Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?

I got myself involved with a nonprofit local group preserving local pioneer era apple trees. They've been DNA testing and cataloging the trees, and had all the info stashed away in google drive and onedrive folders. The founder was looking to step back so they asked me if I wanted to step up as project lead, which I did.

I took the info and organized it into a nice wiki-style site with maps and descriptions so everyone in the community can learn about the old orchards.

https://heritageapplecorps.org/index.php/Main_Page

I've also learned how to prune and graft hundred year old apple trees and now have a couple dozen young grafted trees growing in my garage, all clones of local hundred year old trees, some of which genetically tested unique and are of currently unknown varieties.

I started designing my own clothes. The insight was that I spend 80% money on suits that I wear 2 times a year, and the rest was low quality clothing I actually wore.

I flipped it, and made suits and pants that I could wear everyday.

The fast fashion stores were crap quality, my body is not a template size and I care about fabric and comfort.

The process was to learn how to sketch, to determine fabrics, colors and fit. I made pants that stay comfortable even after I eat food, I made suits that I can wear casually.

I don’t stitch myself, for that I worked with multiple workshops, until I found one that works for me.

Took me about 3 years to reach a point where all my wardrobe is designed by and for me.

There were multiple side effects on my confidence, my life, and the opportunities coming my way.

My hobby is organizing in-person meetups for random people to get together, chat and make friends. Barely structured, if at all. I've found this rewarding and ended up making friends this way.

You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos you probably don't want to be around. And another 10% at any given meetup are autistic or neuro-divergent but well-meaning, kind and full of interesting insights and hobbies, although perhaps difficult to socialize with, at least until they get to know you're well-meaning too.

These challenges come with the territory. You end up talking to people you'd otherwise never meet in the normal course of your life, and it's neutral at worst and wonderful at best.

Almost everything you can do on your own is a "solved problem". Why go into woodworking if you can buy an Ikea stool? The point of hobbies isn't to solve problems - that's called a job - but to learn and have fun.

Find a niche where you can resist the temptation to constantly compare yourself to eight billion other people on the internet. Something where success isn't measured in Github stars, Youtube likes, or Reddit upvotes. Once you get in that mindset, almost anything goes. I know people who collect RPN calculators and are having a blast. All kinds of hands-on crafts are great too. I like making electronic music and I'm pretty bad at it.

Put it down over winter but just picking it back up.

Bat detection/identification with ultrasonic recordings. It's been fun building the data pipeline to manage the ~30GB+ of WAV files generated every night, run through some identification processes (currently using https://github.com/rdz-oss/BattyBirdNET-Analyzer) and build a UI (mostly vibe coded lol) to help with replay, cataloging, etc.

I'm using an AudioMoth currently (https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth), am thinking about extending it to do some of the preprocessing in the field to scale things up a bit.

I've been working on trying to help fill out the MeshCore network in our area for off-grid communications. Some of us are setting up solar powered, battery backed MeshCore nodes, they have no connection to power or Internet. You can use a small device (like a credit card or a small walkie-talkie) with a phone, or a blackberry-like device, to send/receive encrypted messages, chat on channels, or communicate on BBS-like "room servers".

It's interesting for if there were some sort of disaster impacting the cell network, or for use in the back woods where you have no cell contact. But it's extremely unreliable. My coworker who is into it, he lives 2-3 miles away but we can rarely communicate because he lives in a bit of a bowl that we don't have reachability into. Meanwhile I'm regularly getting messages from 30-70 miles away no problem.

It reminds me a lot of HAM radio, where there are other better ways to communicate, but if those ways broke it would be nice to have an alternative.

https://meshcore.co.uk/

If you like to work with your hands and have space, build something physical: big and complex, and actually finish it. I built a single engine two seat kit airplane in my garage, did all the flight testing, and now have an interesting way to travel/commute as a result. The "finish it" part is the most important bit. Computer people spend too much time working on projects that don't have a "done" state. Change that up.

Traditional archery.

I started a few years back and have been doing it off and on since. It's challenging but a lot of fun.

I shoot a lot of older style "recurve" bows, but the main style I shoot are horsebows, that is, bows that were historically shot from horseback.

They're very lightweight and you can shoot much more rapidly than you can with a more modern/mechanical recurve or compound. Right now I shoot around 20-25 arrows a minute. Not amazing compared to experienced archers, but a lot of fun.

I have a number of bows, but here are my favorites:

Assyrian: https://www.bogararchery.sk/image/cache/catalog/product/boga... Buryat: (No longer available)

I also shoot an English longbow from time to time.

The horsebows use a technique called "thumb draw" which is very different from the way most bows are shot in the west.

Here's a great YouTube channel if you want to explore getting into it: https://www.youtube.com/@ArminHirmer

I build Tiki Tube Amps - hifi stereos inside carved tiki heads. The tikis are carved from solid logs and hollowed out before I wire up all the circuitry inside. It's all analog vacuum-tube-driven circuits soldered point-to-point.

They're really difficult to make but super fun to listen to. When I'm carving I have to plan out how the circuit will be laid out, ensure there's enough space inside for the transformers, consider grounding schemes, etc. Plus mounting components and soldering inside a cramped log is not easy. But when they're done they have such personality. No other stereo listens to music _with_ you.

I love them because they combine many of my disparate interests - woodworking, tiki, electronics, soldering, music, vacuum tubes, metalworking. They're also an excuse to have friends over and throw parties.

edit: here's a video where I build one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xo-TGkFvOg

I highly recommend getting into loudspeakers or audio reproduction in general! Without a doubt the most enjoyable, satisfying, and enriching hobby I've had so far.

A couple years ago I decided to build a pair of synergy horns (look them up!) which included all kinds of interesting stuff! For example, I had to learn CAD, the principles of CNC and how to create toolpaths, what a waveguide is, general woodworking, and lots more. There's also lots of interesting "subhobbies" one may dwelve into such as psychoacoustics, signal processing, LEM/BEM simulations, the optimization of horn geometries (look up AKABAK or Ath4 and their respective DiyAudio threads), analog crossovers, or acoustically treating a room to reduce reverb.

Building speakers and experimenting with bracing and lining/damping have been rewarding for me as determining wether I prefer A or B really requires me to _listen_ in a different way from say, listening to a conversation (or even to music!). It feels very grounding and meditative in a way, and at least in my case, indirectly trains one to notice and appreciate more sounds in everyday life.

A big bonus is that it becomes really easy to throw outdoor parties out in the woods when one doesn't have to rent gear. Loudspeakers and bringing people together is a damn good and rewarding combo.

I was into woodworking, then I got into building fly fishing rods from bamboo.

Fly fishing has been around for a long time. They used to build rods by hand out of bamboo - a specific species of bamboo native to southern China - before factories started making them out of graphite, fiberglass, etc. for cheap.

Modern fly rods are a few hundred bucks. If you try to buy a bamboo rod in a store, they run $2K-$5K. They take a lot of time and meticulous work to build, and the result is a functional work of art.

Woodworking is a ton of fun, and challenging. Bamboo rod making is a niche within a niche, and there are not a whole lot of people who still do it ... mostly retired guys with a lot of time. It's a great tradition, and it's about as far away from computers and technology as I can get.

I didn't even know how to fly fish until I built my first bamboo rod.

Here's a great video showing the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfTvRxcTuV0

I got into HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) fencing last year through a club in my little town. Olympic/sport fencing is fun, but imagine (safely) swinging a 4lbs. steel longsword with two hands at your opponent instead. It's a ton of fun, a great workout (I burn ~1500 calories per class), and competitive so it keeps my interest.

Then there's the whole nerd layer of reading all the original sources from the 15th century, attempting to retain the historical character of the techniques while engaging in real combat, etc. It's both intellectually and physically stimulating.

I got into fig (and since then, more broadly, fruit) cultivation. Figs have a rich history, lots of variety, and there are very active online (and in-person) communities where you can buy or exchange plants and cuttings, advice, and fruit. This grew out of an initial interest in gardening, and the long-term goal is to create a food/fruit forest around our house where me, family, friends, and neighbors can walk around, spend time, and eat the absolute best fruit possible.

So far I've got about 40 fig trees in containers (~30 varieties), am focusing a bit more on blackberries this year (4 varieties that were planted last year), and we also have strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, as well as a more standard annual garden with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc as well as some wild edibles: mulberries, wineberries, and black raspberries.

There's a lot of interesting angles to this hobby: fruit selection, cultivation, harvesting, pest management (annoying but still interesting), landscape design, etc. Planning cycles are months at a minimum, and but more often you have to keep in mind what you want the landscape and experience to be like years from now.

It makes it more enjoyable to spend time outside doing physical things when the weather is warm, and I mostly take a break from it (or switch to planning) during the winters here.

Using crooked knives [0] for woodcarving.

They're essentially a combination of a plane, spoke-shave, draw-knife and gouge but all in a one handed tool. They were primarily used by Native Americans to build things like canoes, snowshoes, baskets etc. I first found about them from reading John McPhee's Survival of the Bark Canoe [1] but there are lots of uses of them on video on the website below (which I created).

If you want to get into woodworking but want only a few tools and/or a very portable tool, highly recommend.

e.g. in theory you could build an entire canoe with an axe, crooked knife and 3 or 4 sided awl (and a lot of time, patience and materials)

0 - https://crookedknives.com/

1 - https://amzn.to/3NSj4T3

Railway preservation (full size, not model). It looks crowded when a steam train is running and the moths gather around. The reality, when the trains are not running, is typically quite different, with a small dedicated group. If a place looks too crowded, pick a smaller museum.

Think of all the jobs that have to be done to run a railway and you will be able to find a museum that does it: heavy maintenance, boiler work, fitting and turning, blacksmithing, woodwork, upholstering, painting, catering, engine driving, fireman, signalling, customer service, ...

It's a great way to meet people, learn new skills and work with physical things.

My wife & I are Scottish Country dancers. It's a social dance form (it's traditional to swap partners for every dance so nobody has to bring a partner, though not required). Pretty good cardio, there are groups all over the world, so it's often not that difficult to find a class.

Other similar social dance forms from the UK are Contra dancing, English Country dancing, and Ceilidh dancing. Square dancing in the US developed out of these forms. Many other cultures have their own social dance forms, with varying levels of formalization.

Meaningful contribution is easy: these groups always benefit from more participants. Scottish Country dance has a formalized teaching certificate program, roughly equivalent to a Master's degree worth of work (and if you're a UK resident it qualifies to teach PE in UK schools).

Not sure if it is niche, but focused on one South Asian music genre -- been working on this personal project to compile, and collect resources from reliable sources along with mapping lineages of people. Also, I archive a lot of music for this genre from different sources before it vanishes from internet!

https://www.qavvali.com/

EDIT: I have one more page but that is not in navigation yet for people not familiar with the genre. The site is still work in progress -- if you have any feedback, please do leave it here, on the website if you can. The content curation is the most tedious part! https://www.qavvali.com/tradition/

I got into designing my own knitting patterns. I enjoy that I can customize everything — the yarn material, color (including marling, helix knitting, double knitting), yarn weight, needle size (e.g., resulting in "airy" vs "packed" textures), knit textures (e.g., stockinette, linen, miss, etc.), construction process (e.g., can I figure out a way to knit in the round vs flat?), cables, gradual increases/decreases, selvedge/cord, desired ease, etc..

I wrote software to generate patterns given configurations and keep track of which row I'm on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089

I am sharing some of my patterns here: https://alejo.ch/2s0

I'm currently working on my second ruana.

Perfumery.

It's something I got into a few years ago and has been a real eye-opener into the world of perfumery and our wonderful olfactory senses. Strangely, though I suspect is the case with many other hobbies, there is crossover with programming albeit somewhat abstractly.

Often it's about building abstractions and reusable components. For example let's say you wish to create an apple note (typically referred to as an accord). You're not tasked with creating the scent of an actual apple but rather the illusion of apple. This is done by mixing ingredients (usually referred to as raw materials) which are generally split into two categories, synthetic and natural, where a synthetic material if often just an isolated molecule and a natural material may be an oil extracted from nature or a tincture, among other kinds. Once you have mixed the raw materials and are happy with the result, you've essentially created a formula which is a reusable component that can then be used in one or many of your creations.

Aside from the creative process of making the actual perfume, you've then got a ton of applications in which to use it such as a fine fragrance, a candle, room spray, shower gel, shampoo, laundry detergent to name just a few.

With new raw materials becoming available all the time there are just endless possibilities as to what you can create and it, for me, has been a lot of fun both learning the craft and creating actual perfumes that I myself now wear.

Synthesizers! I like it because it's tactile and immediate, and you're not glued to a screen, but can create fun-sounding beats.

Nowadays there are nice, cheapish groove boxes that are perfect for noodling on the couch. I started with the Novation Circuit Tracks, and also really enjoy the Teenage Engineering EP-133. Not to say that I am any good at this, but it's an enjoyable hobby! Bonus if you are friends who are also into it and you can jam together :)

Consider mathematics. If you already know enough math to derive the quadratic equation, you might make a small change, like adding X^3 or X^4. See where your own techniques take you before looking up the answer. With just a few pen strokes, you will be playing with an equation for which there is no general solution, or no known solution. In mathematics it will take you very little time to start playing at the boundaries of human knowledge, and it's relatively easy to memorize a few starting points that many hours of passenger travel fly by.

Not sure if you're into 40s music, but there's a little known instrument called a theatre organ. It was conceived when silent films were taking off, and theaters needed some form of background music. Paying an organist was much cheaper than hiring a whole orchestra, so a lot of theaters opted to get an organ as a cost saving measure (imagine, lol). Anyways, a few have survived, and I learned the basics of playing one. It's an absolutely incredible instrument, in terms of the sheer amount of sounds you can make with it. Someone played the star wars overture for example[1]. It also has one of the most flexible interfaces, with the tabs, second touch, and sustenuno pedal on the volume foot controls. It's inspired a lot of my own tinkering with custom sound synthesis too.

[1] https://youtu.be/I2S72eajLzw

The demoscene, while not unknown, is still quite niche amongst technologists and digital artists in the most of the world. It has a pretty thriving scene with dozens of get togethers worldwide (mostly in Europe) each year, is creative, communal, artistic, competitive, multidisciplinary, highly influential, and has a near infinite number of ways to engage with it. It has a long running internal culture, but is welcoming of outsiders willing to learn, and is kind of a "third way" to think about software and technology that can often radically change how you think about computing.

It's also a recognized UNESCO recognized intangible cultural heritage in at least half a dozen countries.

https://www.demoparty.net/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

Recreational mapmaking.

Every couple of months the family and I will book out some long weekend to just go to an Airbnb in some random town with some copy paper and just go around trying to draw what we think is around us. Inevitably the lines collide and we have to ask some local passerby for help, and if they know any interesting places nearby, and before you know it they're following along with a colored pencil and some copy paper against a hardcover book too.

Animal tracking. I picked it up in college and it has been a real source of joy and a true challenge. It's also something you can do almost anywhere: urban, suburban, rural, out in "the wild."

A lot of people think of it as looking for paw/hoof marks in the mud, but tracking can actually be quite involved, requiring you to understand the environment and ecology as a whole.

For example, tracking birds is outrageously difficult and when I first started out I didn't think it was possible. But the more I learned about birds, their habits (per species), their environment, I started to see signs everywhere. It really got my eyes open and I started seeing the same old places in completely new ways!

And in terms of contributing something, there are all sorts of apps/organization that can help you identify different species and in turn you give them data in the form of pictures, location, etc. I use iNaturalist myself, but there are others.

My strange hobby was going on what I called "leak walks".

I lived in a town where on any sunny day I could go for a walk and be almost guaranteed to spot a water mains leak I hadn't seen before, which I'd then report and see how long it would be before it was fixed.

The record was over a year for one of them.

( Yes, it was a Thames Water area. )

My niche hobbies is carving wooden spoons and I think it balance very well with any work behind a computer.

It’s surprisingly deep for something that looks so simple. You can start with almost nothing: a small axe to split the wood and a knife to shape it. That’s enough to make your first spoon. From there, it can become as technical or as artistic as you want, depending on how far you go.

There’s also a whole international community around it. People organize small gatherings and larger meetups where they carve together, share techniques, compare tools, and pass down very specific bits of knowledge. There is a whole series of videos about this on youtube on a channel named "zed outdoors". This hobby also had me look around for wood everywhere, when walking or driving and you can do it almost everywhere as long as you have a small knife with you.

Also, using a spoon you made yourself is genuinely satisfying in a way that’s hard to explain. It changes the relationship you have with a very ordinary object.

It looks like a quiet craft, but you can go very far with it.

Despite AI starting to crowd this space, I've been spending all of my free time learning music production (doing it the old fashion way without AI). It's a great mix of technical and creative problem solving. Mostly focusing on dark ambient/cinematic composition, playing around hardware synths (Prophet 6, Subsequent 37, modular / eurorack, Digitone II).

If anyone is curious, I put out a single recently (remaster from last year): https://soundcloud.com/vectordust/ion-dunes-1

My main personal goal right now is to release a full length album this year.

I’m obsessed with powerlifting. Not only because big numbers get bigger but also the physical changes that occur with a healthy dose of lifting each week. It’s also easy to track lifting stats and there are tons of analysis tools out there if data analysis is something you enjoy.

Also, I’m trying to learn guitar - right now following the Justinguitar.com lessons

I’m a paraglider pilot and powered paraglider recently. Totally recommended, you get to connect with nature in a meaningful way. Also people who practice this kind of sports are nice. From a tech perspective there are a lot of data generated on each flight you can create your own way to capture that data or use already existing apps.

What I rarely read about as hobby but I really enjoy is touch! Taking massage/therapy classes, like lomi-lomi, craniosacral, acupressure, shiatsu, etc. -- plenty of great courses available. They're typically aimed at professionals since it is "under-explored" as a hobby, but well worth it as self experience. Not only the receiving but also the giving during the training(s), plus all the chances to give nice touch experiences to your friends and family! How many bodies have you deeply touched in your life?

Another niche hobby of mine is constellations groups: you meet with others to simulate and explore a problem somebody within the group is facing; a bit like impro theatre but real-life issues. Very interesting and doesn't require any skills, you just "do". I often just go and participate as a viewer: Better than cinema!

I also like NVC (non-violent communication) classes and trainings. It's a hobby but a bit more effort, you spend time with other likeminded people, learn something about the inner functioning of others, plus it improves my communication and conflict skills, both in personal and business areas.

Create custom software for non profits is pretty rewarding. They cant afford anything and have process flow needs that are completely unmet.

The software wont be sexy, but will help the non profits and the people they serve

Social dancer here -- without hyperbole this was a lifechanging hobby for the better, and while I haven't been able to "meaningfully contribute to" as a criteria, I am a much better person for it.

I'm primarily a salsa dancer (~18 years), but spent a few years doing a buncha other dances to get an understanding of the music and movement so I'm pretty much beginner-intermediate in a buncha other dances (equiv of 1-2 year level dancer) -- Bachata, West Coast Swing, Fusion, and a splash of a ton of other dances.

The best I can explain to most people is that dance is a conversation to a topic (music) through the language of motion instead of sound, and that just like rewarding conversations we can have through verbal language and text, some of the most resonant conversations can be had through connection and touch.

For the subset of folks who happen to be gamers here, this is a massively multiplayer co-op music game with a very high skill curve.

I started dancing due to taking a popular social dance series at college by Richard Powers, and that was the gateway for my lifelong dance practice. It allowed me to indulge in another side of collaborative music, gave me a good relationship with interpersonal connection and physical touch, and provided me with a fairly active and healthy hobby for my life.

Can't say enough good things about it, just that the skill curve for beginners is high -- the first year is known as beginner's hell, but once you establish a basic vocabulary in the dance it becomes so much more artistic and creative.

I don't think chess engines are a solved problem for some use cases. Yes you can make something strong, maybe even the strongest, but can you create a chess engine perfectly tuned to actually teaching a player? Instead of superhuman perfect lines and inscrutable long-horizon strategy, can you teach nearly optimal human play in a way that's actionable, modular and memorable? Can you improve on tournament prep for players against particular opponents or within a particular metagame?

Also, obviously it's your life, and we're here on Earth to fart around, but I have spent a good portion of my life dipping into one hobby after another, as my dad did before me, so I'm half speaking to myself when I ask this: why do you think you can't meaningfully contribute to any of these realms, even now? To me that sounds like some deep seated fear or doubt, some aversion to competition, some overriding bitterness. I'm slightly worried you'll just be back here in another couple of years trying to find another new hobby, unsullied by the efforts and achievements of others. You won't find that! I would actually suggest a particularly expensive hobby: going to therapy. Try that, and learn that you're already enough, and if your contributions are meaningful to you, that's all that matters. Happy to be way off the mark here though.

Walking and finding history if your location has such history to offer to find.

People pay vast accruing cumulative sums over time to go to the gym and my exercise pays me with every single walk. Some of that modern human history I have found dates back hundreds of years in the form of coins and bottles while some of the native human history I have found dates back 10 thousand years. I cannot neglect the fossils either as the oldest I have found reviewed by an expert is said to be Paleozoic tabulate coral being over 251 million years aged.

Thanks to gravity everything lost in the past is under our feet and as digitalization has taken over our global society, created by some of those reading this here, there are not many folks walking let alone looking. I found my first item over 14 years ago now and while my partner HATES the aggregate volume of the things I have collected she cannot neglect the uniqueness, rarity and value of some of those items. Every single walk inspires real motivation however one needs their health first to take that walk.

Stay Healthy!

I think a really underrated hobby is amateur Microscopy, I don't know why its not more popular.

Looking at moss, pond water, microbes, tardigrades, paramecia, cells, plants, crystals, stuff around the house

You can get a decent microscope for like $250 and just get a smartphone mount to take high quality pictures/videos.

I feel like with astronomy/telescopes you spend a ton of money just to see a blurry blob whereas microscopes are way more bang-for-buck in terms of how much cool science stuff you can see for cheap.

How niche is retrocomputing?

I absolutely love my ancient machines, and I use them to explore period applications, much more than games.

I also love to restore and preserve them. There’s something magical about a Sun workstation Solaris 2 a Frog Design Trinitron monitor. or a Microvax running VMS and DECWindows. Or a multi-user Altair Z80. I think it’s sad a lot of software was lost and some platforms were denied the documentation that’d enable their preservation (looking at you, IBM - document the AS/400 and release old OS to hobbyists).

My niche hobby is exploring patterns in Islamic Geometry and trying to re create them. It is an art of creating pleasing and aesthetic geometric patterns (from intersecting circles mostly). The art form is very popular in decorating Mosques and other Islamic monuments as human/animal representation is forbidden.

[Edit] The thing that I find the most fascinating is that all the complex design you see, are done with only using a pair of compass and rulers.

I build weird experimental instruments and then play them at the local electronic music open mic nights.

My main instrument is the electroduochord, a stereo two-stringed instrument played with a drone motor rotary magnetic bow. https://youtu.be/G1ftvw-Y6pk

I've also hooked up audio jacks to small solar panels to convert vibrations in light into sound. https://youtu.be/ZF2Rn5YfBC8

Now I'm working on cybernetic drumming and rhythm synthesis. https://youtu.be/oJZeP4Naqxo https://youtu.be/NwNrJLvHuAE

Watchmaker in training here - after 20 years in startups I am now in my first semester of watchmaking school. It is one of the hardest things I've done in my 47 years, and I am loving every minute of it. It is training my brain, hands, and eyes to see and do things I never thought possible.

Repairing a watch feels similar to dealing with code to me:

- observing to see how/why certain watch components/chunks of code work and interact with each other - analyzing performance - disassembling and cleaning parts/"cleaning" code - troubleshooting why something isn't working - repairing faults caused by the previous watchmaker/developer

I highly recommend it to anyone needing something physical to do after a day spent staring at a screen. Stare at a watch instead!

I've been playing exclusively CRPGs for the last 12 months or so, which was kinda a niche genre before the success of BG3. There are tons of way to beat those games and optimizing how you build your party and characters (what players call "min-maxing") while following a highly narrative story is a lot of fun. Most of them are quite old and often on sales for like 5 bucks on Steam, for which you get hundreds of hours of gameplay. A few recommendations: Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Owlcat's Pathfinders & W40K Rogue Trader, Larian's Divinity 1, 2 & BG3, Bioware's BG1 & BG2, etc…

It's a great time to get into programming languages stuff: designing domain-specific languages, building new tools/abstractions and, especially, formal verification. If you're mathematically oriented, you can explore formalizing mathematical proofs in Lean.

LLMs have really revitalized interest in these areas. AI can really help navigate the initial learning curve, can do a surprising amount of "heavy lifting" and can make tedious but useful work much easier. Do you want your little language to have a language server and nice editor-specific syntax highlighting? Do you need to write a parser with decent error messages? Do you need to prove a bunch of largely straightforward lemmas to get to the proof you actually care about? All of these things are easier (and, hopefully, more fun) than they were a few years ago. But, at the same time, there is still a lot of room for human insight and design in this process. There are a lot of areas that AI can't handle (or, at least, can't handle well) and, of course, nothing stops you from doing the fun stuff by hand even if you could hand it off to Claude.

And, of course, all this PL stuff was fun before LLMs. It's even more fun now even if you don't want to use AI yourself, because more people are doing and talking about PL stuff online, and there are more tools and libraries you can use yourself.

I make my own hot sauce:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/08/04/making-your-own-ho...

It's quite easy and you don't have to make it super hot.

I am currently growing chillis for the next batch.

FDM 3d printing is still a wild-west and there are plenty of avenues to explore. Not sure what else to say about that other than as someone with daily and close personal proximity to the 'industry' that cropped up I am well aware that there is plenty of work to be done by enthusiasts and niche-people.

Engineering and machinery is still a place full of exploration if you have the chops. If you don't have them yet then there is plenty of topics within that domain to explore; you'll never run out of things to learn there.

My 0.02c : learn to disregard the crowds and focus on your own work. Just because people are doing something you used to do doesn't mean they have anywhere near the depth of understanding and 'freedom of movement' as you do as a 'resident expert'.

also : the fact that no one is doing something may be a signal; crowds form for a reason. Very few hobbyist bomb-squad folk and rabid-racoon-caregivers, get what I mean?

the GPT3 models didn't keep you from learning about ML. The industry didn't push you from keyboard and printers. You did these things.

If you're trying to lead an entirely one-off human life with total uniqueness from other people then all I could suggest is hallucinogens , but personally I think that the goal of just being unique for the sake of being unique is ludicrous.

Just find enjoyment, that's the goal for me at least.

My hobby involves trying to help my brother get a job. He has a disability and can only work remotely at low-skill jobs. So, I have spent years applying, starting, and doing work in virtual assistant, support desk, and social media management roles for him. I apply to contract and freelance projects on his behalf, get started with the work, and later try to hand it off to him. He will either say one of two things: "You do it yourself" or that his brain cannot process the work. I make 10-15 times more money at my regular job, so hearing him say "You do it yourself" is not fun.

This hobby also includes trying to convince him that the business schemes he comes up with are not great—they're exclusively fraud-related, such as various forms of gambling and crypto stuff.

Mum keeps telling me that if I do not look after him, he will likely end up in a worst situation. He is in his early 40s by the way.

I did a second job as a hobby so I could just pay him the money, but that did not work because he keeps investing it in one of his schemes. So, I have to find him a job and convince him to keep it. I have a set of fake accounts that I use to apply to jobs and beg him take them on while he continuously says "you do it".

This has been going on for 7 years now.

I’ve started making what I “joy machines” that I am putting up in or near my neighborhood. They’re some combination of public interactive art (e.g. push a button and it prints out a compliment) and little art on display that I design and 3D print for people to take.

I've been building small games on and off over the last decade

Started taking it a bit more seriously over the last 3 months and I've started building a specific game that I'm slowly building out

It's a top down ARPG called Mechstain where the player creates and pilots voxel based mechs

Instead of traditional gear, your mech has a physical voxel footprint that you the player have to fit weapons and components inside

Your job is to manage space, power and mass, what you can fit and power directly becomes your stats and abilities, essentially a bin packing problem

Basically take Diablo 2 and remix it with Kerbal Space Program, still fleshing out the various systems, but I'm really enjoying the process of slowly designing systems, iterating on it and fleshing it out

It's quite fun taking thoughts I've been noodling on for years and trying to figure out if they synergise with what I'm looking at and do they provide interesting player decisions

Recently onboarded a 3d artist and it's really making things look a lot better

If anyone has experience lighting this sort of game, I'd love to talk to them, still trying to figure that out =)

I make holiday light shows with an open source program called XLights[0]. I'm sure you've seen the videos[1] of what people[2] can do. Usually the top comment is "man that is cool but I wouldn't want to be their neighbor!" followed by "my neighbors love my light shows".

Creating the sequences is time consuming, and lot of people end up buying them or sharing them, but those are rarely as good as the ones you make for yourself.

Some folks have dabbled with using AI to create the sequences. I think the biggest issues are lack of training data and it's a very visual art, so there needs to be a better feedback between the text representation and the visual manifestation.

So if you're into using AI to make physical world things better, that would be a good place to look!

[0] https://xlights.org

[1] https://youtu.be/enhhtPZMwCE?t=119

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5dfpe_-Lgg

My hobby involves some of the oldest technology we've been able to find evidence of.

It started as spinning with a hand spindle using prepared (combed/carded) wool, and has evolved into looking for interesting fleeces directly from the shepherds (plenty given away or sold cheaply around here), figuring out how best to wash and process (hand comb? drum carder? spin directly from the slightly-opened locks?), working on which settings on my spinnng wheel will produce the twist I'm looking for, and most recently, dyeing using Easter egg dye and vinegar, which is surprisingly effective.

Oh, and of course, knitting and crocheting with the results.

I still use hand spindles to spin while walking, watching my kid on the playground, or on transit.

I've been doing photography for a long time but over the last few years had phases where I got bored of it and tried something new.

I had a long time when I was bored and carried the camera in my pack but never took any pictures, then one day I looked out at the sports center out my window and decided to start shooting sports.

Posting photos to socials I found flower photographs were popular so I take a lot of them and find ways to not get bored. (Maybe I will start focus stacking one of these days)

Since the beginning of the year I have been "going out" as a character who is a bit like a Disney cast member who gets photos like

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116326541009492328

from people who recognize my character. Like the Disney cast member it works better when people have seen the movie so i hand out these tokens

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840

which spread virally around a university campus, particularly among Chinese students who recognize the huli jing and all the time I have experiences "that could only happen in a manga" when, for instance, somebody who's heard the rumors is waiting at the bus stop for me. Laugh but all my marketing KPIs have an extra zero on the right!

Local urbex and exploration of 'haikyo' areas. Easy for me since I am in Tokyo and it's super walkable. I have taken to just getting on the train and getting off at random stations and walking in a random direction for a couple of kilometers. Every now and then I run into interesting abandoned buildings or neat shrines. Also makes for good exercise.

Hnefatafl, a simple board game that was played by the vikings and others who had frequent contact with them. Or rather, what we play today is an approximation of what they played back then as we don't really know the exact rules they used. It's interesting in that unlike chess and others, it is asymmetrical, and there are a number of different variants each with their own challenges and different balances between attacker and defender.

The main community and learning resource is at http://aagenielsen.dk.

Not sure if you were looking only for indoor hobbies, but I picked up Kiteboarding recently, and it is the most outrageously fun thing I've ever done.

It's like being a kid and jumping off the house with a bedsheet, except it works. Most mistakes are laughed off by splashing in the water. I'm 3 years in and I can jump 7-10m then fly like a bird for 5-10 seconds without consequences.

Even as a beginner, sailing around or just feeling a kite pull you around is such a blast. Keep in mind it's really difficult and pretty much requires 10-20 hours of private lessons.

There's a lot of legacy / retro coding out there that despite the output being used by anywhere from hundreds, to thousands to even millions of end-users, it still involves small tight night communities per project, sometimes they overlap somewhat. I've mentioned it before, if you follow people reverse engineering Shockwave, you will note that they are all on the same communities to capture as much wisdom from others as possible. In niche reverse engineering communities, the smallest thing can be a life changer.

I have been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find the owners of the old Digital Research "Concurrent DOS" operating system. There's a lot of interesting turns in the search and it's been fun to document.

I've written a blog post about it [1] though there have been a few updates since I've written that.

I honestly think it might be a fun thing for me to keep doing, whether or not I'm successful with my search. I think there is a lot of old software that is just sitting on old hard drives that is waiting to be preserved.

[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/03-March/The-Q...

amateur liquid bi-prop rocket engines for the High Power Rocketry hobby are gaining momentum. There's lot of opportunity there for performance profiling and even more if you have access to a machine tools like CNC lathes. There's also interest in active stabilization of amateur rockets using engine gimbaling which would put so much more performance in reach.

These guys are legit and actually flying airframes instead of just ignition on a test stand. https://www.halfcatrocketry.com/

The hobby is geography constrained though, you need access to large open spaces. Even small engines are spectacularly loud and igniting one in your garage would scare the crap out of your neighbors.

Edit: if you're in/near LA this club is pretty much ground zero. Tom Mueller of SpaceX's Merlin engine series fame was discovered here iirc. https://rrs.org

I don't know if it's niche, but I like making granola for my friends and family. I give them a big jar and tell them free refills are included ("just bring me the empty jar"). I get pretty good nuts and tend to make largish batches (around 2 kg), and, because of the refills, I get a good sense of who appreciates it — always happy to make more for them. My recipe is here: https://alejo.ch/365

Not sure if this is an established hobby or something I've just come up with myself, but I've been "dashboarding." Essentially I have a Blazor webapp that integrates lots of data sources (some manual, some automatic) from areas of my life and I use that to visualize and analyze goals and habits. The main page consists of rolling-weekly stats that deliver "integration scores." Each score contributes to an overall score that gives me a general idea of how I'm doing on all my habits and goals.

So for instance, I use YNAB for our family budgeting, and I have it setup so that if I go a whole week without performing reconciliations, I get dinged -1. Otherwise this sits at 1.0. Then I have a score for journaling - my goal is to journal 4-5 times per week, so each time I journal it resets the score to 1, and then slowly ticks down to 0 over time. Then I have a number of Apple health scores that get imported automatically via REST API. This part compiles all the data on calories, relevant macronutrients (I mostly track protein and fiber currently), steps, workouts, etc. and builds a nice visualization. I consider a total integration score of 0.8 to be pretty good - keeping at that level is actually better than seeking for a perfect 1.0 all the time as my theory is that it will prevent burnout and allow for some forgiveness, because I can't be perfect.

It's been a fun project, and one that I generally try to avoid any AI use. Fun to just build and because the stakes are so low I just chip away at one feature at a time, carving out 15 minutes here or there.

Get a microscope and help me explore the role of structured water in rouleaux formation.

Rouleaux formations are clumps of red blood cells, and they're bad because 90% of our circulatory system is < 1 cell wide, so clumps cannot pass. Hematological literature of past 50 years is a bit of a mess regarding mechanisms, seemingly has not considered structured water because it's recent and looks a little fringe. Structured water is known to be disrupted by WiFi, so if a clearer connection can be made between structured water and rouleaux, it could offer the simplest and most encompassing explanation for biological harm from EMF; would also make the benefits of sauna, red light therapy, grounding/earthing, and other practices more legible.

I did an n=5 study on sauna and rouleaux (positive result; draft report: https://thespacebetween.xyz/p/sangre-y-sauna/), and some n=1 observations of myself with grounding and wifi. Blog post: https://thespacebetweenx.substack.com/p/blood-and-the-specte...

Bellringing, specifically change ringing. It’s a type of church bell ringing that is rather algorithmic in nature. Tends to attract mathy types. Religion not required or expected!

If you have English-style tower bells near you, it's worth checking out, even if only to listen.

Guess this doesn't count as a hobby since I switched careers, but I left software recently to attend violin making school. I'm happier than I've been in a long time.

I'd encourage all "mental work" folks to engage with something physical in the 3D realm (art, cooking, gardening, etc.). I really believe humans have a special affinity for creating refined objects, and I don't think software "scratches that itch".

Is buying hopefully broken electronic test equipment at the flea market, fixing it and then blogging about it a niche hobby?

1. Lacto fermented food, you can spend plenty of time making unique food not available anywhere. Good niche to start is lacto fermented hot sauce. You can go very mild or crazy hot depending on your preference. 2. Sourdough is pretty understood, but there is hardly anything about gluten free sourdough. Basic principles are the same, you make a starter from flour and water, but you need to make it across different gluten free flour and combine them at the end. Endless possibilities with playing with ratios, toppings, etc. 3. Building meshcore / meshtastic nodes for your local area. There are kits / ready make nodes online or you can build your own. 4. Building a cyberdeck. You can start small with ready made parts, while you work towards designing your own PCB, handling battery with BMS, CADing everything, 3d printing, etc. You can specialise by only doing themed cyberdecks like only wearable or only fallout inspired. 5. Self host at home, but only rootless, distroless podman containers. 6. Automate all you can at home and integrate into home assistant. Install wleds, sync them to the music or use them as visual notification for things you care about

So interesting to read from other's hobbies!

I believe we all have three major parts: emotional, intellectual, and physical.

I have been very intellectually oriented, meaning I used my intellectual part even when it was not so useful for the thing I was doing. For example, thinking about emotions or how to do something when it is better than just feel or do.

My aim has been to become more balanced human being, meaning choosing pursuits that activate those other parts as well.

What has stayed with me over the years has been couples' dancing, which fits nicely with physical/emotional side. You just need to find a teacher whose apporach is not intellectual, i.e. based on steps and sequences! I am still doing it 2-5 times per week.

I am also doing regularly: - yin yoga - tai chi - winterswimming

I have had several other niche hobbies throughout the years, like: - fencing - improv theatre - leather works -- I ended up on a very demanding leather shoe course and made my own dancing shoes - wood crafting -- wooden spoons - traditional survival skills -- various kinds of traditional fire making skills, making traditional traps, making emergency tents, making emergency drafts, learning about plants, learning to skin/handle game etc.

Something I wanted to try but did not yet: - flint knapping

I don’t know how niche they are, but a few I’ve done in the past

- 3D printed musical instruments. Print other designs or contribute your own

- lock picking. When you really get into it, you modify locks to make them more of a challenge and mail them to people

- Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat. I’m currently mainly interested in linearizing switch-mode amplifiers, but was doing fox hunting for a bit (radio direction finding), and periodically do POTA (transmitting from parks)

Fishing. But not just regular fishing, life listing. I catalogue and detail ever fish I catch; the conditions, the type of lure or bait, the rod etc. From there you can get into microfishing with tanago rods, surf fishing etc. It's can get quite deep and a good additional hobby for people who love to travel.

Qubes OS is a niche security-oriented operating system that runs everything in VMs with about 70k users [0]. Even less users contribute with amazing things like running in RAM [1] or using very minimal VMs with Debian and Fedora [3] to minimize the attack surface and bloat.

[0] https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/introduction/statistics.h...

[1] https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/qubes-os-live-mode-dom0-in-ram-...

[2] https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-i-learned-to-love-liteqube-...

Started a volunteer run, drop-in, bicycle workshop a few years ago. Its still going strong- something about the vibe, the practicality, and bike maintenance being just the right level of hard. I don't run it any more, but I drop in from time to time, and it always makes me feel better.

Flying sailplanes/gliders. Once you get good at it, you can fly hundreds of miles (or more) by understanding the weather and figuring out where the air is going up. Lots of opportunities to nerd out. Aerodynamics, weather forecasting, remote sensing, in-flight user interfaces, strategy, communications, and also just satisfying to figure out how to coax the atmosphere to get you somewhere for free.

A group of us in our community broadcast many of the local high school sports. Our original setup had a scoreboard that was really clunky to manage and was hard to learn, so I built a web-based version that pretty much any 12 year old with an iPad could use.

I have worked with the logs extensively over time to convert the simple data inputs from the scoreboard controls into charts & graphs that update in real time on the screen to “tell the story” of the game, and generate “talking points” from the data. It allows us to plug in students as commentators and they can talk about the game much more confidently because they can visually see the game's storyline that is based on actual data. “The Trojans are on a 14-4 streak starting late in the 3rd quarter, and that has flipped the lead in their favor” is a lot more fun than “the Trojans are doing well the last little bit”.

It’s been fun (and challenging) to develop the right UI to display the game’s story in a way that is rich yet easy to read at a glance. And it has been cool to see the students increase in how professional they sound on the live broadcast.

I do some synthetic biology as a hobby - genetically engineered a baker’s yeast to produce grape aroma and then baked bread with it, and gave it to like 100 people at an event I was at.

Also do a few others - learned Esperanto (exclusively through listening and speaking with people), beekeeping, woodworking, etc.

Taught myself to use a sewing machine. Then I made my own EDC wallet thing. Basically a zipper pouch that can fit a lot of things while keep them as spread out in my front pocket.

I've got a version of this now in my front pocket for like 9 months: https://share.zight.com/wbu487ew Yes, it's big, but it's the most comfortable from of a big wallet.

It's funny though. I can't help feel the pull to try and make the hobby a business. But then it probably becomes unfun. But my brain just can't not think that way.

2 years ago I wanted an easy way to listen to commodore 64 sid tunes on my computer without the need of powering on my c64 everytime but with the benefits of having real sid chips. After doing some research I concluded that the available uab hardware sid boards were either unavailable or outdated. This started my journey to create my own usb board, USBSID-Pico. Currently at version 1.3 of the pcb with an improved version and pro version in development.

The board is supported in various commodore 64 emulators, sid trackers and web players. It also supports midi (still in active development) and even has an onboard embedded emulator.

As far as I know there are now approximately 300+ boards in the hands of enthusiasts. Ranging from users, chiptunes lovers, demo creators to musicians. The board and it's firmware are open source, and the board is available at PCBWay and via my Tindie. Just yesterday I shipped 11 new boards to new owners across the globe.

From personal need to niche hobby supplying fun to other enthusiasts in just 2 years

I’ve recently started making bread, at the moment still with fresh or bakers yeast and planning to grow my own sourdough.

It’s not very niche, but as a hobby it’s pretty fulfilling. It allows for a lot of play, and you end with something tasty. Also, makes for a great small gift for friends and family.

I'm into book restoration, here's a gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/1oNxCfKJp4k6yjoZ9

Much less niche, but I'm also really into acting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=do5PicgU0Jw

I do gundog training. When I started with our first dog I did not expect to enjoy it that much. It’s hard to express how much it takes mentally and physically, and the bond you build with your dog is crazy.

Best of all, you don’t actually have to hunt. You can stick to dummies.

In terms of contributing in a meaningful way, your local trainer will always be happy with helpers. If you need to setup multiple 200m retrieves for multiple dogs, it helps if you have someone out in the field doing the work. And lots of stuff to organise and help out with.

I got into improv theatre. There are groups in every city, at least here in the EU. It is both fun and developing creativity, alertness, etc.

I'm big into anti tech/work related activities. It reminds me that no matter how much I know, or think I know, that I have so much more to learn.

I got into scuba diving while living in NC, and it just happens that there's a lot of it off the coast! The other problem is that it's deep. Diving down to 130 feet sounds cool until you experience hours on a boat only to get a few minutes at the bottom. Eventually I got bothered to learn more about diving.

I headed down to northern Florida to dive with GUE. My instructor was a person who regularly got hit up to dive to exotic places all over the world. Missions like collecting/deploying samples, archaeology, recovery. Here were people meaningfully impacting the environment, science, and keeping technical know-how alive.

I don't know how to convey a the wonder I feel in text. Check it out maybe.

Get your Part 107 federal drone license and volunteer for your local fire department or search and rescue. When the FD responds to structure fires they sometimes have to go up on the roof to cut an air hole. This allows oxygen into the building which helps prevent backdrafts. A FLIR equipped drone can help direct the hole cutter around hotspots on the roof. If your local fire department has a drone, it might not have the staff to be able to use it on calls.

Echoing others, Chess engines certainly aren't a solved problem! In fact there are a lot of niches that are absolutely starving for effort. Ones I'm interested in are related to Chess variants and puzzles.

Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety of tools to train new neural nets for these variants, generate opening books, puzzles, etc. You can play some of them on PyChess (pychess.org). These are projects basically run by a couple people with huge backlogs of bugs and feature requests. An enthusiastic developer can easily get involved! Or just enjoy playing different variants and getting involved with the player community.

https://dejabru.org - The Homebrew Competition Remembering Historic and Long-Forgotten Beer Styles

I don't think it's a niche hobby, but I really enjoy cooking. Trying out new techniques and receipts, cooking dinner for friends and family or just preparing a delicious meal in advance.

Hydrophonic farming at home. You can play with sensors (acidity, humidity etc), LED lighting (frequencies, intensity, etc), vision processing (maybe throw in some AI buzzword here) to keep track of your plants and do some decision making.

Bonus: You get to eat the stuff you grow :)

I'm into innovation in HCI as a hobby, but it does get expensive so I would like to bring in some additional financial support for my unusual builds.

I didn't really plan to build HCI as a hobby, but I have a strong interest in hardware engineering and eventually I wanted to switch back to building things that anyone can physically see.

Years ago I built a hemisphere keyboard and now I've built an LED globe with a viewing portal. I started building visible things again because I had a vision and it's very satisfying to use the result. I spend more time using it now than I did originally building it, although it is definitely a work in progress. I want to build it again for a 2.0 version.

There's a surprisingly high number of people in my extended social circle who picked up archery as a sport.

It's actually a complex discipline with a huge range of bows and projectiles to choose from, each having unique characteristics you have to train for.

Training using VR equipment is picking up steam, as typically you need a sizeable amount of real estate to practice when the weather is bad.

If chess is a solved problem, think about skating to where the puck is going to be, an interest area a bit further away from relatively easier verifiability such as coding, math, and hard sciences.

Do you have any interest in digital humanities? Knowledge work where verification is still important but not as black-and-white as does the math check out, does the code run.

Do you have any interest in family history or genealogy?

https://vibegenealogy.ai/p/the-genealogical-research-assista...

I’ve been learning Gregg Shorthand (Anniversary) since the start of the year. It’s a fun challenge even if it feels fantastically obsolete at this point with transcription models getting better and better every day. I’ve always liked paper-and-pen notes, so the idea of basically learning analog Vim was appealing :)

Ham radio, can be either really technical designing transmit protocols, antennas, SDRs or really just talking to random people as far away as you can reach without being bound to the internet.

I used to do some fossil digging in an abandoned brick factory, where people have open access to layers and layers of shale rock rich of invertebrate animals. I thought it could be a useful hobby to teach my son about Geology in general and get him moving. Sadly I dropped it when he was 3 because I really did not have the time and energy to pursuit it frequently. I also thought about attending a few Geology classes in local universities but that probably needs to wait until he grows up.

The other hobby I have is to read the source code of legacy kernels such as Linux kernel 1.0, figure out a very early version of a component (e.g. VFS) and tried to trace how it evolves. I completed the MIT xv6 labs for preparation and just started this journey. Not sure what I can get from it, but it is fun to figure out things -- AND I can label myself as a "kernel programmer" to give myself a bit of self-recognition.

I've been conlanging since I was about 8yo or so. This hobby also has me randomly learning natural human languages too. I've always just enjoyed it. I could make up reasons for enjoying it, but I am not certain that any of those would be true.

Printmaking. In a tiny apartment I did linocuts and Gelli prints on my kitchen counter for a few months. https://lucidbeaming.com/art/prints

Try playing Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder (or any number of other systems.) Pathfinder is super deep and complex.

There's also an entire community of people who play Table Top Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) solo and use the outcomes of their play reports to blog or write fiction.

Also, the tooling around these games is very interesting if you want to build an app: Crafting calculator? Generative hexcrawl maps? Random tables? Statistics tools for dice rolls?

I had a route around San Francisco that I would visit, and all the places on the route were where there were good blackberry bushes. I’d take a bucket. Around Golden Gate Park and the Inner Sunset mostly, heading down into the Forest Hills area as well. I did that for a few years. Would pick up some plums along the way as well.

Now on the other side of the Bay I have a couple spots, not as dense a network. About an hour away there are masses.

> I'm looking for something novel and interesting, that isn't absolutely crowded that I could meaningfully contribute to.

I would say that a hobby is a bit like a fetish in that it is derived from our interior psychology. My father’s hobby was repairing old scientific instruments, which was perfectly suited to his disposition for quantifying everything in his life, including his family (bless you dad).

My hobbies are not niche in themselves; however, they are giving me the chance to distract myself from IT and to do something that inspires me and gives me some skills.

My philosophy around hobbies is that every learned skill can be reused in different areas.

So, I'm trying to: - taking photos. I have photography equipment and some experience in nature/portrait photography;

- learning languages. Not only mainstream languages like English (I'm not a native English speaker), but languages like Latin or Interslavic;

- biking and running. Just get a good health habit to clear your mind and improve your overall state after a long working day;

- playing musical instruments. I have a ukulele, guitar, and keyboard so I'm trying to make my own music;

- collecting antique items. For that, on every trip I'm trying to visit flea markets, where sometimes I find interesting items.

- vinyl music. That hobby is connected with the previous one;

- playing Go. I found this game much more interesting than Chess;

- bartending. Not only classical cocktails but some random mixes;

Sailing, archery are some I'm looking into at this moment.

I am trying to build microphone capsules in my garage. Trying to go below 14dB (Primo EM272 level), under 1". It is difficult but rewarding. I do not expect any financial benefits from it, even if I make it under 10mm, because it is very time-consuming. Big players already have massive factories doing 10,000x of what I am doing.

This is the most niche tech-related hobby I have currently.

Hang gliding. It's good if you are in an area with some hills and consistent winds. There are maybe a dozen well-established launch sites around the U.S. Sadly, I broke down my glider around 2001 -- and did a post-mortem on it to discover it had a minor dent in it.

Recommendation -- don't stall the glider at heights between 10 and 25 feet from the ground. Also, avoid barbed wire fences.

Jogging isn’t niche, but after being sedentary for ten years I had to start doing something. When I was young I could run a 7 minute mile which was nothing to brag about. Now at 50+ that seems like an impossibility. I’ve been doing walk/jog intervals for almost a year and I’m getting better, and focusing on not blowing out my knees.

Some fantastic hobbies involve learning a new skill that'll serve you in the long run outside of tech, or teach you something interesting that will last after you drop the hobby. I personally love making things, especially food-related things and so I've been a hobbyist baker for about a decade. The Bread Code on GitHub was a fantastic introduction and taught me the basics to branch out and discover better baking techniques. That's the main one I've stuck with.

I've also dabbled in home wine making, cheese making, preserving and pickling, and they've all given me a deeper understanding of fermentation even if I've not stuck with them as much as I did with bread. However, if I go for a wine-tasting or a beer brewery I now know what they're talking about when they go into the process of it, which is a good conversation starter if nothing else.

There's also gardening, but that's mostly something my partner stuck with instead.

Somebody already mentioned "Modular Synths". There's incredible resources for building your own synth modules for everything from circuit design to simple kits. Check out LMNC on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCTLeNxge54

Go out and record free sounds https://freesound.org/

Go complete OSM quests using the "Street complete" app. Or just add stuff that's not on OSM yet using OsmAnd app.

Record open street view photos using Mapillary or similar.

Flesh out missing albums and metadata on musicbrainz.

After binging on youtube, I am working on learning to do leatherwork, small stuff at first like making your own wallet etc.

I have a collection of years on the facades of the buildings.

https://year-on-facade.uk/

With focus on unique years rather than number of buildings. Still quite a few to find (and visit) but I consider this to be an almost perfect collection.

If you like music and technology - there's a massive world of possibilities out there (e.g., software based music production, tone.js, music programming with Strudel).

If you have more money - 1) DJing/mixing on vinyl + record digging, 2) Modular synthesis (your wallet will hate you your soul will love you)

I've been making a seabed simulation of the seabed for interacting with polymetallic nodules. The idea is these nodules contain a lot of cobalt, but due to their location on the seafloor they're had to access, making mining difficult.

It took me a while but I finally got my hands on some polymetallic nodules (basically the rocks you find on the seabed that contain cobalt) which I'm scanning and will hopefully have uploaded soon. Tragically the nodules were damaged through shipping but it's all I have, especially since the first shipment was stolen off my porch lol. It's build with Project Chrono using C++ https://github.com/thansen0/seabed-sim-chrono

High altitude balloon launches using weather balloons to get photos of the curvature of the earth.

I design treasure hunts and then hide them in books. Well, I've just started to. Was obsessed by the book Masquerade, by Kit Williams as a kid. Finally decided that I could probably do that as well. So have started. Very much enjoying it.

Learn how to calculate longitude and latitude by eyesight using the Ptolemaic system.

Then add a telescope or sextant.

This is lots of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Not a new hobby per se, but the combination of

- a good audio book

- a massage chair

- a mindless idle game that you don't need to think of while listening to a good book and getting a massage

Priceless.

I like to target a very specific species (Lake Trout) using vertical jigging techniques. You can do it on a small kayak with a simple fishfinder (histogram "graph") or a large boat with livescope (active sonar).

Because of the bait available for the lakers differs from what they eat in different lakes inland and other surrounding states, they are SUPER aggressive when the fishing is good.

The game is cruising around until you find marks at the depths and/or structure you are looking for. Once you find them, you drop heavy lures down on them (1-4oz) and they will rocket up sometimes 3/4 of the water column +(70ft / 21m) and absolutely crush your lure.

This tactic also requires you to properly reel your lure to match the intensity of the fish. Too fast or slow and they will swim off. Sometimes you have to leave your bait motionless and wait for them to approach and then "fleeing" at the right time to trigger their agression and chase.

I've had fish mess with me for 5+mins and still not bite. This tactic works in both ice fishing as well as open water fishing.

I discovered this technique trying to adapt what I learned on a boat to kayak fishing. Necessity is the mother of invention, and if you want to catch fish that aren't near shore you gotta float somehow.

Part of the kayak adaptation was going from 1/8, 1/4 or 1/2oz lures up to 1, 2, 3 or 4oz. You are often dealing with not only wind that pushes your boat, but also current that pulls your lure in a different direction making it difficult to see your lure on the fishfinder.

There are a couple other ways to do the jigging thing but all of this has resulted in a new lure design i've been trying to figure out how to turn into a viable business. I'm also trying to figure out how to do some kind of kayak fishing guiding because there are much higher restrictions / licensing reqs on taking people out on boats

https://www.verticaltubejig.com

https://youtu.be/1Z5CPrB3Cpk?si=pD1oQLb6ai7rSujg

Two things, but mostly revolves around sports. As my job in software engineering is very sedentary, I try to remain active in my hobbies.

First is gym - I go every morning before work, do a 2-mile run or 5k, depending on my mood, and then power lifting.

On weekends I hike or climb. I find it very liberating when visiting places without any kind of network and it's me, nature and socialising. I've recently also started an outdoor agency (it's local to my place) - for when AI takes over my job completely: https://boa.ba/

Since you mentioned biohacking but are wary of "wetware" risks, consider Personal Bioinformatics via 30x Whole Genome Sequencing. Now that sequencing costs have dropped significantly, you can use AI to take a deep dive into the latest research surrounding your own genomic data.

While severall open medical databases and open-source tools exist, they are often fragmented or built for academia. There is significant room to contribute by hacking together better toolsets, localized databases, or AI-driven interfaces to make this data truly accessible.

autonomous weapons?

Just kidding. Honestly, the best ideas out there are low-tech. Anything where as you put it is "crowded" with tech people don't want, but is also of good build.

Or if you must add an LLM and a touch screen to everything, do it in a way that respects user consent and boundaries.

One thing I wanted to get into but can't due to time is sub-150ms responsive LLM for use with drones and bots. Faster response time than a human brain. Multiple LLMs running on dedicated hardware to preempt and predict response for various stimuli.

A drone you can't shoot-down with an arrow, and a robot you can't beat at dodgeball.

Now imagine the implications of that!? But the first problem I'd like to solve is remotely piloted work. if that LLM and response-time combo works, you would be able to safely work alongside a remotely piloted robot in a hazardous construction site better than you would with a human (it could even improve safety for humans). At all times it is getting audio/sonar, lidar, infrared and visual (image processing) input and several of these really fast LLMs (not just, LLMs aren't great at certain tasks, so naturally other types of ML and predefined routines would also be running) will be preparing if/else decision trees in case a potential condition is met. Sees a ladder just leaning there? what if it randomly slips, how would it react? plan is in place under 150ms while other plans are being formulated for other things as well.

I don't quite get your point about 3D printers.

I spent many months redesigning, improving and rebuilding a prusa clone, not because I couldn't afford anything else, but precisely because I could afford to "waste" time and money learning and having fun.

Once I felt like the printer was in a useful state, I spent some more time getting it to a point where it could print nice ABS parts for a Voron Trident. Of course I couldn't just build a Trident. That would be too easy. Before I had even finished assembling it, it already had a number of bespoke modifications that I had designed.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Have you ever _looked_ at the klipper source code? It's like a fractal of weirdness. I mean it works, and clearly the person behind it is very knowledgeable about many things. But it makes for such an enormous and fun playground for improvements and redesigns. I've redesigned the entire build system for the firmware component. I've made the host component an actual (almost) normal python package. I changed a bunch of core aspects so that it could be packages for a linux distro. I am working on making the native helper a normal python native extension library too. And I am also writing some proper test rig for it.

And while I was at it, I started writing my own display software which doesn't use Wayland or X. It is going quite well actually. (Writing it in Rust)

This hobby (and, really, any hobby) has as much depth and obscurity as you are willing to look for.

I'm learning to play the accordion

I started learning how to make croissants. I bought a Japanese hand crank sheeter, and tried different butters and convection ovens. Definitely put me through a rabbit hole.

We got into scuba diving about 3 years ago. Have something like 200 dives now logged across Southern California, Hawaii and the Caribbean. Planning on adding Indonesia to the list later this year. That wow factor you experience the first time you dive hasn't gone away after 200 dives and I don't think it'll go away after 2000. Probably the most life-affirming thing I've ever gotten into and can't recommend it enough.

I've designed jewellery for my wife's last few birthdays. Nothing fancy, geometries, square kufic and such.

Very crude approach: I've been doing it in Blender, if you've 3D skills should be easy. I've got a friend who does the printing and casting, so there's more I could explore there later.

I also do dioramas, which grew out of 40K. Got bored with hench guys with guns and moved to 6mm, it's been great fun focusing on buildings.

Vermiculture - breeding worms and harvesting their casting.

Outside of software development I enjoy gardening, farming/breeding worms and collecting their compost for the garden was a fun hobby I could dive into. It is a great amendment to my garden's soil and just a unique thing I can do on my own. I would like to start a small side business selling the castings, extracts, and worms one day.

Chess engine is already a solved problem, yes, but Baghchal would love some attention. I have been maintaining https://www.baghchal.net for more than a decade now and I dream of the day I could integrate Stockfish like Engine for Baghchal one day. I haven't gotten chance to dive deep into this myself because of work and personal reasons but it could be a great niche to explore since you mentioned about Chess. Look into it.

Also, check this: https://github.com/bhu1st/obx

I started hand carving and painting fishing lures a few years back, mostly from gathered or gleaned materials.

It started as something to keep my hands busy in the Minnesota winter evenings, but there is actually quite a lot of depth to the materials/buoyancy/fluid dynamics that dictate how the lure moves in different water conditions. Each one is also a little work of art which is nice.

I glanced at this question at work, now reading it to find interesting ideas, but also want to share something: six months ago I bought a motorcycle. It was a no-brainer, commuting time is now half compared to the subway and after decades it's invigorating to be back to two wheels, not only physically but also mentally.

Maybe not very niche, but you'll quickly find there are many sub-cultures around biking (some of them very friendly) and an endless variety of interesting tech: engines, suspensions, electronics, injection mapping, IMUs, gear materials, GPS... routing is its own rabbit hole.

It's not necessarily very expensive. A middleweight bike that will take you everywhere can be bought for less than 10k. Add a grand more for gear and insurance.

I've been using Codex to build a repo that pulls down astronomical datasets and runs simulation to try to find explanation for the hubble tension. Having an agent to do the tedious bits and also having an LLM to bounce ideas has tough me so much about astronomy. I don't have serious hopes of finding anything new and novel but it's still a lot of fun.

I decided to run for congressional representative.

Just a suggestion as this isn't my hobby, but look into gem cutting. There are some tools for designing new cuts, but I think I lot more is possible than is commonly accomplished. And every gem material is different so that adds to things. Plus, the more precise the cut the better the result. And it's very math and loop driven.

Gamey Boy / Modretro Chromatic / LSDJ / Dirtywave M8 / anything F# / MiniDisc community

Sailing. Good to focus your eyes on something not glowing, the cold and wet makes you feel really alive. There's a bottomless pit of cheap old boats and maintenance to learn about- or if you like buying toys, the sky is the limit.

I like racing dingies, adds a social aspect, but ymmv.

* playing shortlarps

* using short boardgames to measure cognitive performance on various metrics

* creating simple 3d boardgames with raylib kolibri_engine

* dancing and studying vajra dance and the vajra song from namkai norbu

* reading and studying about: mahamudra and dzogchen vs christian contemplative traditions and mystics, and transpersonal psychology

Muay thai is my favorite hobby. Two kids later, it’s hard to find time, but I had a time where I went boxing everyday. I can really recommend material arts for those with proper work/life balance.

No activity brings you more endorphines than being brutalized under controlled conditions.

I'm very much into niche hobbies: they usually have nice tight & friendly communities.

Below are some of my favorite I'd love to share:

- FPV drone flying: once you've spent 5-10 hours to get initial reflexes for the controls in the simulator, the first flight on a real machine outside feels magical.

- Electric unicycles: the "mind-controlled" PEV, and arguably the best way to get around in San Francisco.

- Foiling: the closest feeling to riding a hoverboard. You can kite-foil, pump-foil, sup-foil etc, but wing foiling is the easiest to get started.

- Knots: tying laces properly just makes life easier, and tying tucker's / voodoo hitches for the first few times feels like a magic trick.

- Cardistry: learning to do a proper riffle shuffle and a few artistic cuts adds some fun to the most boring part of any card game.

You should try getting _extremely_ good at Trading Card Games. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic The Gathering all have extremely active current player bases and loads of places to play across the Americas, Europe, and (mostly east) Asia. Getting deep into card advantage, deck construction, and hypergeometric theory has been an absolute blast. Plus, the online simulators are free for Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon are free and pretty current with the paper game. Making new friendships with people not in my usual circles has been so rewarding, I can't recommend it enough. Not to mention the most meaningful contribution of all - winning events moves the needle on the way the rest of the playerbase plays the game. I could go on and on about this.

Not niche, but photography has a way of opening doors because you push yourself to get to places you might not otherwise.

Maybe learn a new language that isn't European or Japanese.

If "niche" matters to you, anything currently receiving any type of investing (ML etc) is probably not gonna work.

I've been pretty obsessed with FSRS in general (tldr: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/awesome-fsrs/wiki/...) It's a fantastic new-ish scheduler for spaced repetition - basically a machine learning model which adapts to you, and schedules flash (or anything, really, it's an algorithm) cards according to how well you are personally performing - surfacing data like retention, stability, recall, etc. It's a massive jump over previous "learning algorithms" like

For the past 60d I've been using Anki (a flash card program) and it's FSRS setting to learn my French deck (5000 most common French words) and I'm absolutely zooming. I can already follow a fair chunk of conversational French.

I've also been using the same system to learn Chess more deeply (endgames, tactics, openings) through Chessable and a few other websites that offer FSRS. It's levelled up my chess game a lot

Basically - the thing that hooked me was the data. Being able to see how many cards I've reviewed, how many cards are at 90/80% retention, the stability of every piece of that knowledge, the decay rate, etc... It's really cool.

I'd suggest you try out something completely offline. My next candidate is flintknapping, but there are lots of really interesting historical crafts that are in need of preservation and are extremely interesting to learn and gain expertise at.

Woodworking, oil painting, pottery, analog synthesizers, animal husbandry, spinning and yarnmaking, knitting and weaving, sewing, pattern making, metalwork, welding, endurance running, rock climbing, beekeeping, brewing and distilling, the list goes on and on. Contrary to popular opinion they are all extremely technical and demanding fields, and getting to reconnect with the physical world and the people in it, as well as history, is extremely rewarding.

Maybe not that niche for this group, but I love pen plotting. I use code to create drawings and then pen plot them on paper [0]. The ability to bring something digital into the physical world is really fulfilling for me and makes the process much more tangible. I have an Axidraw A3, and it might be the best purchase I ever made.

In the last few months I haven't done much as I'm currently obsessed by gamedev. But now when you reminded me, I want to plot a few pieces I started last year and never finished.

[0] https://muffinman.io/art/

Invasive species removal, bird identification, trail running, mountain biking, audiobook listening while walking. All are best done out of doors. :P Most are teh opposite of the posture and brain patterns that intensive computer usage encourages.

I'm playing backgammon. Not just online, but live tournaments as well.

What I like about it: it's one of those games that are easy to learn but difficult to master. Modern analyzing tools can detect your errors and weaknesses, providing you with eternal possibilities to improve.

But also, I like the excitement of the live tournaments, which like poker, have money prizes and an entry fee. They are all over the world and I especially like visiting tournaments in places which I otherwise wouldn't visit. Plus after a while you'll make friends in the tournament circuit, so it becomes a social thing as well.

Designing origami tessellations: https://origami.kosmulski.org/albums/tessellation-examples

It's lots of fun, with folding allowing you to go offline for a while. The community is very friendly, both online and with IRL meetings such as yearly conventions in many countries.

Still a kind of niche within origami, so there's lots of room for novelty and explorations. And there are strong ties to mathematical and computational origami if you're into this kind of thing.

Six months deep now into analog computing. (I have a modular, hobbyist analog computer wrapping up—just writing the manual).

Going to have to do something on the other end of the spectrum after this. Maybe RISO printing…

I build ukuleles and guitars from scratch. That's not as niche as what a lot of people do -- it's just woodworking -- but I do software for a living and enjoy making durable, physical things in my free time.

I view hobbies as something that I derive value or pleasure from. I do not approach them from the perspective of “meaningfully contributing”. IMO, that sounds more like compensation for career dissatisfaction. I’m not being critical. I just recommend choosing hobbies that you derive value and meaning from, regardless of what the world may think of it. For example, a friend of mine, with high pressure tech management job, quilts in the evening. He says it helps him relax. Doesn’t matter if anyone likes what he does or wants to buy it. As for myself, now that I’m retired I delve into a number of areas, just for me, and absolutely have no interest in sharing them or being recognized for what I do. Good luck on your quest.

Juggling! I used to juggle when i was a teenager, managed to juggle 5 balls and clubs. Then after decades of neglecting it, i picked it up again and i found the joy in this hobby again! I can highly recommend.

You might look into applying RL in the domain of low cost robotics and drones. That would draw on some of your past experience but applied to a domain (robotics) which I perceive is seeing renewed interest.

Someone needs to solve barbecue. The entire industry is based on feel and experience. Why can't a beginner replicate Franklin's brisket by following a recipe online?

It's probably because the main measuring instrument (a probe thermometer) doesn't provide any feedback about fat rendering, moisture, etc. Plus, every brisket cut has different fat ratios and thickness, which means a recipe can't guarantee identical inputs like bread baking. I'd love for someone to throw some over the top engineering & experimentation at this.

Making watches. You can start simple ("modding") which is essentially assembling a movement, case, hands, dial, etc. You can keep going deeper: try to fix or build a movement gears.

I haven't really had a hobby until last summer, when I took up collecting banknotes. Growing up in the USSR, I had a few imperial notes as a kid and wanted to expand my "collection", but didn't actually start in earnest until decades later. Got a few late 19th / early 20th century pre-revolution notes, and then found myself in the abyss of Russian Civil War, where every city and local municipality were printing their own money. Anyways, it's a journey without an end, and I saw an interviewee describing this hobby as a "sickness, do not start", which sort of resonated.

As a history lover with appreciation for tactile aspects of history (love 100+ year old books), this scratches this itch better than anything else, while leaving me wanting more. I research and write up every banknote I acquire, and the sense of history I get from browsing my album is like nothing else.

For anyone interested, here are the photos of my collection circa end of last year: https://imgur.com/a/zmCXd8l

Hardware synthesizers, audio engineering, DSP programming, a whole lot of problems to solve in that domain as big manufacturers sell half baked devices for a quick buck that can barely stay in sync, or gear that is inferior to the same kind of gear from 20 years ago... it's not niche though, synth popularity is exploding, it's just that manufacturers aren't making the synthesizers as powerful as they could be, despite the increase in CPU power...

I melt milk jugs and other HDPE plastics into musical claves and drum sticks as an answer to "recycling plastic is kind of bs". It melts at 350 degrees and can be done in a toaster oven in the garage or even the kitchen with proper ventilation. The smell isn't that bad, nothing like if you dropped plastic in a fire.

I've also made some sticks from braiding plastic grocery bags which are also often made of HDPE (#2) type plastic.

Looks like nobody has claimed this yet so I'll add: heavy equipment (excavators, loaders, chippers bigger than they had in "Fargo"...). Began as a solution to the "can't find a contractor to dig that hole" problem but like most things turned into an interesting rabbit hole and money pit. Interesting social side in terms of learning how to deal with mechanics, parts suppliers, welding, hydraulics, getting to know your way around a gravel pit.

Design whistle sequences to get dolphins to respond in ways that will help you figure out their meaning. A few multi-million $ projects could use that, such as Google, Baidu, and SDRP.

One of my hobbies is organizing events. I, like to think, I am pretty good at it. Main point is to create good initial conditions, then people take care of the rest.

I set up trail cameras in remote areas to watch bears, mountain lions and other critters. Getting there is very hard so it keeps me in shape and I am always fascinated when I can watch new footage.

once I have more time I will try classifying and trimming the videos with AI so there is a tech component too. And maybe in the long run do my own cameras that have better detection than the usual PIR sensors that trigger a lot for moving branches or leaves.

> that isn't absolutely crowded

I'm sure there are field that should be absolutely crowded but where you can do something meaningful.

If I had free time, I would write an app to learn foreign languages I'm interested in. I'm pretty sure that there are good apps, but I tried a few ones, and none really fit my needs.

There are also software that I use a lot, like transcribe! which works well, but that I could see how to improve.

So as others mentioned, do something that you would be interested in.

I got into riding, building and customizing motorcycles. The chopper scene could always use the creativity and skills of tech savy folks. Besides the mechanical skills you learn in moments which are as satisfying as they are frustrating, there's ways to utilize programming skills too...think performance/usage monitoring, trip cataloging software, social tools to connect bikers, camping planners, who knows.

You mention chess, Chessboxing is an interesting niche hobby where you play both chess and boxing.

I play chess but not chessboxing but hey, you asked for some interesting niche hobbies!

It seems that what you do is mostly related to computers within the niche hobbies but what if you can do something else too?

> Right now I'm making a chess engine, but that's already a solved problem

Not everything should be done for the end-result, sometimes its the process which matters, there was a great hackernews post about it (https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/)

If you want something niche, perhaps make some portal-2 mods or make more efficient versions of using GlaDOS TTS within browser etc. (this is just something that I want to be honest, but I feel like it can be a niche hobby in its regards seeing your interests)

Let me know if you want more ideas and have fun and have a nice day man!

Started pottery (if that's niche anymore) about 4 years ago, my wife wanted to take a class together.

Now I'm a teacher! Which is a hobby in itself, I have learned so much from having to teach and explain it.

Combine it with some non-niche hobbies my son and I enjoy together and boom. https://imgur.com/a/aJqvVVw

I play vintage baseball. It's baseball using rules and equipment from the 19th century. There's nothing else in my life that connects me to my eight-year old self, but the feeling I get running out onto the field or going up to bat is exactly what it was back in Little League. It's also a really fun community of passionate baseball nerds, and a good motivation to stay fit.

Many niche sports that are great at making you spend less time sitting in front of a computer.

I want to try trials[1] (both bicycle and moto), but it might be hard to find local community for such niche activities (you can always be first!)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_bike_trials

Artisan pizzas! Local food bank Clothing give—a-way for homeless (organized) Toastmaster public speaking Organized a youth chess club (great) Lock picking Teaching calculus, physics Exercise at the gym Helping a homeless guy get organized Nature hikes in groups Dancing Spanish lessons Chess puzzles Chess lessons Cooking Making past Home improvement Detail your messy car Take an auto class

Nowadays, apart from stockpicking as a value investor, I use LLMs to develop AIs that don’t use backpropagation and that support continuous learning.

Boat building is in a really interesting time with new materials allow foiling, along with new battery technology giving new power sources.

I'm getting into old maps, books, and ephemera - mostly travel and tourism related stuff. I'm also currently researching old printing methods like lithography and letterpress. I recently purchased my first rubber brayer, some cotton-rag paper, some ink, and a 1930's letterpress plate. I hope to have my first pulls this weekend if time allows.

I guess I'm a dabbler - I have too many hobbies, none of which I take very seriously. Brewing, dry stone walls, math puzzles, etc.

That said, if you're looking for something meaningful, consider doing something with kids. Technical or not, it doesn't matter. Could be anything from volunteering at a local sports club to teaching part-time at a trade school.

I like making transit maps in my spare time.

I got into tech by liking data visualization, information design, and aesthetics in frontend. It turns out transit maps and wayfinding is one of the earliest modern attempts at information design that is standardized and legible. And it’s fun to revisit because there’s no objective truth about what kind of map is best.

I design print on demand t-shirts and merch

https://www.amazon.com/s?refresh=1&rh=n%3A7141123011%2Cp_4%3...

I’ve been building quantum photonics experiments. Repeating the Bell inequality tests that won the 2022 Nobel, quantum erasers, etc.

Probably the coolest part has been automating the optomechanical equipment and optimizing physical experiments with Bayesian optimization. Similar to hyperparameter tuning in ML, but with lasers.

Also, Thorlabs sells some really fun toys.

What you’re looking for is a research topic, or maybe a better way to put it is your hobby is research… if that makes sense?

So for ideas, sorry that’s going to be whatever floats your boat. You listed a bunch of different things.

But hobby is normally “playing softball” or “guitar”, but it could be “researching next gen PCs”… but that seems more like a PhD lab project.

Holograms! It's fascinating how they are made and how they can serve as a metaphor for how the universe might work.

I used to play Pokémon cards competitively. It was fun going to local tournaments and flying with friends for Regional tournaments. I stopped to focus on night school, and I want to pick it back up with the card legality change happening Friday.

Pokémon Champions just came out, so I might give up cards for the video game. We'll see.

I'm a football/soccer coach (youth, U12 and U19).

Got started as a "temp" for my sons mini-team (back when he was 5). Temporary turns into UEFA certified youth trainer/coach real fast. It's no longer just about the kids (sorry guys), but a really awesome hobby with lots of personal development paths.

I'm tinkering with some electronic gadgets like esp32 to build my own things, such as auto feeder for my aquarium or an auto wattering system for my balcony garden. It's kinda hard and takes time because I'm not an electrican, but I'm really enjoy it and taking it slowly.

Hey, I love this thread!! Thanks for asking the question, there's _so many_ interesting responses in here!

In my views, you don't need an unsolved filed- you need an unexplored angle. Most "crowded" hobbies still have some gaps who build tools, document deeply, or connect ideas across domains. The average isn't in the hobby itself, but it how you approach it.

I've been growing bonsai trees for about 13 years. It doesn't have anything to do with computers, so it's a nice counterbalance to my software job. I don't really even take pictures or videos of my trees, I want to keep the subject as analog and simple as I can.

I do a lot of lindyhop Swing dancing as a hobby. It's not innovative work, but I find it rewarding.

Visiting and educating/programming for the elderly (in nursing homes or just community members) or the imprisoned is both socially beneficial and mentally and spiritually rewarding.

Likewise for volunteering at hospices, food banks, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters.

I built a sauna. It was fun and worthwhile and now I have a sauna!

Also I am turning into Middle-Aged Synth Guy.

A while back, at a company I used to work at, we did intros of new hires. This was one of the questions. One person shared that they do composting and worm farming. That was memorable. Sharing here since it's about as interesting and niche as I can imagine.

How about demo-design ? I mean good old PC demoscnece. Try to fit something feasible into 64K.

My wife started reselling vintage furniture as a hobby, but now it has become her full-time job and she earns money from it. We live in the UK and went to France for shopping for the first time last weekend. Happy to answer any questions

I recently started looking into hydroponics gardening. You can start very easily with a Kratky system and some herbs, and then take it a step at the time.

I’m quite at the beginning myself, but I like it so far! It’s a nice mix of science and craft.

I found out something that was shocking to me about two years ago, which is that plenty of people learn to play ice hockey, of all sports, as an adult. I don’t know about you folks, but I always assumed it was one of those where if you didn’t play as a kid, you missed the boat. I didn’t even know how to skate, I learned on the fly. And this is in North Carolina! 10/10 recommend. I’m actually typing this lying on the couch after playing in a tournament in the Carolina Hurricanes arena :-)

Antkeeping, rockhounding, and flint knapping are things I've gotten into recently. Antkeeping and rockhounding in particular have a ton of room for citizen science. Lots of undiscovered stuff out there.

Exploring my own bio-electricity.

Something is stuck within my body most of the time.

Doing certain movements makes this something flow better.

I feel better when this happens.

Breathing in certain ways enhances this something.

I feel A LOT better when this happens.

Still early, exploring.

NULF - we support the proliferation of utraquist ideals in all congregations. Our goal is to expand access to the eucharist for the laity. been round about 500 years or so but we're having a come back.

Read manuals to learn niche software, right now I’m reading about LyX and TeXmacs (their manuals are very well written). Lots of these more niche software can always use more love and users.

I do wrestling and BJJ, helps me cope with my stressful job and besides my joints hurting (especially fingers) from time to time, it was great for both my mental and physical health

Building autonomous security systems as a 17-year-old. Turns out confidence-gated AI execution is a fascinating design problem when the stakes are real infrastructure.

Naval once said his best engineers all do some form of art. So I am playing with AI art, and making tools for making the iteration fast and closed-loop.

I am enjoying "trigbagging"/"trigpointing" in Israel (look it up!). I also built an app for this hobby (currently in open beta)

My hobby is growing exotic plants, things like rare tropicals. It’s fun, hands-on, and there’s plenty of room to experiment and try new things.

Postcrossing

My thing right now is Arcade Machines. I cant get enough of them. I have a 1988 Sega Aero City cabinet that I'm doing a kind of rest-mod on.

I'm looking at doing some field recording. Currently reading around the subject and thinking about starter equipment.

I wouldn't say that chess is a solved problem. Just a hard problem to make a better chess engine than current Stockfish.

I saw a few videos of making glasses (cups) out of nice liquor bottles. Seems like a nice cheapish hobby.

Does Broadway and live theater count as niche?

Here in NYC it doesn’t feel like it, but we’re a world unto ourselves

Not exactly niche: raise some kids.

there's a print shop nearby that does workshops, i took a short class there and i'll soon be back with some design files, hope to make a few copies of a zine about publishing a website on the internet

I am a big fan of fountain pens, and I think they're a great hobby.

Baking bread, albeit with a (Panasonic) bread making machine. Might not be niche, however, traditions of giving bread to guests runs deep and people are always delighted if you give them a loaf of extremely fresh bread.

There are different directions that bread making can go. During the pandemic there was a rash of people making rock hard sourdough, and sourdough is still the magic word for 'higher status' bread, even though almost every commercially available sourdough loaf is faked with enzymes added to a regular 'Chorleywood' loaf.

I gave sourdough a go but I prefer my bread making machines creations that are definitely not sourdough. I like to fortify my bread in two different ways, either with fruits and nuts to make a 'fruit loaf' of sorts, or with seeds and wholemeal flour to have bread that covers many a niche nutrient.

Commercial bread in the UK comes with government issued fortifications of folates, B vitamins and whatnot. This might be fine for pregnant mums that can't cook, but I am not one of them! So the challenge is to do a better job of the fortifications, mostly with seeds and choice of flour.

Commercial bread is also not very real, with lots of additives that I don't seem to need in my own creations. Emulsifiers, preservatives and everything else are needed for commercial bread, if it is to have shelf life and appeal, but my intestines are not crying out for these sorts of additives and I seem to still be alive without them, with improved digestive tract functionality.

Although we have more interesting things to eat than bread, our history in the West is the history of bread, we would not be here without it. Once you start baking your own, albeit with a machine, history becomes so much more interesting.

The other optimisation I try is cost. It is easy to produce a decent loaf with very expensive ingredients, however, on a budget it gets to have a different challenge to it.

I introduced my uncle to the hobby and he is a meticulous record keeper, so I wrote a simple app for him to record his bakes and ratings. This enables him to make fine adjustments to quantities so as to improve on his creations.

I did look for an app before I wrote my own, and the app was called 'Microsoft Excel'. I am sure that could be customised with recipes and whatnot, but I wanted to reinvent the wheel, hence my own app, just for myself and my uncle.

With some hobbies that is all you do and an obsession. Bread making is not like that, you can have plenty of more strings to your bow. As mentioned, people are always impressed if you give them a loaf, or if they learn that your sandwiches are made with your own bread. You can insist that it took three minutes with the machine, to downplay everything, however people stay impressed.

sailing. you will learn how to be self resilient, to be an electric, plumber, painter, weather and experience (sometimes under your nose if near water) most beautiful places

Not too niche: Traditional archery. Niche: Make wood climbing holds.

To some annoyance of my wife and kids, i like to plant all kinds of seeds in little pots to see if i can make it grow.

One kind of success (for me) is a 1m25 / 50 inch tall avocado which is in a big pot now. Took some years.

I am working (again) on paprika, spinach, cucumber and tomatoes . Thinking about to start with another avocado seed.

I think i would like to have a small greenhouse when i’m ready to retire.

Working through PRML and creating a full solution set, albeit very slowly.

https://github.com/abhimanyu-jain/PRML_Solutions

NTSC video & film (movie film - 35mm) restoration.

Well I just learned all my hobbies are boring, so bah.

im an airsoft nerd. its a fun way to blow some steam with friends. not the tight milsim approach just the recreational way,

Women's pro soccer. If you're in the US, we have access to some of the world's greatest athletes with World Cup champions and Olympic gold medalists in nearly every match. Even if you're not in the US, yeah you probably do too.

I never feel more connected to my community than when I'm at a game. Supporters groups are welcoming and politically/socially engaged and regularly sponsor community service events. The league is still young and fanbases are small, but it's a really critical point in history to support pro women's sports.

It's definitely worth throwing some of that tech salary at. Bonus: it has none of the drama of the men's game!

I make AI music https://suno.com/@igorstechoclub

What is barrel shipping nigeria?

Synbio but it’s expensive as hell

Lockpicking.

Do you homelab or self host?

build a battlebot!

Magnet fishing

wargaming

designing improvements to democracy & taxation

So this thing would require you years, if not more before you can contribute meaningfully; and you have to build a community basically from scratch for it -- and before that you not only can't contribute, but you can't even participate. But hear me out.

WhatWhenWhere (спортивное Что Где Когда in Russian. Note the "sport" part -- it's an entirely different, much more interesting game than a regular one). Doesn't ring a bell, I know, but mostly because it is almost exclusively post-USSR deal, but wouldn't it be cool if the movement becomes worldwide? You can help!

The idea is simple. It's a quiz game. Think pub quiz, but formalized. You have a team of 6, you have 36 questions, and you have a minute to give an answer to each one. Sounds boring? It isn't, believe me, otherwise we wouldn't have people who have been doing it for decades -- myself included, I played my first game at about 13, and I'm over 30 now. Obviously I was doing it on and off for a while, but for last seven or so years it was pretty consistent. Last year I participated in 83 games, so about 1.5 a week.

So what's the deal, and what's the appeal? How is it different from a regular pub quiz? First, almost no just trivia questions. Yeah, you can get a question about recent Oscars or Italian brainrot here or there, but rarely and still packaged properlt. Second, and most important, as I mentioned, it is more formalized. There are rules, committees, leagues, nationals, ratings and so on. But the best part -- there is a way to write questions right. There are tools to help you lead players in the right direction, help them determine what possible solutions aren't correct -- all that without revealing anything that would spoil the right answer. Number of letters in the answer, the etymology of the word -- is it Greek, is it Arab, is it French?; grammar pointers, toponyms and personal names. You can make a host read you question in a certain way as a part of the question. You can print out (a lot of games are still played offline) something and turn that into question. You can ask a question that is one word long! You can ask a question without a single word if you set it up right -- recently played one like that. There is metagame to it -- you can set something up in a question 3, to have it come into play in the question 9. There's drama -- captain of one of my teams seduced a wife of opposing team's captain. There's dickmeasuring with global leaderboards. But most importantly, there's a constant race between authors and players to outwit each other. We have a publicly available database of questions played previously -- aptly named gotquestions.online with 6+ thousand of "packets" -- a set of questions, played in one game, usually 36, but since we have 24-hour marathons, some of them are over 600 questions long. And you can see the way questions evolved over the years. It was completely normal to ask something like "What's the name of the painting of the guy with an apple for a face" in the one of the most prestigious tournaments in the late 90s. Now this wouldn't fly even in a school tournament -- because it's not a proper WWW question, it's just a question. A WWW question makes you first unravel the thought process of an author, find a direction of the answer and then try to remember the name of the guy who dug up Troy. So yeah, it would require you to have some general and sometimes pretty deep knowledge of a lot of things, but most of the time it would be just logic, communication -- there are six people solving the same problem in your team, and ability to read hidden hints.

Interesting note: in my experience about half of players on any game would be tech guys and gals; almost all the rest would be split between lawyers of some description, and education professionals. Teams I currently play with consist of about 10 IT professionals (one of which also a professor of compsci), a lawyer, a psychologist, a private school headmaster, a professor of law in university (combo) and a logistics manager. So it also a great hobby for networking.

To finish my ramblings, I'll translate a question from recent school tournament and walk you through the solution. It doesn't require any intricate knowledge of an original language (a lot of hints built using that) or some deep specialized knowledge from any field, just general one.

On the days of the game near the Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo you can find unusual traffic jams. Where does this stadium located?

Solving this will take you just a couple of steps. First, make note of the stadium name. Obviously named after someone, but most likely not from English-speaking country. Sounds Italian if anything, and the guy isn't some world-famous athlete to have a stadium named after him elsewhere but the Italy. Keep that in mind -- it's probably in Italy. Next step: unusual traffic jams. What can be so unusual about the traffic jam? Long? Mundane. Colorful? No one buys colorful cars anymore. Not cars? That might work, but what if not cars? Mopeds? Too close to cars and gives us nothing. Bikes? Not Netherlands, and still leaves too many options for a city on the table. Boats? That might work, that's unusual. Are there any Italian cities full of water? Venice would be one.

And what do you know, that's the right answer.

So yeah, wouldn't this be a great pastime? Join us, play the game, write your own questions, build a community and be remembered as a Person Who Brought The Game to the Anglosphere.

Visit places steeped in history and imagine how people left their mark on these places in the past.

very cool post

FPV drone racing