices are low, and then resell during the day when purchase prices are high.
I think the economic problem is that while there /may/ be overproduction during the day, the day is the only time other than early-mid evening when there is significant demand.
You would effectively be targeting the early-mid evening demand, assuming there was overproduction during the day, and with the current cost of batteries, their installation, and their replacement, I can't see the numbers working out.
I would love for battery prices to come down enough to make something like this possible though.
Yes, item 4 does exist. Tesla and Sunrun both have virtual power plants. Tesla operates as a peaker plant, while Sunrun is a base-load plant.
What I want is different in terms of its organization. The intention is to establish a local community microgrid that anyone with the necessary equipment can participate in. I think the biggest problem will be the accounting, but that's my blind spot
Working. In my 30 years employed I've managed to invest enough to make up a little. I've probably 24 years left. I think I can more than double my 401k in that time but that still won't be 1M
If crypto keeps going up there's a chance my 3k investment in it eclipses my 40yr 401k so I'm hoping for that....
Automate office workers who do repetitive tasks. The likes of generalagents.com are getting close, perhaps they are even a bit worried about how much disruption is about to happen so haven't released it yet.
I've had this idea forever, and mentioned it here many, many times... the BitGrid, which is an FPGA chip without all the routing and long lines, but with added latching so you can banish timing constraints.
I honestly think it could be as important/useful as Von Neumann's CPU architecture, for AI and other highly parallel compute tasks. Every time I start to work on it, something stops me.
For instance, last week I had a good chat with Github Copilot about it, and it was way too nice and encouraging for comfort[2] Unfortunately, you need a Copilot account to read the chat I shared. 8(
I was hoping to get it into TinyTapeout, but they're now only in Europe. 8(
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] https://github.com/copilot/share/086351a0-0ac0-80a7-9802-144...
Hobby electronics & robotics. I can make an LED blink on a ESP8266 (it's been a while), but that's it. I'd like to get more familiar with a multimeter, figuring out broken kids toys, etc. but it's a bit daunting. Maybe there's too many options and not enough constraints. I'm not sure.
This gotta come up with a project you want for yourself and make it. I remember soldering one of those 2x16 LCD screens and it had a short so it would start smoking to designing/3D printing my own quadruped with an IMU/navigation. I did cheat and not use inverse kinematics, I watched videos on other insect-style quads walking and I programmed it manually.
I think main gotcha is power distribution and shared ground eg. using a boost converter or regulator to boost/downgrade voltage and which servos/sensors uses what. Later have to be concerned with too much current being drawn but yeah.
I used these green proto boards you can solder onto as a step up above breadboard but not my own PCB.
I have produced the magical blue smoke multiple times out of my own mistakes. It’s part of the process!
See my previous comment here for how to get started - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33628025
I highly recommend downloading Understanding Signals with the Propscope from Parallax (available for free online) and following the tutorials from it with an Arduino+Analog Discovery 2/3 device. You can use the Digilent "Real Analog" learning course along with it - https://digilent.com/reference/learn/courses/real-analog/sta...
The real motivation in Electronics comes from understanding in visual form (using a Oscilloscope/Multimeter etc.) how things work in a circuit and how your calculations match up to what you see on the screen. Even as simple as the beginner LED circuit can teach you a lot when you use a potentiometer and see how voltage/current graphs change.
Thanks a lot for the recommendations.
Would you recommend the Real Analog course independently?
What does the Propscope one offer that Real Analog doesn’t? The Propscope one looks kinda old so I was wondering what I’d miss if I only used Real Analog.
Also not sure if there’s a parts kit for the Propscope one that I can buy.
Sure, you can do the "Real Analog" course independently. Study it with a Parts Kit from Digilent+Analog Discovery 2/3 device(AD2/AD3)+Arduino board. That would be a nice entry point into Electronics+Embedded Systems.
I was referring to the tutorial pdf of Understanding Signals with Propscope containing very nice step-by-step lessons in using a USB Oscilloscope for measuring various circuit parameters. The Propscope itself is very old/underpowered (not being sold anymore) and not needed. You just use AD2/AD3 with its Waveforms software to do the same experiments with any board.
Note that if you use a AVR-based Arduino you can learn to program at the higher Arduino API/library level and then at the lower direct AVR level both with the same board. For learning Arduino Programming see Exploring Arduino by Jeremy Blum and for direct AVR programming see Make: AVR Programming by Elliot Williams.
Thanks for the tips.
I placed an order for the AD3+Parts Kit and excited to dive in!
Nice. You also need to get the BNC Adapter board and probes for AD3 (available separately or as part of the pro bundle). Might also want to take a look at other available adapters for AD3.
AD3 resources (docs/tutorials/accessories/books etc.) - https://digilent.com/reference/test-and-measurement/analog-d...
For robotics, I recently came across this course to learn the basics: https://github.com/henki-robotics/robotics_essentials_ros2. Haven't started it yet though.
I'm starting out as well. If you prefer coding in python, raspberry pi or anything adafruit is a good place to start. If you're cool with c/c++ Arduino ecosystem is quite mature . I decided to stick to the former so it's a less steeper learning curve for me and my little one. Get a BBC Micro:bit v2 and/or a CircuitPlayground Express. Both have a ton of sensors on board (temp, tilt, light, humidity etc) and some leds/neo-pixels to play around. Once you play with some of that, and want to get your hands dirty with breadboarding and soldering, get a basic kit (e.g. raspberry pi pico etc) and use MakeCode to try out some simple circuits with your microbit or circuitplayground express as the signal provider, play with servos, hobby motors, do some basic projects. Once you feel you're a bit proficient, might one to check out LeRobot for an open source robotic arm that you could train with reinfocement learning.. this is not exhaustive or the only path, there's many others, this is just my 2cents. Hope this helps!
For this, what takes a while is to just tinker and fry components several times. Get a breadboard, get several sensors, try to design something and iterate on your design. Plan to fry sensors and IC's. Also helps to read some basic electrical theory and know what the role of different components are.
The way I got proficient is with hobbyist PCB design. What helped me is starting with schematics and datasheets and planning to finish with an assembled board. I started designing PCB's and having them assembled with JLCPCB (quite cheap: $20 or so for a run of 5 boards; $120-$150 fully assembled). I fried 2 boards before the 3rd rev booted up, then from there it's optimization. I consider the $200/mo or so in PCBA, whether boards work or not, to be my "EE education" -- cost efficient compared to university fees! And $200 is sort of like the "exam," it's costly enough to make me really think twice about component selection/placement/etc.
Not saying that's the approach you want to take because that might be hardcore / not someplace you want to get to. But I spent a long long time really wondering how electricity really works and like why you need capacitors, inductors, op-amps, etc. It never made sense to me until I created my own schematic, chose my own parts, and understood why I chose the parts I did and connected them the way I did.
This just reinforces the fact that it's inaccessible. There's no way I'm literally throwing $200 a month in the trash on a hobby.
$200 is for assembled boards. I learned electronics and spent about $200 on it in two years, that includes cheapest soldering iron. Don't order assembled boards when you are starting. Order cheapest bluepill (STM32F103C8T6) or non-original arduino clone and start on breadboard with that. Make pcb's only when you're ready to learn more. Expect that your first one will not work or will require some "rewiring", but second one may already work. You might start with some cheap through-hole components, they are a little easier to re-wire or re-solder, it's a good idea to put your first microcontroller in socket.
Ah alright that makes more sense, I missed that part, my bad.
I'm a EE masters student and I also want to reinforce how inaccessible EE is and that I don't really recommend it as a hobby. EE is a very mature field and it's very math heavy for a reason. The second you move past the hobby boards, stuff becomes really difficult and really expensive really fast. If your end goal is to create toys for kids, then it's fine as a hobby. But without the formal training and lab access you are going to struggle to get past that point so it's pretty much impossible to turn the hobby into something more. Unlike software, where tinkering genuinely has the possibility of turning your side projects into careers. Hell, if you don't live in EE hotspot locations, I wouldn't even recommend it as a career anymore. Software is where it's at, even in the age of AI.
That's only for the heavy analog stuff. If you're into the more modern digital stuff, you basically never for any reason need to breadboard prototype, everything can be done with I2C modules and the like.
Burning a part is incredibly rare with this kind of stuff, if you're willing to put in the time to learn about it before actually building it.
did you understand theory deeply first like Kirchhoff , node analysis
Check out the Arduino starter kit. This is how I started with electrics. It comes with everything you need including a great book which walks you through everything. Very much worth the money.
https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-mu...
Thanks for the link! This looks perfect for what I'm looking for.
I have found the Make: Electronics series of books by Charles Platt to be a good mix of basics / fundamentals and fun projects.
You should check out Ben Eater's channel on YouTube. He has a series about building an 8 bit computer from scratch + another one about building a 6502-based computer. It's very very accessible if you know some really basic hardware stuff (and for the things that you don't know already, he gives enough context to start googling).
Highly recommend LeRobot.
I want to help small businesses in my area, those who want it, with technology solutions that can improve things (and in-turn learn about the needs of real small businesses). I can pretty much do full-stack (ranging from something basic that improves things for them to something elaborate like backend, UI, AWS, K8S etc). However, I don't have any idea how to identify customers, approach them, price my work fairly, deal with wiring/hardware, deal with the local laws regarding running a non-full-time business etc. I guess what I'm after is that end-of-the-tunnel satisfaction in helping others using technology but a pretty long tunnel is getting in the way :)
What I've learnt is that it's for businesses to productize SME solutions unless they're dirt cheap or free, but getting hired as a consultant (who actually adds value) is always an option. It need not be done for compensation either initially - you just want to build trust with the folks, advise them, maybe sit with them and evaluate already existing technical solutions on the market (instead of building your own!).
If you're in the US, you could just set up an LLC if you find some potential customers through the above method, very straightforward. Or you could set up the equivalent of a sole proprietorship in Europe if you're based here.
Got it, thanks!
Most small businesses don’t need UI, etc. They need lots of integration work though. Like my friend who has a jewelry business needed help integrating Etsy orders to Asana which we did using Zapier.
So lot less custom code and more linking things software focused on their specific needs.
Thats good to know - I love integration. The most fun I had was to design and build a ci/cd setup for my team (which spread to other teams). I guess I am a plumber at heart.
I am fascinated by the idea of building something like the Lisp Machines or Smalltalk 80 from scratch. Build a Forth in assembly, build a Lisp in Forth, build an OS and computing environment in Lisp. AOT-compile only the Forth interpreter, load and compile the rest from source during system boot, maybe with later stages optimizing the previous stages as the system is assembling itself.
I imagine two languages - Langsam and Schnell - intertwined in some sort of yin-yang fashion. Langsam is slow, dynamic, interpreted, Schnell is fast, static, compiled. Both would be LISPs. Schnell would be implemented as a library in Langsam. If you said (define (add x y) (+ x y)) in Langsam, you would get a Langsam function. If you said (s:define (add (x int) (y int)) (+ x y)) in Langsam, you would get a Langsam function which is a wrapper over a JIT-compiled Schnell function. If you invoke it, the wrapper takes care of the FFI, execution happens at C speed. Most of the complexity typical of a low-level compiled language could be moved into Langsam. I could have sophisticated type systems and C++ template like code generation implemented in a comfortable high level language.
This latter part I managed to partially implement in Clojure and it works (via LLVM), it would be just too much effort to get it completed.
> Build a Forth in assembly, build a Lisp in Forth
You might already know it, but Dusk OS[1], which is a Forth, has a Lisp implementation[2] which includes a native code compiler for i386, amd64, arm, risc-v and m68k. You might consider it a good starting point for your project.
[1]: http://duskos.org/
[2]: https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/item/fs/doc/co...
fyi
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/TopicsReflection.html
I don’t like the language names but I get why you chose them.
Being able to spontaneously speak with people and slow thinking. I am ok at writing with people, because it gives me time to think and refine my message. But I really suck at live events and talking to people in real life. Did anyone overcome it? And how?
For very clear, very specific advice, succeedsocially.com is the best website I’ve ever seen.
Besides that, you just need practice and if applicable a bit of therapy. Practice comes with interacting with a lot of people until it seems easy. Therapy clears some of the roadblocks that might hamper you.
For me, it was a skill issue.Most people learn it when very young. Just repeated practice helped... and someone close to me coached me on things that seemed common sense to others, but were counterintuitive to me. But over time, my neurons rewired themselves. I'm fairly good at small talk now. People dont believe me when I say I couldn't even order pizza over the phone at one point.
Are you young enough to have grown up in a house without a land line by chance?
I think land lines are where many current adults (who grew up before cell phones were ubiquitous) learned a lot of that common sense, because in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever picked up the phone first - chatty mothers, asshole brothers, mostly-deaf grandfathers, etc.
Before land line phones, in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever answered the door first.
can you share some of the things that seemed common sense to others?
Could you share what you practiced that helped you?
The French have a term for this, "the wit of the staircase" where one doesn't think of the clever rejoinder until heading upstairs to bed later that evening.
I've found asking folks about themselves, trying to get their story works best as a start, then if they reciprocate, things should flow naturally from there.
Seriously, make it a habit to say “Good morning” or “Good evening” with a warm smile the first time you make eye contact with another guest at a hotel, whether it’s during check-in or at breakfast. This is especially important if you’re staying more than a few days. Once you’ve crossed paths with someone three times without saying a word, starting a conversation later becomes both unlikely and a bit awkward.
> But I really suck at live events and talking to people in real life. Did anyone overcome it? And how?
Yes. This is a learned skill.
Start by leaving your house every day and don't come home until you talk to 10 people you don't know. Do this every day for a month.
And yes, I did this.
Any advice you get is going to sound rudimentary, as with much of life advice. Now that I've put a disclaimer, here is what helped me the most:
When you are shy, there is sometimes the one kind person that introduces you/breaks the ice to others. You love this person because they lubricated the social interaction. I harness this feeling of being saved by pretending that everyone around me is the shy person waiting for someone to break the ice. I frame this internally as myself doing the shy others a huge favor that they'll appreciate. I want to be "that guy" that helped people feel included and involved.
I used to do this consciously. At this point, I rarely have to invoke this thought as I've now put in the reps and it's easier.
Tldr: pretend you're being a social savior and repeated practice
For years I had a little project here to rebuild the iPod Nano 7g in Open Source Hardware and software. Not that small, but at least in the same size category (a lot smaller than the smallest smartphone).
The iPod nano 7g is not designed to last forever... it is hard to repair - the battery can be replaced but the internal 16GB flash memory is a job for professionals.
There are lots of <= 4 inch Android players which could simply run an app, but these are draining a battery so fast after a while it isn't even close to the experience of a specific device.
The main pain point is controlling the device via headphone remote. The iPod supports play/pause, next, prev, vol+, vol- and fast-forward as well as rewind. Nothing comes close to this in android.
However, I was aiming to take one of the newer RISC-V boards with USB-C (like LicheeRV Nano or Luckfox Lyra), add a 2.4 inch display and a battery + gauge to it and 3D print a case, work out a UI via LVGL, but having 2 children is just too time consuming for such a project.
Sticking to my iPod Nano 7g hopefully lasts another 5 years until I can focus on it again :-)
I don't know anything about electronics design, but I'm really into backpacking so a high efficiency battery system with a solar panel is really interesting to me. I came across this project[1], and wanted to improve upon it for my usecase. I want to add the ability to have multiple 21700 cells in a lightweight charger, instead of a single cell with a builtin USB charger. I want to learn more electronics, but it definitely feels like a multiyear process, and it'd be nice to shortcut it for the projects I'm interested in.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/myog/comments/1k3stln/ultralight_13...
Learning just enough for your needs is a valid approach to learning electronics design, unless you're planning on becoming an actual EE.
It provides a huge amount of self-motivation and as much as I hate to admit it (as a one-time electronics design engineer), you can skip a lot of the middle-layer concepts. Sure, you should understand Ohm's law and what basic components (resistors, capacitors, transistors) do, but you can jump from that right into understanding how a battery charger works without having to understand how the components actually work.
The hard part is finding good tutorial material that starts at the right level: most of the professionally written stuff presupposes that you're either already an EE, or have one at your disposal to translate things for you.
Such is life in STEM.
Edit: And EE is genuinely involved.
There's a few that come to mind, but none that feel actually as daunting intellectually as much as they are qualified by other factors.
I'd like to go from indoor bouldering to rock climbing, but coordinating with a belayer doesn't seem super interesting and otherwise it's just a matter of expense, gear, and a slight pivot in my leisure time to start going at it.
Otherwise, the skill that seems most out of reach is keeping a job for longer than a year. I'm in a decent spot now, after a year and a half prior of being unemployed, and I feel like this might be my last real shot at a career of any kind. Other people seem to handle it fine, but this is the thing that seems most out of reach. Unlike engineering problems that are made up of abstractions with ways to break them down and piece together systems, keeping a job is as opaque of an abstraction as I'm aware of, that doesn't necessarily depend on a measurable skill or even on anything within one's control. I've never once felt stability or been able to bet on money coming in next year, and if I had the money for a mortgage, I'd be stopped by the knowledge I can't count on an income flow at any time in the future. I'm thankful for what I have and what I've learned nonetheless.
I haven't done much climbing at all but I would encourage you to go for it. Being outside is a whole different level and a great excuse to spend time in nature.
Start by talking to people at your bouldering gym. If you hear anyone discussing going out climbing, ask if you can tag along and just watch for a few times. Watch some videos about climbing basics to get an overall feel for it and some of the concepts and terminology. I'd say you should start out "top roping" on smaller walls. As for equipment for that you don't need much especially since your partner will probably have a rope and gear to build an anchor, etc. You'll need, shoes, a harness, and a helmet.
Going from gym bouldering to outdoor climbing _does_ require being a little more social. It's a minimum 2-person sport usually. But going as a small group and rotating roles and just hanging out watching works too.) You just need to find people you like hanging out with and you can trust. (If you don't find them at your gym, try another or ask around at outdoor stores, your local university rec department, etc.)
About jobs, I can't help you. I tend to stay too long if anything.
Thanks for the advice! After re-reading my comment, I should have articulated the thought differently. I've already been taking the path you and the sibling commenter described, all the variables are already more or less in-place, and I already have a strong love of the outdoors, long day hikes with sketchy scrambles, many wall climbers met, invitations received, etc.. So what I meant was, "One of the things I'd like to do is outdoor climbing, but I have a pretty clear path with no particular hurdles in the way of going for it, it's not as abstract as not getting fired or laid off from a job"
That said, I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless; more encouragement to get out and do hard, rewarding things, especially social things, should never be frowned upon.
Motivation and prioritization can be hard!
Personally, I love hiking. I like getting out in nature, seeing all the things I can observe along the way, and getting good exercise. That being said, I don't get up and go on my own as often as I'd like. My wife OTOH, also loves hiking but is adamant about going once or twice every weekend if at all possible. So, I take advantage of that extrinsic motivation and am the better for it.
I would encourage you to speak to the wall first in case they run outdoor sessions or see if there are any clubs in your area. This assumes you live in an area with some outdoor climbing. Outdoor bouldering can be done with little equipment, but you need to start way easier than what you'd do at the wall. The ground is surprisingly hard and I've seen someone break their ankle right in front of me a few times and it does not look fun.
Outdoor sport climbing is pretty easy to get into if you have bolted climbing in your area, but as you get higher the ground gets even harder so make sure you know what you're doing. Lots of good books and resources available.
If you really want to get into trad climbing be prepared for a longer apprenticeship, take your time and start easy.
Yep, this is pretty much the process I had in mind for going about it, and yes all the other variables are conveniently in place. I have a lot of respect for nature, mountains, and difficult potentially dangerous recreational sports, so I don't mean to trivialize the endeavor. I should have articulated the thought in a slightly different way, such that I meant something more akin to "One of the things I'd like to pursue is outdoor climbing, but I have a sense of the path to doing that, it's not as much of a mystery as this other thing"
There's a certain change of perspective with modern AI (by "modern" I mean Resnet and beyond). When I was deep into neural nets in the 1990s, they weren't that large, and I would think of them in terms of the number of weights and nodes - but modern deep learning seems to have has moved up a few levels of abstraction. (I stepped away from the field for a while). And there's a certain understanding people seem to have now regarding the "gradient flow" through the net and why certain architectures work well (Resnet, Unets etc). I must say I'm finding it tricky to shift into this new level of thinking. Also Transformers - still looking for an intuitive sense of how they work, haha.
3Blue1Brown's youtube channel has a lot of visualizations that may help. Transformers are video #6 in his neural networks playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_6700...
Game development.
I’ll admit that part of my problem is chronic depression over a decade+. The idea of gamedev excites me, but I have a hard time feeling passionate about anything these days. You definitely need that for games. Hell, I’m barely able to sit down and even enjoy games anymore.
Try Roblox (YouTube but for games essentially). You can publish a game just a few clicks, and even quite simple games can get popular enough that you get the satisfaction of seeing others interact with the thing you made, which is very motivating.
We're not depressed, the rest of the world is just stupidly optimistic.
Only partial agree!
I think there is a group that is nihilistic and follows that with a defeatist view
There is also a group that is nihilistic and extremely content with the state of the world and molding it to their liking. Which is very useful
and then there is everyone else with the optimism
also this is not depression
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/dont-be-a-doomer
Takes all kinds, I say.
Gamedev is weird. I want to do it, and am trained to do it, but the working conditions are horrific.
Like half my graduating class ended up in a real estate company making directx based 3d walkthroughs for minimum wage.
Even if you are successful, the crunch is oppressive. The bigger firms will make you labor hard for your art, take all the cream off the top and then terminate your contract.
And yet heaps of people, even me when I am bored, want to do it.
Not sure what types of games you're interested in, but the TIC-80 can be fun to explore, and supports quite a few languages
Ah yeah I love the concept of these small fantasy computers. I’m familiar with them because of Celeste, but never played with one.
I’m interested in traditional roguelikes these days (Tales of Maj’Eyal, Qud, Brogue). Ofc the dream is to make something with wider appeal, like Balatro, and get out of the rat race all together.
Genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Synthesizing DNA and transforming cells. Designing better methodologies to improve efficiency, robustness, cost or scale up of common bio lab processes. Mapping out all bio lab processes used in genetic engineering. Unfortunately without going back to school to PhD options are very limited. The Thought Emporium guy and the 4-6 community bio labs in major US cities are the only counter examples I know of doing this outside of academia / industry.
I have a theory that if society could unlock a hobbyist class of synthetic biology tinkerers it could unleash rapid growth similar to the computing industry. I'm not sure if the problem is technology not being low cost and high safety enough or a lack of social institutions supporting people like this.
For me, it's gotta be Asahi Linux development. I've been following the work of Asahi Lina and the team for a long time, watching their progress in awe. It just seems incredibly cool to get macOS hardware running Linux so well. But every time I think about actually diving into it, my brain just screams "super complicated!" and I have no idea where I'd even begin to contribute or understand what's going on under the hood. It's definitely one of those things I admire from a distance because it feels so far beyond my current capabilities.
On the development side, I feel like I just don't have the "brain" for Rust even though I have built a couple of useful things with it and have also contributed to an open source project (checkout hurl.dev, great tool!) - I would love to get into low level OS development, VMMs and microVMs . It's probably just an issue of effort
Outside of programming, I'd like to get into welding so I can make some things. I recently learned to use my angle grinder but welding feels like it's out of reach because of not having the right tools and experience.
Hi, maintainer of Hurl [1] here.
We're trying to write "simple" Rust as far as we can, without going into too much optimisation: very little lifetime usage, no async stuff (just classic multi-thread directly from the last sample of the Rust book), liberal usage of clone, no macros, reusing crates for C libcurl and libxml binding, limiting dependencies. We could certainly gain a lot of performances but with this first simple approach, the binary is already "fast"... The only advice I would give for someone going into Rust is to not try to optimise everything from the start to get a first "feeling" of the language.
[1]: https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl
Hello there, thanks!
Hurl is definitely one of the more approachable Rust codebases I have looked at and worked with. The test suite is one of the best I've seen - so thorough! Definitely, one of my fav projects
Yeah, Rust was... nontrivial for me too. I feel like I understand it now quite well, but it took more effort than I'd expected to expend on anything. Prolog was a similar but distinct mindfuck too.
Do you regret the expended effort? Does it feel wasted, or does it feel useful?
"What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?"
A job where I can support my family and feel valued/respected. I think that would be cool.
Yes. I could theoretically do just about anything, with a reasonable amount of ramp up time. And am interested in many things. Even willing to study ahead of time for free.
Yet, my main obstacle these days is gatekeeping by others. People won’t let you work in a field without previous experience (in the exact thing) or significant credentials. Seems to have gotten worse over time, although ageism may contribute.
Not to mention the more interesting, the more popular, and less likely you can get in the club—inversely proportional. Hobbies are fun though.
Usually, a good way to start is to try working for just getting experience (directly ask to people who are working in your desired field to till you get one). Maybe work for free for first couple of months and make connection and get an idea how things work...
Without knowing specifics like your current skillset, experience, location, income requirements it’s hard to provide advice.
I've already accepted that it won't happen.
Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right
I've wanted for years to take the research paper "Coq: The World's Best Macro Assembler" through several of its more and less obvious next steps, including re-implementing it on top of a formal specification of ARM (or RISC-V) machine code, and introducing a concept of virtual registers on top of a (light weight) register allocator. I really feel like there's a path here to a system in which low-level non-portable code can be written comfortably (if perhaps at a somewhat slower pace than C), with arbitrary correctness properties proven on it; but the learning curve to get there (through Coq, etc) has been a struggle. Every few years I set myself the goal of a proven-correct implementation of a min/max heap in assembly built on this approach, and every few years I give up.
Not in Coq, but you might find this interesting from AWS: https://github.com/awslabs/s2n-bignum?tab=readme-ov-file#tes...
I've just taken a quick glance at this, and will explore further -- but at first, it seems like it's really a good application of ad-hoc proofs to assembly code; which is a subset of what I'm interested in, but for me the more interesting thing about the paper was the structured safety proofs for things like memory safety, no read-before-write, no overflow, etc., and thinking about how this can be expanded and generalized. While for something like a bignum library (or a heap) the actual conformance to the behavioral contract will be somewhat ad-hoc, having a lot of safety contracts also proved along the way "for free" (or at slightly reduced cost, anyway) is what really draws my attention. I can see spending 2x the time writing the code, and 10x the time proving things about it, in exchange for not having to spend the 100x (DAL B) or 1000x (DAL A) time testing it.
Yeah, I hear you. Many things are simplified in this crypto code, for example there’s no dynamic allocation. At the same time it’s incredibly difficult to get a realistic model of the hardware instructions because they all have side effects. And it gets incredibly more difficult if you try to prove real world, hand optimized code (vs academic proof of concept code).
With all this said, I think this could be a good inspiration and look forward to seeing advancements!
> Many things are simplified in this crypto code, for example there’s no dynamic allocation.
That's okay, I haven't worked on code bases with dynamic allocation professionally in years, and even my hobby projects usually avoid it.
I want to build a large format, real-time, physical music visualizer that could orchestrate an artistic light symphony for any song.
I'm imagining physical visualizers that are columns of multiple, discrete light nodes, each able to have variable brightness and color.
The real-time music processing is the hard part (for me) to crack.
There's some standard tricks here: FFTs, bandpass filters, etc.
But I want to do more: Real-time stem separation, time signature and downbeat tracking, etc.
Imagine hearing Sweet Caroline and, when the horns kick in, the whole installation 'focuses' on the horns and bright yellow light jumps between each column on each horn note, before returning to tracking the bass line or something.
I've been noodling on this idea for a long time and slowly digging into the music and CS fundamentals. The rise of LLMs might finally be the piece that enables me to close my intelligence gap and finally build this thing...
Well, I'm have a little guilty bias towards spacetime non-substantivalism and I've always been interested in getting back to physics in this area. I've particularly found the Shape Dynamics program to be at least somewhat interesting and while I have a sort of ok grasp of the language and mathematics of GR translating that to the SD world has been a persistent challenge. If I had time I'd try to figure that out.
Briefly, one usually formulates the theory of gravity in terms of a a 4d spacetime with curvature but you can also formulate it as a theory of curved 3d shapes if you allow the lagrangian to carry more structure. This is often performed in GR, in fact, by decomposing the metric into a "spatial" and "temporal" part but shape dynamics kind of runs with this idea in an attempt to formulate a totally relational version of the theory of gravity.
Shape Dynamics apparently produces a reasonable theory of gravity which agrees with GR in many situations but forbids, I believe, closed timelike curves, and may be more amenable to quantization since it re-separates space and time.
Anyway, it all seems very beyond me, maybe even if I had the time, which I do not.
For a while now, I've had the desire to make an AI that kills enemies and beats levels like a human would in the game Crypt of the Necrodancer. Here's[0] someone doing it as a human without ever taking damage.
There's something close called ChoregraphAI[1] on GitHub. It simulates the entire map and does a brute force search for what will get it to the stairs. That doesn't satisfy me because it just skips most of the enemies and takes advantage of things that a human couldn't know, like where a bat will move (bats move randomly, while other enemies are completely deterministic). Also, it can't control the game and is for an old version of it (although those problems themselves seem not that big).
But, I do not know what kind of AI could be written to perform the kind of long term planning and strategizing that a human would do (e.g. isolate each enemy to beat it more easily) and to beat the enemies like a human would (with special, pre-practiced strategies for certain enemies or groups of enemies), and even if I did, I get the sense that this would be really complicated for a first try and that I should gain experience making such an AI for a simpler game, though I don't know what.
It might be a self-constrained challenge. It's just been floating around my head for a while because I don't really know where to start.
[0]: https://youtu.be/CxavaHV-K6A
[1]: https://github.com/Grimy/ChoregraphAI
There's 2 big ones that I want to learn.
Quantum computer programming. I've dived a couple times into Qiskit from IBM. Also tried to get into dwave and ocean sdk but they never got back to me.
Qiskit tutorials are easy to blow through and i think even understand. But when trying to use it for my own purposes, just never get anywhere.
The other one for me with no success. Training my own specialized predicting AI models. Tensorflow, pytorch, and another.
I certainly prefer pytorch. Super simple to build models on simple stuff.
I'm trying to do something that literally nobody else has ever done. My lack of success has probably a lot more to do with that it's not perhaps actually doable.
Flipside, I might be re-approaching this now that i have the pycharm ai to help me in this progress.
>you've been there and figured out how to get past similar hurdles – please chime in! Share some helpful resources, dish out general advice, or just give a nudge of encouragement on how to take that intimidating first step.
Never be afraid to try. Always dare to fail; you only truly learn when failing. The easier you make it to fail, the quicker you learn.
My concern with quantum computing is there's already such an outrageous overabundance of quantum computing PhD's the marked will likely be saturated for decades to come. It would be a ton of fun to learn, but I can't justify the time because there's no career progression
Lol where are people getting such ideas. First of all there are probably like 10 QC people graduating a year in the whole world (okay maybe 20). Second of all y'all people have no idea how far off usable QC is. It's like 50 years at best.
It's not that hard to learn, you can do it in a few evenings. Grab something like Nielsen and mess around on qirk.
Now whether it's worth learning? Eh, maybe it's good to exercise some math skills that have been atrophying.
You might benefit from this overview: https://ianreppel.org/a-review-of-quantum-computing-courses/
Totally fair re: quantum computer programming. It's still an open question what exactly it can be useful for.
Are you trying it for anything in particular?
(I'm only getting started in it now in my Master's programme)
>Are you trying it for anything in particular?
cracking crypto. forcing netadmins and sysadmins to update crypto to quantum resistant crypto. Might as well make it a real threat :)
I'll bet a lot of money PQC becomes commonplace before quantum breaks anything meaningful. (although I'm one of the people paid to work on PQC so maybe I'm biased.)
Anything that involves time. Dance, music, gardening. I have too many existing commitments that when I actually have free time I have no energy left
Are you speedrunning life?
what are you trying to suggest? that they are doing to much already? and if they were to do less they would have time? wouldn't that then lead to the same situation, that they would like to work on some of the things they are working on now but could not because of lack of time?
also we don't choose all our commitments. family, work, friends, etc are commitments we can't just give up. it comes down to choice and priorities, and the problem is that we have more things we find interesting than we can focus on.
but i consider that a good thing. i know that whenever i retire or am unable to continue some of my interests there will be others that i can pick up instead. i know that i won't be bored...
Just a quick prompt for reflection. I do not suggest anything how people actually live their lives. But many have said that they got caught up in being too busy to actually enjoy life. Don't fall into that by accident!
I've tried to make my own pair of shoes a few times now, never quite getting to the end. I even took a class but doing it on my own is so much harder.
I'm a software developer with no real reason to be sewing and lasting my own shoes, but god damn it I'd love to wear my own handmade shoes.
Manufacturing. I have no idea where one would start with learning it that doesn't begin with having at least $100,000 in machinery and industry knowledge.
Start by asking yourself "manufacturing what?" and go from there. I've worked at companies that did some form of manufacturing my entire career. "Manufacturing" covers even more ground than "software" does. e.g., textile manufacturing has a completely different set of concerns than manufacturing airplane parts does.
3d printers start around 250 USD. Filament's at 15 USD/kg.
You can get familiar with gcode, with CAD software, making parameterized models, etc.
Something like pcbway allows you to prototype a lot of stuffs, cnc and sheetmetal forming iirc
Over the past several years I have slowly patched the .NET version of Shen to run on Linux and modern .NET releases. I also learned about Higher-Order Perl the other year and have a dream of going through the book and implementing the exercises in Shen while tuning the compiler.
But while I have had a broad interest in compilers for years and years, it feels difficult-to-impossible to actually complete any of it. Part of it's general depression and time management, part is looking at the long story of these projects and the lack of progression: Stuck in a rut of mediocrity.
https://github.com/rkoeninger/ShenSharp https://github.com/jaccarmac/junkcode/tree/79ea647d4ddbe41cf...
No worries. One of my personal compiler projects took over ten years to complete. Still worth it, though. Sped up my programming by at least 20x. (Not kidding.)
Edit: Within confidence intervals that is a 22% per year improvement. Way ahead of Proebsting's law. Surprising.
Speaking of which, I've always been fascinated by audio signal processing especially the idea of writing code to synthesize sounds or emulate vintage synthesizers. It feels like magic to turn mathematical formulas into actual audible melodies. But every time I look at a tutorial, I get intimidated by all the Fourier transforms and equations. Maybe I just need that one real opportunity to get started from scratch.
Libraries can abstract much of this. At least enough to get you started.
I'd like to establish an index fund that jumps through the necessary hoops to allow US expatriate citizens to invest from places like the European Union.
Last I checked, there is no fundamental legal barrier preventing this - just an enormous amount of compliance work that has to get done. But as we would be the only real option for 1 or 2 million well-monied people, I imagine we'd be able to start with a very eager customer base provided we could jump through those hoops. And uh, the actual algorithms for index based stock selection are pretty straightforward, too - I'm not Jane Street level clever, so that's an attractive point for me.
If anyone's interested in this hare brained scheme, let me know via the email in my bio. It's been a problem I've been rolling around in my head for a few years now. I have no idea how I would get started, but I'm pretty sure I could do it.
Another area I'd be interested in is automatic document conversion between the IEEE and EN standards.
I know most of you guys have never had to deal with these, but I've spent my professional life in high-regulation fields. Documents which adhere to these standards are table stakes for getting software sold to, say, the freight train industry, but neither is a subset of the other. They're more like parallel universes, one from North America, the other from the EU.
Getting them to play nice in an automated, LLM + human aided review way would unlock an enormous amount of value for software firms looking to work across these two markets. I'm one of only a handful of guys in the world who understands this well enough to see the value add, and I don't know how I would convince anyone to help me go to market with this either. So I broadcast it here, in the hopes that some other capable software engineer with more time on their hands takes it off of my plate. Please build this business!
If it's an index fund, what's the difference between this and a fund run in the EU that tracks a US market? Is it taxed differently?
I'm using 'index fund' broadly to refer to the cost structure - very low management fees, very "dumb" wide market tracking. Plenty of these already exist in the EU, for EU citizens, you are correct.
But yes, they are taxed differently. A US-domiciled fund is much easier for US expats to invest in without risking losing over 100% of their return (I am not exaggerating), but only if you can actually find one which will accept money from you while resident in the EU. None do, to my knowledge, An EU-domiciled fund would probably be classed as a PFIC and have to fill out reams of paperwork to avoid messing up people's taxes. One that US expats love is possible in theory, but no one has brought one to market yet because it requires dealing with a lot of US taxation errata.
What about ETFs in ireland that track the SP and other indexes?
digital signal processing for synths and audio stuff.
maths :/ brain hurt.
i did some digital signal processing in my phd but i need to go through and implement a bunch of things from scratch to learn/relearn and it’ll just be a bit of a grind. i’m avoiding doing that by working on data file parsing / project management utils for the elektron octatrack instead, which is useful, but tangential to what i want to do.
long term would be rad to build software for old synth hardware and the like. sort of like midiquest, but without the price tag.
Will Pirkle has a couple of books that go through this. I've found them quite helpful. https://www.willpirkle.com/
I've heard The Audio Programmer discord is a great resource for this sort of thing. Worth checking out: https://www.theaudioprogrammer.com/
thanks, although i’m a member already. it’s not really resources that’s the issue. i’ve read Julius Smith’s books in the past etc. in the rust audio discord etc.
i just have a mental block similar to the one i had with rust. avoided learning it for a long while until i made a decision to finally to do it.
i just keep avoiding making the same decision here for some reason. not sure why. probably the old “it’s going to be really hard” thing i had with rust (which turned out to be rubbish, it just took time and repeating stuff over and over and learning from mistakes over and over).
Electronics. Have a hard time thinking about it conceptually. I tend to always take a step out and just find components from other projects and tie them together with code. Would love to design my own PCB.
Creative Writing - Although LLMs seem to be a good help with replacing whatever I am missing. Mostly organizational issues. I enjoy the meat, writing certain scenarios. But fleshing out a whole book I fail from both top down and bottom up methods.
Arduino and, specifically, the ESP8226 (basically an Arduino+Wifi) and ESP32 (Arduino+Wifi+BT) development boards are a fantastic place to start!
For most hobbyist-level electronics, it’s just a matter of becoming familiar enough with using the Arduino IDE to flash your C(-like) code to your board, or using something like MicroPython, then following the wiring instructions freely available online for common parts like servos, LEDs, displays, etc. Every once in a while you may have to reach for something like a transistor, capacitor, or resistor, but those can also be learned in an afternoon.
Google really is your friend! I taught myself hobby electronics over 15 years ago using the same, and they still hold up!
Yep I am drowning in them.
Its just like, in terms of my abilities, I find it easier to grab Arduino + wifi and arduino + ledmatrix and get them speaking together in code, when I should be able to create a simpler, and cheaper circuit of LED's and just use electronic signals to do the work for me.
Python packages written in low-level languages like C/C++ and Rust.
There are currently so many cool open source projects in the python ecosystem that involve writing python packages in low-level languages. But unfortunately, I've barely written any low-level code since university, so these projects are effectively out of reach for me at the moment.
However, I do plan on learning Rust sometime later this year and there are number of smaller projects that I plan on working on!
C is not as hard to get into as you might think, and probably necessary to be at least a little bit comfortable with if you want to write Python libraries or understand Python internals. I would suggest Beej’s guide, if you’re looking for a place to start!
https://beej.us/guide/bgc/
Many thanks for the resource!
I did do some C in uni and I remember not finding it too terrible and actually pretty fun, but yeah, it does feel intimidating to come back to.
Do you have examples of such projects? I have some low-level language knowledge and might be interested in giving it a shot.
Yeah I have quite a few examples. However, they're pretty niche projects that require a bunch of non-programming domain knowledge such as Japanese linguistics or using a Rust-based machine learning framework to optimize the parameters of a spaced repetition model.
pybind11 is your friend. Focus on small self-contained functions first. For numerical functions you can then take it mostly our of a book. See if you can speed up some simple and common operation within your problem domain of interest.
Sounds like solid advice. Thanks!
Reverse engineering. Each time I start I seem to get overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge required, then I decide to check if these skills might be useful in getting a better paid job... and there just doesn't seem to be that much jobs involving these skills, neither in my area nor remotely. And my motivation instantly evaporates because learning all that stuff just to sometimes poke around in some weird program.
I love reverse engineering, but it is strictly a hobby (fortunately? Unfortunately? Honestly I’m not sure!).
Anyway, I’d heartily recommend Microcorruption[1]. It’s really good fun, uses a fairly simply assembly flavour (msp430), and introduces new concepts at a nice cadence.
Shameless plug: I’ve written up a bunch of the solutions in “tutorial form” on my blog[2], but I am incredibly slow at getting new posts out (although I do have the next ~4 levels in nearly-complete drafts).
[1]: https://microcorruption.com/
[2]: https://lovesexsecretgod.com/
Two projects:
1. Training my own LLM and other kinds of neural networks, e.g. a network for discriminating cheaters in an online game. I feel like it's very hard for an amateur to get their hands on enough training data.
2. Building my own weather prediction engine. Again, accurate prediction requires highly detailed and accurate data to start from and as far as I can tell that's not publicly available.
I want to make my own music streaming app. Fix all the UI problems, improve discovery, remember all the musical phases I went through.
Unfortunately, you can't just sign up for API access to millions of songs. And the streaming apps either don't provide a playback API, or their TOS limits what you can do with it.
You don't need to do a monolithic design, and kludging things together is just fine. Start with local playback from the server or something equivalently small and work from there. If you need to background play a youtube video and forward the audio stream elsewhere, so be it haha
I've looked into this before. You might be able to pull this off with the YouTube API and Stream Rip using Deezer. Would require a bit of hacking but it could work.
Debugging electronics to fix stuff. Some people seem to be able to repair whatever broken electronic devices we give them, which I find fascinating.
Same! There is a huge knowledge and skill gap between knowing how resistors, capacitors, and transistors work to the point where you can build a little light blinker, which I can do, and actually troubleshooting a (even 1980s through-hole technology) device to find the component that is broken, which is way beyond me.
* Kernel development and eBPF: I tried many time to go deep on those topics, but never became proficient
* Bayesian statistics: I know the basics and the theory, but I am not able to understand how to use it in a real world problem
For kernel dev and eBPF, what kinds of resources or tutorials have you tried in the past? Have you ever tried building something small or contributing to an existing project?
Curious to hear what hurdles you ran into.
For kernel, I have tried to write simple modules and it's okay. But when I am going deep in the internals, things become really complicated and my memories from OSes exam are rusty. For eBPF, I wrote a quite simple DNS visibility tools and while I am okay with the logic, I struggled on writing low-level C code that parse the network packet. Moreover, I found documentation incomplete and really confusing, for example: I would like to understand how the different queues are working and the only solution was to read the code. Right now, anyway, it seems that this aspect is improved; probably it's the time to play again with that!
For Linux kernel dev, I found Linux Kernel Programming: A Comprehensive Guide to Kernel Internals to be a really helpful resource. For eBPF, the early chapters of Brendan Gregg’s BPF Performance Tools gave me the context I needed to get started.
From there, what’s helped me most is a cycle of reading new material, building prototypes and exploring how an open source system solves similar problems. I've definitely hit that wall as systems programming can get confusing fast.
I’ve also noticed that I sometimes get stuck trying to make something perfect before I’ve even started experimenting. Forcing myself to build the lowest-effort version of an idea has been surprisingly productive. Debugging things that don’t work is frustrating, but that failure often reveals insights I wouldn’t have discovered if I were overanalyzing.
You’ve probably seen some of these resources already, but just sharing in case any of it’s useful. I work with eBPF full-time and had many similar challenges along the way, but recommend jumping back in when you have the time.
> Bayesian statistics
Look into real-world examples in e.g. The Bugs Book (Lunn et al) or any of Gelman's books. Pyro and PyMC also have good real-world examples in their tutorials.
Thank you for suggestions. I will give them a look :)
Building a web browser.
I once took a stab at Ladybird browser but had to back out due to the complexity of its build chain. I couldn’t get it run on Xcode/CLion on macOS but would love to give it a try once again.
Does anyone have any tips on getting started again?
if you are not already, stay connected to the ladybird dev community. don't complain to them about the difficulty to build, but keep an eye out for others having the same challenges. see if there are others also trying to build on MacOS and share your experience. perhaps together you can overcome the issues.
the majority of ladybird contributors are probably on linux, so mac support may take some extra effort. consider if you can work with a linux container or VM instead.
i just checked their discord, there is a "build-problems" channel, where you may be able to ask for help.
don't give up. one step at a time. we need more alternative browsers, so i hope you will be able to contribute.
You know what, I’ll give it a shot again tonight. Thanks for the fist bump. Let’s see how far I go.
join the discord and share your progress
note that i am not at all involved in ladybird (i only just joined the discord myself), i am just an interested bystander with some experience mentoring FOSS contributors. i would say the same things for any other project someone is interested in
Maybe find the smallest one and read through its code?
Lynx is where I would start, or see:
https://lobobrowser.org/
since it's all in Java and presumably is straight-forward.
CAD, all aspects of machining, tool and die stuff, injection molding, and similar manufacturing techniques.
Have you tried 3D printing? It’s a pretty cheap and forgiving way to get into manufacturing. You’ll get a lot of practice with CAD. Autodesk Fusion 360 is free for hobby use and very good.
For machining, I’d start with wood (wood lathe or router, cheaper than a real metal lathe or mill). Very similar concepts as real machining (feeds and speeds, toolpaths, CAM). Up to you if you want to start manual or CNC. The Shapeoko routers are very nice and relatively affordable (in this domain). You can also find used manual machines locally, but it’s hard to know if they’re in good condition if you don’t know anything.
If you want to read, the Machinery’s Handbook, aka the Bible in any shop, is enormous and contains pretty much anything you’d want to know.
Oh, and get a set of Mitutoyo digital calipers. Expensive but the only way to go, in my opinion. Measuring is fundamental to manufacturing.
I've been trying to make this sort of thing more tractable by modeling the movement of tooling in a CNC machine so as to make 3D parts using Python in OpenSCAD (https://pythonscad.org/):
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
That said, the only 3D CAD tool where I was able to follow the tutorial (after a fashion) was Dune 3D: https://dune3d.org/ --- if you haven't tried that, I'd highly recommend it.
The usual way to get started w/ molding is to make a vacuum molding machine:
https://makezine.com/projects/diy-injection-molding
(I remember one such plan page where the first project was to make a handle to make the machine more comfortable to use...)
You might like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
Electronics. Especially the concept of ADC/DACs. Connecting Analog to Digital in to an FPGA, etc. I read a document about PLLs and I barely understand the block diagrams, the math I can't even begin to understand the symbols. I'll start learning from a book, but get to a certain point, then a few days go by, then many days -- by then I feel like I have to restart from the beginning.
Electronics - I recently bought a decent DSO, the "Pinecil" soldering iron, a whole bunch of components. I had some ideas but then sort of hit a wall and lost interest. So now I have a workbench with tools that I will hopefully get back to some day. I think my starting projects were either too difficult, or not that interesting after I implemented them on a breadboard.
Plasma simulation - I really want to understand how fusion and advanced propulsion systems can be simulated and maybe even contribute in some way. E.g. The fusion propulsion being developed by Helicity Space is very interesting. I wish I knew enough to understand their work and maybe do some simulations myself. I tried doing this "Particle In Cell" course I found online but quickly lost interest after a week or so.
I guess I just have a wide variety of interests that come and go. Some of these just seem to be passing interests. I have sort of learned to live with that.
Game dev. I like the idea of programming the core loops, but cannot fathom getting into assets and art design as I do not have a single artistic bone in my body
Try Pico-8 - The low pixel approach makes it so that those of us with lower artistic abilities don't have to focus on the art since everything is pixelated as the baseline. (Not to say that people aren't doing insane art with it anyways, but the baseline is much lower quality than something like Unreal).
Generative AI is helping people express themselves, the ones that were never going to hire the fiverr worker or graphics team to begin with
But then you risk harassment from the anti-AI crowd.
Haters gonna hate. Don't let the fear of that stop you.
Generative AI has gotten really good, unless people are told to discern it from being AI generated or human generated, they won’t notice
What is out of reach for me is space to perform the hobbies.
I have welders, metal and woodworking equipment, 3d printers, auto mechanic tools, etc and years of experience and knowledge and interest in building stuff. But I have only a tiny garage to work from. I don’t really have room to do much so it feels like waste.
I’ve looked into renting a small shop but Seattle is so expensive that renting even a one car sized shop space is prohibitively expensive for a hobby (for my income level).
I’m sure I could turn a profit with my work on the side but then it’s a job and you have monthly overhead expenses to cover and all the stresses that come from that.
What is even the actionable step to take? Make more money? That usually comes with less time unfortunately. Moving away to somewhere I can afford a larger workshop at home was the plan until return to office happened for me.
Surely there is a makerspace in Seattle? The one near me in Atlanta has all the things you mentioned and more, plus an abundance of space, a neat community, and classes for most skills you could use there
A useful tool for me would be an app/site that instantly provides a short list of available events/activities that a) are happening soon, b) match/complement my unique set of interests and c) is in reasonable geographic proximity.
For me, it's Bézier curves --- Freya Holmér has a wonderful video on them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds
and I've been trying to read through _METAFONT: The Program_ and https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/ and I keep wondering if I shouldn't just try scripting Inkscape....
I want to do a couple of different things, and not sure if they all fit in one project or no:
- implement a single line font in my current project: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
- implement a way to convert arbitrary curves into smooth arcs (for DXFs or G2/G3 arcs for G-code)
- work up an interactive version of METAFONT/METAPOST which allows both programming and drawing
I found that wrapping my head around B-splines helped me finally understand how to implement routines for Bézier curves.
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/B-Spline.html
Also easier for my brain to use in practice, when implemented, than Béziers, if they can work for you.
(Edit to add - great video you linked!)
Two things and they are both grinds more than anything else and hard to squeeze time in with work, travel, exercise and just spending time with my wife.
The first is traditional machine learning - not “AI”. I know what I don’t know and I can fake it well enough to talk to a subject matter expert when leading projects and I have a dual math/cs major from three decades ago. But it would take years to be good enough to be at the same level of seniority I am in my existing niche.
The second is more important for my life is learn Spanish well enough to be conversationally fluent. I know some. But my wife and I are going to start living in Costa Rica during the winter and I want to actually learn it to embrace being thier.
> But my wife and I are going to start living in Costa Rica during the winter and I want to actually learn it to embrace being thier.
Tangential thing: years ago, a guy in a hedge fund I was working at left this very high-paying job and lifted and shifted his family to Costa Rica. He shared that his motivation was being able to spend more time with his kids (which is a absolutely fantastic goal). I think I have heard a few more examples of this and your comment is an addition. What is it about Costa Rica? I can obviously google the pros and cons of Costa Rica from a blog or whatever, but I want to directly hear from someone who presumably has been on the ground and shares the HN mindset, whatever that might be.
I work remotely at a cloud consulting company for company context.
First time zone and proximity to the US and more specifically for me, short flights from cities we consider “home” - Orlando where I live and Atlanta where we are from and where many of our friends and adult sons live.
Second it’s safe, they don’t even have a military,they have a good public health system, it’s relatively easy to become a permanent resident and have access to both their public health care system (caja) and private health care.
Nice apartments and AirBnbs in San Jose are really affordable - $1500-$2500 a month.
You aren’t going to find that combination anywhere else in US time zones besides Panama City Panama and from what I read, it is much more urban, crowded and less tranquil than San Jose Costa Rica.
We went to Costa Rica this year on vacation (Manuel Antonio). Next year we are going back twice - once for a week to get a local “relocation” guide to take us around the different neighborhoods and then going back for a month once we know the lay of the land.
For more context on our current life
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159562
So it’s really not lifting and shifting for us. We pack everything we own and put them in suitcases and put our condotel unit in the rental pool to offset our mortgage and HOA fees when we are gone for months. We did that domestically for almost a year between late 2022-late 2023
Appreciate your detailed reply - makes the rationale much clearer.
Cellular networks.
I specialize in computer networking in my day job. Most of what I do is Cisco routers, Cisco switches, and Cisco firewalls. I would be interested in learning more about cellular networks. I haven't put any effort into exploring this for myself. If there is a track similar to CCNA → CCNP → CCIE then it isn't well-known (well, not known to me).
Same background as me, however I moved into cellular/mobile - not really any official routes I know of in the industry, certainly not like a Cisco track.
Typical route is work at a Telco or IoT company as Network Eng or Developer and naturally pivot into telco learning on the job.
Vendors will run training courses when you buy their kit which helps a little, but it’s mostly self learning or on the job.
I love the idea of computational experiments that replace testing on animals. Reading about what we do to animals in the name of science is heart breaking, but learning there are computational models and experiments being developed to take place of animal cruelty is exciting. However, such projects feel overwhelming given I know next to nothing about biology, and I'm not sure spending the time learning is worth the payout given my age and other areas of expertise.
The reason we use animal models is that we don’t know enough about animal biology to be confident we can simulate it accurately.
However, computational tools that help biologists “replace, reduce, and refine” animal experiments are helpful. That catchphrase is a good one to Google to look for previous efforts.
Building computational tools to help scientists improve the design of necessary animal experiments is certainly worth working on.
Nothing intellectually, but some things are financially, spatially, and/or temporally out of reach. A long term goal of mine has been to make machines which are decently precise with wide dynamic range measurement capabilities for all of the SI base units & some commonly-used derived units. Somewhere in the 6-8 digits of dynamic range for each.
E.g. be able to measure distances over a 50cm range to a resolution of ±500nm. Easy for a coordinate measuring machine, very challenging and expensive to DIY.
Validating anything I build means finding a calibration lab willing to check it, which is also rather pricey. I don't have the space, the time, or the money to do this.
I saw an article recently on a shock absorbing material and a biohacking method of manufacturing it with a bioreactor. I’d love to pick up something like that. That and Effective 3D printing or hobby manufacturing.
I love reading about projects where someone has taken a combination of used bicycles, bicycle parts, metal tubing, sometimes batteries & electric motors, aerodynamic skins, and built something new: a bike for transport, a recumbent, something aerodynamic, something light, something electric.
I wish I had the project space, the skills (welding, mechanical), and the tools to build human and electric powered bikes.
Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell University.
I like to see that with known drone sounds, maybe missiles and rockets too.
But that is closed-source.
One viable open-source alternatives is written in Python and uses CNN algorithm.
https://github.com/LonesX/Bird-Song-Recognition
That LoneX lets you add new sounds
Running with an idea and starting a business. Some people are naturally entrepreneurs, but I don't feel that I have the bug for it. I'd like to find a niche in soft robotic actuation and run with it, renting a garage somewhere in my hometown after I finish my PhD.
I wish I could devote to build my dream programming language (https://tablam.org) that has several hard questions and troubles (mainly I wanna rebuild in full something like FoxPro).
But, there are things I truly have dream but have dedicated almost not effort trying:
* Play (rock) bass
* Draw comic/manga style. I wish to make histories and think I could do it but refuse to write plain words (idiot!).
Basically, art is my unreachable goal
I recently gave up on a native JavaScript only PTY. You absolutely needs third party binaries to make use of OS APIs, namely open_pty and fork_pty from pty.h in posix and some C# functions for ConPTY on Windows. Xterm.js already does this. The only pure JavaScript solution would be for Xterm.js to become a core Node.js API module.
Presentations, including video ones. The ideas feel pretty clear in the head long before you can describe it in a manner which ideally could be a pleasure to watch. What tooling to use, how to work with all that, how to even plan the layout of words, scenes, images seems pretty puzzling, and solutions are like a slow walk in a dark room.
I'd recommend Beyond Bullet Points by B. Atkinson; it's a book about PowerPoint but teaches you how to synthesize presentations, including videos and in-person presentations.
As far as career upgrades, this book was decisive for me in making the lightbulb go off so I could share my vision with others and have them see it, too.
Storytelling is the skill you're looking for. Visual aids and recording/editing are incidental.
What makes presentations, video essays, etc, great is having a great story to tell.
It's all about the archetype of the hero, and plot arch (normal life -> problem -> departure -> toll -> return).
You have to present people with a reason to embark on the story - which is the reason the 'hero' leaves on their journey; a clear understanding of what's at stake, the price to be paid, the confrontation and the return to a new, better normal.
I'm pretty good with textual stories. The presentation format is another matter, there is a difference.
One option is to put your thoughts down in great detail on paper, then feed it into AI and ask it to design you a slideshow with text and suggestions for visuals.
Currently, just making a game. I have finished like one game in my life. There is something about the huge scope of things I need to know from music to UI to art that just seems daunting. I tried to do a couple game jams but I am now of the opinion that is too much stress for me.
I think game jams are a bit overrated, but when you're feeling stuck they're great for getting unstuck. For my big passion projects I get hung up on all the peripheral things you mention like music and art too, but game jams force you to move past those things quickly and learn the value of terrible placeholders and horrific hacks in service of maintaining momentum.
Check out the Week Sauce Jam [0]. You still make a game in seven days, but it can be any seven days of the month; there's no voting or ranking either. Jams are typically too stressful for me too, but this one is deliberately as low-pressure as possible, you can take on as much or as little accountability as you want, and release whatever you have done with no judgement.
[0] https://itch.io/jam/weeksauce
I’ve gotten really into linguistics recently. Digging into primary texts, answering a problem, the whole nine yards.
My difficulty here is if this problem is interesting or unique, and where to go from here. AI says so (but how much is that worth?)
Fun problems to have! It’s pretty amazing that we can Just Do Things, what a time.
There is a tiny airport near my house for small personal planes. I see them through my office window above the tree line. I'd love to build a dashboard/screen on my desk to easily identify each aircraft. Ideally something more complicated than querying an existing api. Radar?
If the airplanes have ADSB transponder you can buy a cheap RTLSDR dongle and get data from there.
Another way, can be to record ATC conversations, translate them with an LLM and then track the airplane properly. This is harder and can be problematic from a legal standpoint (listening ATC is illegal in some countries)
Definitely reverse engineering and shaders. Watching these kinds of talks I realize, I'm not built for this: https://youtu.be/EtX7WnFhxtQ?si=UL8G8u1eQw8fpzKR
I'd like to learn about malware analysis and threat intelligence, especially dealing with zero-days and vulnerability exploitation and tracking how APTs do that.
I'm also interested in electronics, like building my own drone.
What resources did you find useful while building your drone ?
Playing music. I love playing, but my sense of rhythm is not quite there and I make mistakes too easily, plus a few years ago I had some nerve issues that makes it that much more difficult to move my fingers in the exact way I need to play music.
Messing with EEG headsets, like the ones by OpenBCI. Being able to perform some operations by just thinking about them sounds so incredibly cool - I've been thinking about this for several years, but it looks like quite an expensive hobby.
As an ex-EEG researcher I can say that acquiring an EEG device is probably the least difficult thing. EEG signals are messy, not reliable and hard to interpret. Without a solid foundation in cognitive psychophysiology you won't have a lot of fun with an EEG device. So, before investing a lot of money into an EEG device you should watch a beginner course on cognitive psychophysiology or get some literature to get the basics down.
On the other hand, you could probably hack a cheap ECG device to measure EEG signals.
I'd like to build an e2e encrypted distributed version control system and platform with homomorphic encryption. Think, something like git and github, that's end to end encrypted.
Not sure if it's e2ee but you might like https://radicle.xyz/
What is the threat model against which you are protecting version control? It seems like you are either thinking about using GitHub as just a backup system, which is almost certainly better solved by actual encrypted backups, or posting encrypted patches to a mailing list to just collaborate with your friends
My primary motivations...
1. I'd like to store code without a company using my code to train their language model.
2. I'd like to store code without a company deciding my code's merit (Github removing youtube-dl, Sourcehut not allowing crypto projects, etc).
3. Something about storing private code on a closed source forge feels wrong. It also feels wrong that company can read my code, and any of its employees can.
I’m bothered by the clunky/unrealistic movement of game characters and wonder how hard it would be to fix.
I can code a little but I've never done a large project. I want to create something like softimage XSI but open source. a 3D program that is built entirely around usability, because the paid options are too expensive and blender's usability pisses me off.
Not out of reach but I have to put time into it, working with FPGAs and designing my own circuit boards.
I recently built an optical encoder from scratch, and it was a ton of fun. More recently I've been looking into how force feedback works, and I'm currently gearing up to implement it using a motor/encoder/controller setup and ODrive.
I want to build hyper realistic vr experiences with characters that feel real and not scripted.
Music production, but I’m finally taking the leap after a decade of saying it wasn’t for me.
Biotech, wearables
+1 biotech, biohacking
Are there any biohacking projects in particular that excite you?
Gene therapy.
wearables +1 and robotics
Two things:
- firearms technology: designing or modifying guns. Feels out of reach because... laws, obviously.
- general ICE engines knowledge: Will probably be obsolete when I get the space and the time to pursue this.
The problem with firearms is of course the "thought crime" aspect of the recent/current? BATF stance on making a firearm w/o an FFL, using it, and selling it, as well as ITAR concerns.
Naturally, there are DefCAD/Defense Distributed and the like and a couple of very active subreddits/forums and some new developments/techniques.
Arguably, 1st Amendment + 2nd Amendment == the right to 3D print firearms, but of course, no one aside from Cody Wilson wants to be the poster child for that court case, note the example made of Philip Luty in England and his writings.
For internal combustion engines, small models are popular things (have you at least purchased a Revell Visible V8 model?)
> Arguably, 1st Amendment + 2nd Amendment == the right to 3D print firearms
Yeah, but no such thing where I live unfortunately. Meanwhile I'll just watch Mark Serbu's fun experiments.
OIC.
Maybe do air guns instead? There's a big modding community around them, and PCP weapons can be quite powerful (though maybe also regulated?)
Perhaps try an Olympic Match air pistol? Or purchasing a basic model and re-working it to make it match-quality?
Yes, PCPs can be powerful but just because the gas pushing the projectile is different does not mean other laws apply !
I could probably build a 22LR rifle in my garage, but the moment the authorities know that, I lose my shooter license.
How in earth could they know that if you are working alone in your garage ?
"Am I a dinosaur?" and "Is anyone else struggling with this?" I think you're asking the most honest questions in our industry. Thank you for this thread.
My skill that often feels "out of reach" is building a truly great Go-to-Market machine.
I'm a product-obsessed founder. I can spend all day architecting our 'Workspace OS' or fine-tuning our AI, MAKi. But when it comes to sales funnels, marketing channels, and building a repeatable sales process, my brain just fogs over. I truly feel like I wasn't born with the "sales gene."
After 10 years, multiple pivots, and learning to survive like a cockroach, here's the only method I've found for tackling any skill that feels too big: Make it small.
1. Don't read 20 books; talk to one person. I find one person who is great at it and just ask: "What is the very first, smallest thing you would do?"
2. Don't build a complex system; do one dumb, simple action. I don't try to build the perfect marketing funnel. I write one LinkedIn post. I send one cold email. The goal isn't to succeed, it's just to start and get a single data point.
3. Don't guess what the market wants; ask one customer. I ask, "How did you really find us?" Their answer is always more valuable than a market research report.
4. Don't try to master it in a week; just survive to the next day. The goal is just to learn one thing today, so I can be slightly less clueless tomorrow.
I don't think any of us have the "right brain" for everything. But cockroaches don't have big brains either. They just keep moving, adapting, and refuse to die.
We just need to find the next small, tangible step. That's how we get unstuck.
CPU design
For a very early beginning take a look here - https://github.com/cpldcpu/MCPU .
This is quite cool. The CPU has only four instructions, which can be applied to immediate arguments or run in sequence to get six more, which can then be used to write real programs!
Industrial design for a long time, and injection molding more recently.
Making hardware synthesizers, I have a CS degree and took a could EE classes in school. But I have no idea where to begin
My own rap music. And trading, I find it hard to believe in it given empirical research about well diversified passive funds over performing.
Software: Kernel develoent or any similar level system programming projects.
Hardware: electronics repair, especially vintage ones.
Playing Scott Joplin rag on the piano.
VR things. I want to have an app or something on the quest devices but don't know where to start.
Using AI to develop novel drugs. Imagine the world without or with minimal diseases. Only one can hope.
Or just make a new kind of heroin
Robotics, music instrument playing
Astronomy and quantum physics :)
I'll talk anybody's ear off about astrophotography if you wanted to learn that. Be forewarned though, it's a money hole
Music theory and desktop app development. Mostly because lack of time.
Making electronic music. Any recommendations for where to start?
My time to shine! I'm a computer programmer but I've been making music digitally for about 15 years now
The software you want is called a DAW - Digital Audio Workstation. There are 300 DAWs, you need to find the one that fits your 'style' or 'workflow'. There are a multitude of paradigms, as making music is not a single technique.
Once you find your DAW, my recommendation is to just make lots of music. Make the music you imagine in your head. Make the tracks that don't exist but you wish they did. Your first 100-200-300 tracks will all be extremely crappy in hindsight, but when you finish them you'll think they are, at the time, a magnum opus each. Keep iterating that process over and over and after many years, you'll start making something that you'll feel semi-proud enough to be able to show your friends!
This is a track I've done 11 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlkoEI4Sq7w&list=PL2xsoYcYFo...
and this is a newer track, released "only" 8 years ago:
https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/twothousandseventeen-feat-m...
so you can definitely notice the difference of what 3 years of music making look like in terms of progress
GOOD LUCK!
Your enthusiasm is shining through. For someone wanting to do exactly what you said "just make lots of music. Make the music you imagine in your head." and faced with the issue of "There are 300 DAWs, you need to find the one that fits your 'style' or 'workflow'.", how do I choose? I am not a music maker, I have never made music - I would like to though. I don't even have a style or workflow. I don't know how to start.
I would buy a synth and learn it as you would any other instrument, something on the simpler side and not a work station or the like so you can focus on it more as an instrument. Modern technology makes it all to easy to just have an entire electronic music studio which is a great deal to learn and few are going to ever learn any of it well if they start with a full studio. Build out from there, once you are getting the hang of the synth install a DAW or something to record with on your computer and start learning that, record an entire album worth of songs with just that one synth. I always liked using SoX as a multitrack recorder, ecasound was nice as well, kept things more about making music instead of being an engineer.
Back when I was more active with electronic music I would do an entire album worth of tracks with each new synth I got, software or hardware, good way to learn a synth.
Ah caught me! You need a Mac and GarageBand. I was always in the too expensive not gonna buy one but it changed my home use a lot.
GarageBand is easy. I’m gonna upgrade to logic at some point but that’s a start.
And good studio monitors or studio headphones. Can’t mix on regular headphones. I’ve got some m-audio pretty good.
Then you play. I don’t have many followers or fans but I’m doing it for me.
Here’s a track https://open.spotify.com/track/5o0xa7x1Q3bokEwFOEnXBQ?si=QZc...
It’s lofi/ electronica.
Best of luck
I've been having a lot of fun getting started with Max/MSP following Cipriani & Giri's "Electronic Music And Sound Design" books. Max is a paid program though; Pure Data is similar but open source.
https://learningmusic.ableton.com/
CNC machining and 3D graphics
The De-googling my life project
Fastmail is fantastic, has a standards compliant calendar, a notes space, webdav, and a pretty decent mobile app
I still have a Gmail address because getting a bazillion people to update their address books is a monster problem but otherwise I'm glad I at least halfway won't lose my digital life if some Google bot decided it doesn't like me
taking a long break
customized driver creation
Working with Hollywood movies at a not so low position
Gold recovery from scrap circuit boards and electroplating solution. I worked in a PCB shop until 1998 and have a small collection of scrap that I would like to process.
1) Revisiting one of my past projects, using Hashcash as a rate limiter. The original one I worked with was Camram/2 Penny Blue, which embedded proof-of-work tokens in an email message as an anti-spam method. It was the wrong solution, and proof-of-work tokens should be embedded in the protocol itself, which would enable dynamic pricing based on reputation.
Why I'm not doing it: I'm not sure it would be accepted. I took a lot of lumps for trying to use Hashcash in email, and I'm not sure I want to go through that again, but it does have value. Embedding proof-of-work puzzles in a protocol is a great way to limit abusive requests and patterns. SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS are easy to modify and probably could be done via a proxy. I'm not sure how easy it is to change the SSH protocol, but that would be useful as well.
2) Low-income living space electrification.
I tested this idea out on a friend who works for a Housing Authority, and their eyes lit up. However, they warned me that it would take a few years for everyone to sign off on it.
The original idea was to provide a kit, a bag of parts, that an affordable housing authority could use to improve living quarters and housing for low-income people, and eliminate/reduce the use of gas.
a) Replacing gas stoves with a set of three induction plates. The significant challenges are filling the void created by the original stove, ensuring sufficient power to operate the induction plates, and addressing how to handle the absence of an oven.
b) Filling the hole is easy. This is something a halfway decent carpenter could do, or we could provide an adjustable-size box that fits in such a space, not quite an IKEA flat-pack but roughly similar.
c) Power is a little more difficult. One company is solving this problem by putting in a battery to handle the load. This is possible, but the baseline cost would now be approximately $2,000, just for the parts.
d) window mount heat pump. New York City has funded in-window heat pumps as part of a design project. The problem is they run around $4,000 to $6,000, but an ordinary handyman could install them.
3) Recycling car batteries from crashed vehicles into home power banks.
This project is a bit of a stretch for me. I know people are doing this, but not in the States as far as I can tell. The off-grid solar community has a variety of inverters and solar chargers that may be suitable for this kind of situation, but I don't have enough knowledge.
4) Ad hoc virtual power plants
Many people have rooftop solar. The grid gets overfull on bright sunny days. People who can't have solar often have space for batteries. Work out the instrumentation and accounting so that solar producers can charge batteries, and everybody gets compensated when the grid demands the battery's power.
It seems to me that this would be a great application of distributed system concepts, providing a win for the local community and grid resiliency.
I need a second life to make progress on these ideas
Interestingly, just yesterday I found out 4 already exists, but it's inverse of what you're thinking: top up excess battery capacity overnight, when grid prices are low, and then resell during the day when purchase prices are high.
I think the economic problem is that while there /may/ be overproduction during the day, the day is the only time other than early-mid evening when there is significant demand.
You would effectively be targeting the early-mid evening demand, assuming there was overproduction during the day, and with the current cost of batteries, their installation, and their replacement, I can't see the numbers working out.
I would love for battery prices to come down enough to make something like this possible though.
Yes, item 4 does exist. Tesla and Sunrun both have virtual power plants. Tesla operates as a peaker plant, while Sunrun is a base-load plant.
What I want is different in terms of its organization. The intention is to establish a local community microgrid that anyone with the necessary equipment can participate in. I think the biggest problem will be the accounting, but that's my blind spot
Making enough money to retire
Any realistic strategies that you have considered in order to try achieving that? Genuine question.
Working. In my 30 years employed I've managed to invest enough to make up a little. I've probably 24 years left. I think I can more than double my 401k in that time but that still won't be 1M
If crypto keeps going up there's a chance my 3k investment in it eclipses my 40yr 401k so I'm hoping for that....
Genuine answer: I buy a lotto ticket like once a week. ~100 bucks/yr seems like a decent risk/reward tradeoff once over a certain tier of income.
I may try Gambling at the end
Automate office workers who do repetitive tasks. The likes of generalagents.com are getting close, perhaps they are even a bit worried about how much disruption is about to happen so haven't released it yet.