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.

This reminds me of [0], basically just inviting the most interesting people I know (also transitively the most interesting people they know), and just getting to meet people. I would really like to do this, but half the most interesting people I know are PhD professors I rant with because I'm next to them in a lab. Maybe once my network gets bigger. But I would still like to know more about how you do this, as other people doing this accidentally made me some good friendships, and I'd like to repay this favor to others

[0] https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/this-might-be-oversharing

How I do it is context-specific. I used to live in a place where it's undoable and I was very lonely there. I moved to a place where people are much more open to it culturally and there's enough population to +/- bring in a constant flow of 4:1 regulars to newbies.

I advertise on local meetup platforms and in local social media. And I go to so many meetups myself that when people ask me what my hobbies are and I tell them, they get curious and self-invite.

How do you do this? And do you find people within tech industry or just random-people, I am sort of curious to know!

Just random people, but because of where I post my events I tend to get about 30% ~ 50% tech-adjacent people

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

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

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

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

Do you have any interest in family history or genealogy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do boxing as a form of cardio so I'm not weightlifting all the time. So I've just invited a friend for a 1v1 and he accepted, time to start training both properly I guess.

I do want something related to computers because that's where I'm skilled the most, but it being mixed with something else is fine (i.e., biohacking). But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel. Maybe the next frontier is becoming an electrician?

> But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel

I feel like it depends, there are many sorts of projects which are still low hanging fruits. you might not get appreciated to do things anymore because of the amount of competition but you can feel proud of yourself.

Breaking NATs without root permissions (try searching dropbear without root and building it and running it with something like pinggy to then make a minecraft server beneath a nat work), making a free crypto chain have data embedded within a loop of transactions to embed data on crypto for free, recently using single-file to somehow archive archive.is pages on archive.org* anonymously using piping-server.

I have used AI/LLM assistance in most of these but I feel like aside from being frustrated at the code aspects, I had some good ideas and even with everyone else having AI, I didn't see anyone else doing these things (the reason I say this is because if they did, I would've just used their services :] )

Not sure if a lot of these things sound novel, programmatically not, but idea-wise I think* they might-be novel.

A lot of my novel ideas come out of proving things. Can I prove that I can run minecraft on a free intel server that me and my friends can play on? Can I prove that I can save archive.is pages on archive.org anonymously-ish since the issue with archive.is

So my point is, out of personal experience, there are so many novel-ideas within things which seem obvious but nobody has really implemented them and to be honest, everyone is just creating yet another chatgpt wrapper with AI. Much of these experiments are prototyping/proving these ideas and I believe that there are some low hanging fruits in such sense of these ideas which can be interesting to think about.

So I don't suppose that you have to go bio-hacking to find things which pique your interest, there are some practical things too in my opinion which can pique your interest.

Not sure if this might be the answer you are looking for, but I hope this helps within the context you asked it. Sometimes two normal things combined together can be the novel thing to do.

My opinion is that people with money chase money oriented things, the people with passion/hobby-tinkering will do things that chase passion and so sometimes you have nothing to worry about :-)

So are there any things that you feel is similar to this for you, perhaps?

What you're doing is interesting but those are side-projects. I have plenty of random side-projects, just now after reading Gibson's Burning Chrome, I'm making an OpenBSD server where you can only log in using SSH keys in my implant, and logging in makes you a completely new but very restricted user with 1GB of free storage. Kinda like Johnny Mnemonic.

But I feel very disorganized when most of my attention is on distinct one-off side projects, I want to work on something novel and big. But thanks for your suggestions. It is true that most industries begin when passion oriented people finally meet money oriented people, but most time they are separate.