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

I'm a EE masters student and I also want to reinforce how inaccessible EE is and that I don't really recommend it as a hobby. EE is a very mature field and it's very math heavy for a reason. The second you move past the hobby boards, stuff becomes really difficult and really expensive really fast. If your end goal is to create toys for kids, then it's fine as a hobby. But without the formal training and lab access you are going to struggle to get past that point so it's pretty much impossible to turn the hobby into something more. Unlike software, where tinkering genuinely has the possibility of turning your side projects into careers. Hell, if you don't live in EE hotspot locations, I wouldn't even recommend it as a career anymore. Software is where it's at, even in the age of AI.

CNC machining and 3D graphics

what are you trying to suggest? that they are doing to much already? and if they were to do less they would have time? wouldn't that then lead to the same situation, that they would like to work on some of the things they are working on now but could not because of lack of time?

also we don't choose all our commitments. family, work, friends, etc are commitments we can't just give up. it comes down to choice and priorities, and the problem is that we have more things we find interesting than we can focus on.

but i consider that a good thing. i know that whenever i retire or am unable to continue some of my interests there will be others that i can pick up instead. i know that i won't be bored...

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.