Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?

I really resonate with this. For the longest time, I felt I just “wasn’t wired” to explore deeper reasoning tasks with AI — things like philosophy, creative synthesis, or even serious debugging just seemed like they needed some genius-level prompting or coding skill.

Weirdly enough, what helped me break through wasn’t a course or a YouTube tutorial… it was a PDF.

Sounds silly, but I found this open-source project called WFGY, which is basically a semantic reasoning booster for any LLM. You just upload the PDF to ChatGPT (or any model), and it starts interacting in a way that feels like actual understanding — not just parroting surface logic.

No install, no sign-up. Literally a 60-second experiment.

I used it to challenge GPT with questions it usually fumbles (like nested logic, or paradoxes), and it actually got better. The framework even comes with sample questions to test against it. Kind of surreal.

If you’ve ever felt AI prompting is a weird dark art... this made it feel like turning on a light.

→ https://github.com/onestardao/WFGY

Hobby electronics & robotics. I can make an LED blink on a ESP8266 (it's been a while), but that's it. I'd like to get more familiar with a multimeter, figuring out broken kids toys, etc. but it's a bit daunting. Maybe there's too many options and not enough constraints. I'm not sure.

I want to help small businesses in my area, those who want it, with technology solutions that can improve things (and in-turn learn about the needs of real small businesses). I can pretty much do full-stack (ranging from something basic that improves things for them to something elaborate like backend, UI, AWS, K8S etc). However, I don't have any idea how to identify customers, approach them, price my work fairly, deal with wiring/hardware, deal with the local laws regarding running a non-full-time business etc. I guess what I'm after is that end-of-the-tunnel satisfaction in helping others using technology but a pretty long tunnel is getting in the way :)

Very basic compared to everyone here. Self-host software in the cloud. I have worked in tech my whole life and feel now is the time to make the jump to hosting something myself.

Nothing special, prob will be a todo app, but such a steep learning curve to wrap my head around the jargon with everything hosting and docker related.

Wish me luck!

I don't know anything about electronics design, but I'm really into backpacking so a high efficiency battery system with a solar panel is really interesting to me. I came across this project[1], and wanted to improve upon it for my usecase. I want to add the ability to have multiple 21700 cells in a lightweight charger, instead of a single cell with a builtin USB charger. I want to learn more electronics, but it definitely feels like a multiyear process, and it'd be nice to shortcut it for the projects I'm interested in.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/myog/comments/1k3stln/ultralight_13...

Being able to spontaneously speak with people and slow thinking. I am ok at writing with people, because it gives me time to think and refine my message. But I really suck at live events and talking to people in real life. Did anyone overcome it? And how?

I am fascinated by the idea of building something like the Lisp Machines or Smalltalk 80 from scratch. Build a Forth in assembly, build a Lisp in Forth, build an OS and computing environment in Lisp. AOT-compile only the Forth interpreter, load and compile the rest from source during system boot, maybe with later stages optimizing the previous stages as the system is assembling itself.

I imagine two languages - Langsam and Schnell - intertwined in some sort of yin-yang fashion. Langsam is slow, dynamic, interpreted, Schnell is fast, static, compiled. Both would be LISPs. Schnell would be implemented as a library in Langsam. If you said (define (add x y) (+ x y)) in Langsam, you would get a Langsam function. If you said (s:define (add (x int) (y int)) (+ x y)) in Langsam, you would get a Langsam function which is a wrapper over a JIT-compiled Schnell function. If you invoke it, the wrapper takes care of the FFI, execution happens at C speed. Most of the complexity typical of a low-level compiled language could be moved into Langsam. I could have sophisticated type systems and C++ template like code generation implemented in a comfortable high level language.

This latter part I managed to partially implement in Clojure and it works (via LLVM), it would be just too much effort to get it completed.

For years I had a little project here to rebuild the iPod Nano 7g in Open Source Hardware and software. Not that small, but at least in the same size category (a lot smaller than the smallest smartphone).

The iPod nano 7g is not designed to last forever... it is hard to repair - the battery can be replaced but the internal 16GB flash memory is a job for professionals.

There are lots of <= 4 inch Android players which could simply run an app, but these are draining a battery so fast after a while it isn't even close to the experience of a specific device.

The main pain point is controlling the device via headphone remote. The iPod supports play/pause, next, prev, vol+, vol- and fast-forward as well as rewind. Nothing comes close to this in android.

However, I was aiming to take one of the newer RISC-V boards with USB-C (like LicheeRV Nano or Luckfox Lyra), add a 2.4 inch display and a battery + gauge to it and 3D print a case, work out a UI via LVGL, but having 2 children is just too time consuming for such a project.

Sticking to my iPod Nano 7g hopefully lasts another 5 years until I can focus on it again :-)

There's a few that come to mind, but none that feel actually as daunting intellectually as much as they are qualified by other factors.

I'd like to go from indoor bouldering to rock climbing, but coordinating with a belayer doesn't seem super interesting and otherwise it's just a matter of expense, gear, and a slight pivot in my leisure time to start going at it.

Otherwise, the skill that seems most out of reach is keeping a job for longer than a year. I'm in a decent spot now, after a year and a half prior of being unemployed, and I feel like this might be my last real shot at a career of any kind. Other people seem to handle it fine, but this is the thing that seems most out of reach. Unlike engineering problems that are made up of abstractions with ways to break them down and piece together systems, keeping a job is as opaque of an abstraction as I'm aware of, that doesn't necessarily depend on a measurable skill or even on anything within one's control. I've never once felt stability or been able to bet on money coming in next year, and if I had the money for a mortgage, I'd be stopped by the knowledge I can't count on an income flow at any time in the future. I'm thankful for what I have and what I've learned nonetheless.

There's a certain change of perspective with modern AI (by "modern" I mean Resnet and beyond). When I was deep into neural nets in the 1990s, they weren't that large, and I would think of them in terms of the number of weights and nodes - but modern deep learning seems to have has moved up a few levels of abstraction. (I stepped away from the field for a while). And there's a certain understanding people seem to have now regarding the "gradient flow" through the net and why certain architectures work well (Resnet, Unets etc). I must say I'm finding it tricky to shift into this new level of thinking. Also Transformers - still looking for an intuitive sense of how they work, haha.

Game development.

I’ll admit that part of my problem is chronic depression over a decade+. The idea of gamedev excites me, but I have a hard time feeling passionate about anything these days. You definitely need that for games. Hell, I’m barely able to sit down and even enjoy games anymore.

For me, it's gotta be Asahi Linux development. I've been following the work of Asahi Lina and the team for a long time, watching their progress in awe. It just seems incredibly cool to get macOS hardware running Linux so well. But every time I think about actually diving into it, my brain just screams "super complicated!" and I have no idea where I'd even begin to contribute or understand what's going on under the hood. It's definitely one of those things I admire from a distance because it feels so far beyond my current capabilities.

Genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Synthesizing DNA and transforming cells. Designing better methodologies to improve efficiency, robustness, cost or scale up of common bio lab processes. Mapping out all bio lab processes used in genetic engineering. Unfortunately without going back to school to PhD options are very limited. The Thought Emporium guy and the 4-6 community bio labs in major US cities are the only counter examples I know of doing this outside of academia / industry.

I have a theory that if society could unlock a hobbyist class of synthetic biology tinkerers it could unleash rapid growth similar to the computing industry. I'm not sure if the problem is technology not being low cost and high safety enough or a lack of social institutions supporting people like this.

On the development side, I feel like I just don't have the "brain" for Rust even though I have built a couple of useful things with it and have also contributed to an open source project (checkout hurl.dev, great tool!) - I would love to get into low level OS development, VMMs and microVMs . It's probably just an issue of effort

Outside of programming, I'd like to get into welding so I can make some things. I recently learned to use my angle grinder but welding feels like it's out of reach because of not having the right tools and experience.

I've wanted for years to take the research paper "Coq: The World's Best Macro Assembler" through several of its more and less obvious next steps, including re-implementing it on top of a formal specification of ARM (or RISC-V) machine code, and introducing a concept of virtual registers on top of a (light weight) register allocator. I really feel like there's a path here to a system in which low-level non-portable code can be written comfortably (if perhaps at a somewhat slower pace than C), with arbitrary correctness properties proven on it; but the learning curve to get there (through Coq, etc) has been a struggle. Every few years I set myself the goal of a proven-correct implementation of a min/max heap in assembly built on this approach, and every few years I give up.

"What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?"

A job where I can support my family and feel valued/respected. I think that would be cool.

Well, I'm have a little guilty bias towards spacetime non-substantivalism and I've always been interested in getting back to physics in this area. I've particularly found the Shape Dynamics program to be at least somewhat interesting and while I have a sort of ok grasp of the language and mathematics of GR translating that to the SD world has been a persistent challenge. If I had time I'd try to figure that out.

Briefly, one usually formulates the theory of gravity in terms of a a 4d spacetime with curvature but you can also formulate it as a theory of curved 3d shapes if you allow the lagrangian to carry more structure. This is often performed in GR, in fact, by decomposing the metric into a "spatial" and "temporal" part but shape dynamics kind of runs with this idea in an attempt to formulate a totally relational version of the theory of gravity.

Shape Dynamics apparently produces a reasonable theory of gravity which agrees with GR in many situations but forbids, I believe, closed timelike curves, and may be more amenable to quantization since it re-separates space and time.

Anyway, it all seems very beyond me, maybe even if I had the time, which I do not.

I want to build a large format, real-time, physical music visualizer that could orchestrate an artistic light symphony for any song.

I'm imagining physical visualizers that are columns of multiple, discrete light nodes, each able to have variable brightness and color.

The real-time music processing is the hard part (for me) to crack.

There's some standard tricks here: FFTs, bandpass filters, etc.

But I want to do more: Real-time stem separation, time signature and downbeat tracking, etc.

Imagine hearing Sweet Caroline and, when the horns kick in, the whole installation 'focuses' on the horns and bright yellow light jumps between each column on each horn note, before returning to tracking the bass line or something.

I've been noodling on this idea for a long time and slowly digging into the music and CS fundamentals. The rise of LLMs might finally be the piece that enables me to close my intelligence gap and finally build this thing...

There's 2 big ones that I want to learn.

Quantum computer programming. I've dived a couple times into Qiskit from IBM. Also tried to get into dwave and ocean sdk but they never got back to me.

Qiskit tutorials are easy to blow through and i think even understand. But when trying to use it for my own purposes, just never get anywhere.

The other one for me with no success. Training my own specialized predicting AI models. Tensorflow, pytorch, and another.

I certainly prefer pytorch. Super simple to build models on simple stuff.

I'm trying to do something that literally nobody else has ever done. My lack of success has probably a lot more to do with that it's not perhaps actually doable.

Flipside, I might be re-approaching this now that i have the pycharm ai to help me in this progress.

>you've been there and figured out how to get past similar hurdles – please chime in! Share some helpful resources, dish out general advice, or just give a nudge of encouragement on how to take that intimidating first step.

Never be afraid to try. Always dare to fail; you only truly learn when failing. The easier you make it to fail, the quicker you learn.

Author here. With https://evcc.io I have (with tremendous help) developed a home energy management system, originally for solar-optimised EV charging (big in Germany/Europe with users in the US or even Australia). Turning into a general HEMS proves hard. While all our current algorithms are strictly predictable, we're lacking global, multi-goal, non-linear optimisation. Maybe SAT solvers, maybe non-linear programming, maybe stochastic or ML/AI can be part of the solution. We have lots of data but no algorithm or technical approach and I'm unsure where to go next.

Anything that involves time. Dance, music, gardening. I have too many existing commitments that when I actually have free time I have no energy left

For a while now, I've had the desire to make an AI that kills enemies and beats levels like a human would in the game Crypt of the Necrodancer. Here's[0] someone doing it as a human without ever taking damage.

There's something close called ChoregraphAI[1] on GitHub. It simulates the entire map and does a brute force search for what will get it to the stairs. That doesn't satisfy me because it just skips most of the enemies and takes advantage of things that a human couldn't know, like where a bat will move (bats move randomly, while other enemies are completely deterministic). Also, it can't control the game and is for an old version of it (although those problems themselves seem not that big).

But, I do not know what kind of AI could be written to perform the kind of long term planning and strategizing that a human would do (e.g. isolate each enemy to beat it more easily) and to beat the enemies like a human would (with special, pre-practiced strategies for certain enemies or groups of enemies), and even if I did, I get the sense that this would be really complicated for a first try and that I should gain experience making such an AI for a simpler game, though I don't know what.

It might be a self-constrained challenge. It's just been floating around my head for a while because I don't really know where to start.

[0]: https://youtu.be/CxavaHV-K6A

[1]: https://github.com/Grimy/ChoregraphAI

I've tried to make my own pair of shoes a few times now, never quite getting to the end. I even took a class but doing it on my own is so much harder.

I'm a software developer with no real reason to be sewing and lasting my own shoes, but god damn it I'd love to wear my own handmade shoes.

I've had this idea forever, and mentioned it here many, many times... the BitGrid, which is an FPGA chip without all the routing and long lines, but with added latching so you can banish timing constraints.

I honestly think it could be as important/useful as Von Neumann's CPU architecture, for AI and other highly parallel compute tasks. Every time I start to work on it, something stops me.

For instance, last week I had a good chat with Github Copilot about it, and it was way too nice and encouraging for comfort[2] Unfortunately, you need a Copilot account to read the chat I shared. 8(

I was hoping to get it into TinyTapeout, but they're now only in Europe. 8(

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://github.com/copilot/share/086351a0-0ac0-80a7-9802-144...

Manufacturing. I have no idea where one would start with learning it that doesn't begin with having at least $100,000 in machinery and industry knowledge.

digital signal processing for synths and audio stuff.

maths :/ brain hurt.

i did some digital signal processing in my phd but i need to go through and implement a bunch of things from scratch to learn/relearn and it’ll just be a bit of a grind. i’m avoiding doing that by working on data file parsing / project management utils for the elektron octatrack instead, which is useful, but tangential to what i want to do.

long term would be rad to build software for old synth hardware and the like. sort of like midiquest, but without the price tag.

Speaking of which, I've always been fascinated by audio signal processing especially the idea of writing code to synthesize sounds or emulate vintage synthesizers. It feels like magic to turn mathematical formulas into actual audible melodies. But every time I look at a tutorial, I get intimidated by all the Fourier transforms and equations. Maybe I just need that one real opportunity to get started from scratch.

Over the past several years I have slowly patched the .NET version of Shen to run on Linux and modern .NET releases. I also learned about Higher-Order Perl the other year and have a dream of going through the book and implementing the exercises in Shen while tuning the compiler.

But while I have had a broad interest in compilers for years and years, it feels difficult-to-impossible to actually complete any of it. Part of it's general depression and time management, part is looking at the long story of these projects and the lack of progression: Stuck in a rut of mediocrity.

https://github.com/rkoeninger/ShenSharp https://github.com/jaccarmac/junkcode/tree/79ea647d4ddbe41cf...

Electronics. Have a hard time thinking about it conceptually. I tend to always take a step out and just find components from other projects and tie them together with code. Would love to design my own PCB.

Creative Writing - Although LLMs seem to be a good help with replacing whatever I am missing. Mostly organizational issues. I enjoy the meat, writing certain scenarios. But fleshing out a whole book I fail from both top down and bottom up methods.

Python packages written in low-level languages like C/C++ and Rust.

There are currently so many cool open source projects in the python ecosystem that involve writing python packages in low-level languages. But unfortunately, I've barely written any low-level code since university, so these projects are effectively out of reach for me at the moment.

However, I do plan on learning Rust sometime later this year and there are number of smaller projects that I plan on working on!

I'd like to establish an index fund that jumps through the necessary hoops to allow US expatriate citizens to invest from places like the European Union.

Last I checked, there is no fundamental legal barrier preventing this - just an enormous amount of compliance work that has to get done. But as we would be the only real option for 1 or 2 million well-monied people, I imagine we'd be able to start with a very eager customer base provided we could jump through those hoops. And uh, the actual algorithms for index based stock selection are pretty straightforward, too - I'm not Jane Street level clever, so that's an attractive point for me.

If anyone's interested in this hare brained scheme, let me know via the email in my bio. It's been a problem I've been rolling around in my head for a few years now. I have no idea how I would get started, but I'm pretty sure I could do it.

I want to make my own music streaming app. Fix all the UI problems, improve discovery, remember all the musical phases I went through.

Unfortunately, you can't just sign up for API access to millions of songs. And the streaming apps either don't provide a playback API, or their TOS limits what you can do with it.

Reverse engineering. Each time I start I seem to get overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge required, then I decide to check if these skills might be useful in getting a better paid job... and there just doesn't seem to be that much jobs involving these skills, neither in my area nor remotely. And my motivation instantly evaporates because learning all that stuff just to sometimes poke around in some weird program.

Debugging electronics to fix stuff. Some people seem to be able to repair whatever broken electronic devices we give them, which I find fascinating.

* Kernel development and eBPF: I tried many time to go deep on those topics, but never became proficient

* Bayesian statistics: I know the basics and the theory, but I am not able to understand how to use it in a real world problem

Two projects:

1. Training my own LLM and other kinds of neural networks, e.g. a network for discriminating cheaters in an online game. I feel like it's very hard for an amateur to get their hands on enough training data.

2. Building my own weather prediction engine. Again, accurate prediction requires highly detailed and accurate data to start from and as far as I can tell that's not publicly available.

Building a web browser.

I once took a stab at Ladybird browser but had to back out due to the complexity of its build chain. I couldn’t get it run on Xcode/CLion on macOS but would love to give it a try once again.

Does anyone have any tips on getting started again?

CAD, all aspects of machining, tool and die stuff, injection molding, and similar manufacturing techniques.

Tons of things, ranging from raw technical skill to being able to talk to peopele about things, theorycrafting etc.

But, that's too much for poor ol' me :). Will just start simple.

Electronics. Especially the concept of ADC/DACs. Connecting Analog to Digital in to an FPGA, etc. I read a document about PLLs and I barely understand the block diagrams, the math I can't even begin to understand the symbols. I'll start learning from a book, but get to a certain point, then a few days go by, then many days -- by then I feel like I have to restart from the beginning.

Game dev. I like the idea of programming the core loops, but cannot fathom getting into assets and art design as I do not have a single artistic bone in my body

Electronics - I recently bought a decent DSO, the "Pinecil" soldering iron, a whole bunch of components. I had some ideas but then sort of hit a wall and lost interest. So now I have a workbench with tools that I will hopefully get back to some day. I think my starting projects were either too difficult, or not that interesting after I implemented them on a breadboard.

Plasma simulation - I really want to understand how fusion and advanced propulsion systems can be simulated and maybe even contribute in some way. E.g. The fusion propulsion being developed by Helicity Space is very interesting. I wish I knew enough to understand their work and maybe do some simulations myself. I tried doing this "Particle In Cell" course I found online but quickly lost interest after a week or so.

I guess I just have a wide variety of interests that come and go. Some of these just seem to be passing interests. I have sort of learned to live with that.

What is out of reach for me is space to perform the hobbies.

I have welders, metal and woodworking equipment, 3d printers, auto mechanic tools, etc and years of experience and knowledge and interest in building stuff. But I have only a tiny garage to work from. I don’t really have room to do much so it feels like waste.

I’ve looked into renting a small shop but Seattle is so expensive that renting even a one car sized shop space is prohibitively expensive for a hobby (for my income level).

I’m sure I could turn a profit with my work on the side but then it’s a job and you have monthly overhead expenses to cover and all the stresses that come from that.

What is even the actionable step to take? Make more money? That usually comes with less time unfortunately. Moving away to somewhere I can afford a larger workshop at home was the plan until return to office happened for me.

For me, it's Bézier curves --- Freya Holmér has a wonderful video on them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds

and I've been trying to read through _METAFONT: The Program_ and https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/ and I keep wondering if I shouldn't just try scripting Inkscape....

I want to do a couple of different things, and not sure if they all fit in one project or no:

- implement a single line font in my current project: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

- implement a way to convert arbitrary curves into smooth arcs (for DXFs or G2/G3 arcs for G-code)

- work up an interactive version of METAFONT/METAPOST which allows both programming and drawing

Cellular networks.

I specialize in computer networking in my day job. Most of what I do is Cisco routers, Cisco switches, and Cisco firewalls. I would be interested in learning more about cellular networks. I haven't put any effort into exploring this for myself. If there is a track similar to CCNA → CCNP → CCIE then it isn't well-known (well, not known to me).

A useful tool for me would be an app/site that instantly provides a short list of available events/activities that a) are happening soon, b) match/complement my unique set of interests and c) is in reasonable geographic proximity.

Two things and they are both grinds more than anything else and hard to squeeze time in with work, travel, exercise and just spending time with my wife.

The first is traditional machine learning - not “AI”. I know what I don’t know and I can fake it well enough to talk to a subject matter expert when leading projects and I have a dual math/cs major from three decades ago. But it would take years to be good enough to be at the same level of seniority I am in my existing niche.

The second is more important for my life is learn Spanish well enough to be conversationally fluent. I know some. But my wife and I are going to start living in Costa Rica during the winter and I want to actually learn it to embrace being thier.

Nothing intellectually, but some things are financially, spatially, and/or temporally out of reach. A long term goal of mine has been to make machines which are decently precise with wide dynamic range measurement capabilities for all of the SI base units & some commonly-used derived units. Somewhere in the 6-8 digits of dynamic range for each.

E.g. be able to measure distances over a 50cm range to a resolution of ±500nm. Easy for a coordinate measuring machine, very challenging and expensive to DIY.

Validating anything I build means finding a calibration lab willing to check it, which is also rather pricey. I don't have the space, the time, or the money to do this.

I love the idea of computational experiments that replace testing on animals. Reading about what we do to animals in the name of science is heart breaking, but learning there are computational models and experiments being developed to take place of animal cruelty is exciting. However, such projects feel overwhelming given I know next to nothing about biology, and I'm not sure spending the time learning is worth the payout given my age and other areas of expertise.

I saw an article recently on a shock absorbing material and a biohacking method of manufacturing it with a bioreactor. I’d love to pick up something like that. That and Effective 3D printing or hobby manufacturing.

I love reading about projects where someone has taken a combination of used bicycles, bicycle parts, metal tubing, sometimes batteries & electric motors, aerodynamic skins, and built something new: a bike for transport, a recumbent, something aerodynamic, something light, something electric.

I wish I had the project space, the skills (welding, mechanical), and the tools to build human and electric powered bikes.

I wish I could devote to build my dream programming language (https://tablam.org) that has several hard questions and troubles (mainly I wanna rebuild in full something like FoxPro).

But, there are things I truly have dream but have dedicated almost not effort trying:

* Play (rock) bass

* Draw comic/manga style. I wish to make histories and think I could do it but refuse to write plain words (idiot!).

Basically, art is my unreachable goal

Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell University.

I like to see that with known drone sounds, maybe missiles and rockets too.

But that is closed-source.

One viable open-source alternatives is written in Python and uses CNN algorithm.

https://github.com/LonesX/Bird-Song-Recognition

That LoneX lets you add new sounds

Running with an idea and starting a business. Some people are naturally entrepreneurs, but I don't feel that I have the bug for it. I'd like to find a niche in soft robotic actuation and run with it, renting a garage somewhere in my hometown after I finish my PhD.

I recently gave up on a native JavaScript only PTY. You absolutely needs third party binaries to make use of OS APIs, namely open_pty and fork_pty from pty.h in posix and some C# functions for ConPTY on Windows. Xterm.js already does this. The only pure JavaScript solution would be for Xterm.js to become a core Node.js API module.

Presentations, including video ones. The ideas feel pretty clear in the head long before you can describe it in a manner which ideally could be a pleasure to watch. What tooling to use, how to work with all that, how to even plan the layout of words, scenes, images seems pretty puzzling, and solutions are like a slow walk in a dark room.

I’ve gotten really into linguistics recently. Digging into primary texts, answering a problem, the whole nine yards.

My difficulty here is if this problem is interesting or unique, and where to go from here. AI says so (but how much is that worth?)

Fun problems to have! It’s pretty amazing that we can Just Do Things, what a time.

Currently, just making a game. I have finished like one game in my life. There is something about the huge scope of things I need to know from music to UI to art that just seems daunting. I tried to do a couple game jams but I am now of the opinion that is too much stress for me.

There is a tiny airport near my house for small personal planes. I see them through my office window above the tree line. I'd love to build a dashboard/screen on my desk to easily identify each aircraft. Ideally something more complicated than querying an existing api. Radar?

Definitely reverse engineering and shaders. Watching these kinds of talks I realize, I'm not built for this: https://youtu.be/EtX7WnFhxtQ?si=UL8G8u1eQw8fpzKR

Playing music. I love playing, but my sense of rhythm is not quite there and I make mistakes too easily, plus a few years ago I had some nerve issues that makes it that much more difficult to move my fingers in the exact way I need to play music.

Not out of reach but I have to put time into it, working with FPGAs and designing my own circuit boards.

Messing with EEG headsets, like the ones by OpenBCI. Being able to perform some operations by just thinking about them sounds so incredibly cool - I've been thinking about this for several years, but it looks like quite an expensive hobby.

I can code a little but I've never done a large project. I want to create something like softimage XSI but open source. a 3D program that is built entirely around usability, because the paid options are too expensive and blender's usability pisses me off.

I'd like to learn about malware analysis and threat intelligence, especially dealing with zero-days and vulnerability exploitation and tracking how APTs do that.

I'm also interested in electronics, like building my own drone.

I recently built an optical encoder from scratch, and it was a ton of fun. More recently I've been looking into how force feedback works, and I'm currently gearing up to implement it using a motor/encoder/controller setup and ODrive.

I'd like to build an e2e encrypted distributed version control system and platform with homomorphic encryption. Think, something like git and github, that's end to end encrypted.

Biotech, wearables

Two things:

- firearms technology: designing or modifying guns. Feels out of reach because... laws, obviously.

- general ICE engines knowledge: Will probably be obsolete when I get the space and the time to pursue this.

I’m bothered by the clunky/unrealistic movement of game characters and wonder how hard it would be to fix.

CPU design

Industrial design for a long time, and injection molding more recently.

"Am I a dinosaur?" and "Is anyone else struggling with this?" I think you're asking the most honest questions in our industry. Thank you for this thread.

My skill that often feels "out of reach" is building a truly great Go-to-Market machine.

I'm a product-obsessed founder. I can spend all day architecting our 'Workspace OS' or fine-tuning our AI, MAKi. But when it comes to sales funnels, marketing channels, and building a repeatable sales process, my brain just fogs over. I truly feel like I wasn't born with the "sales gene."

After 10 years, multiple pivots, and learning to survive like a cockroach, here's the only method I've found for tackling any skill that feels too big: Make it small.

1. Don't read 20 books; talk to one person. I find one person who is great at it and just ask: "What is the very first, smallest thing you would do?"

2. Don't build a complex system; do one dumb, simple action. I don't try to build the perfect marketing funnel. I write one LinkedIn post. I send one cold email. The goal isn't to succeed, it's just to start and get a single data point.

3. Don't guess what the market wants; ask one customer. I ask, "How did you really find us?" Their answer is always more valuable than a market research report.

4. Don't try to master it in a week; just survive to the next day. The goal is just to learn one thing today, so I can be slightly less clueless tomorrow.

I don't think any of us have the "right brain" for everything. But cockroaches don't have big brains either. They just keep moving, adapting, and refuse to die.

We just need to find the next small, tangible step. That's how we get unstuck.

I want to build hyper realistic vr experiences with characters that feel real and not scripted.

Music production, but I’m finally taking the leap after a decade of saying it wasn’t for me.

Making hardware synthesizers, I have a CS degree and took a could EE classes in school. But I have no idea where to begin

My own rap music. And trading, I find it hard to believe in it given empirical research about well diversified passive funds over performing.

Software: Kernel develoent or any similar level system programming projects.

Hardware: electronics repair, especially vintage ones.

Playing Scott Joplin rag on the piano.

Using AI to develop novel drugs. Imagine the world without or with minimal diseases. Only one can hope.

VR things. I want to have an app or something on the quest devices but don't know where to start.

Robotics, music instrument playing

Astronomy and quantum physics :)

Music theory and desktop app development. Mostly because lack of time.

Making electronic music. Any recommendations for where to start?

CNC machining and 3D graphics

The De-googling my life project

taking a long break