I'm not interested in crypto.
Oftentimes I kick off a fuzzer on some OSS, e.g., GCC, v8, standard *nix binaries, and let it run for days/weeks/months. If I find anything I submit it to the appropriate people or make a PR, if Im motivated enough that week
There's a bunch of good tutorials out there on [dumb] fuzzing (presumably where you'll start). One starting point I'd recommend is taking a binary that accepts input from stdin and making some proof-of-concepts with AFL (https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/).
If you'd rather start from a code/library perspective (and not CLI), I'd recommend libfuzzer (https://github.com/Dor1s/libfuzzer-workshop/).
There's a lot of other fuzzers, techniques, and depth to the field, but I'd recommend inch worming through (speed up as you gain more comfort). The Fuzzing Book is good to help you understand the logic behind techniques and strategies (https://www.fuzzingbook.org/)
As for some management, there's a few decent "monitoring" systems out there; personally I just SSH in and check the fuzzer manually (I leave it running in a tmux pane), but if that's not your cup of tea I've heard good things about OneFuzz (https://github.com/microsoft/onefuzz) and LuckyCat (https://github.com/fkie-cad/LuckyCAT).
Happy to answer any specifics of the sort :)
https://lichess.org/get-fishnet
https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet
There's also the Mersenne prime search which passed some milestones recently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_...
Hmm, I don't follow it that closely, but I have given a clock cycle or two to the project. And from taking a quick glance at their website[0] it seems they are still pretty involved. The most recent posting is called "Markov State Models (MSMs) of SARS-CoV-2 proteins" (although it may be from June 2020)
I'm also curious as to why the disinterest in crypto. I am not hugely swayed one way or the other, so its nice to hear peoples reasoning.
Better to use the energy for research imo