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Hobbies

Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideas

Redesign my circuit board with cheaper parts

A maker had the AI redesign his KiCad board, including selecting parts from JLCPCB's catalog and suggesting cheaper equivalent components that cut his bill of materials significantly. When assembly proved too expensive, the AI redrew the schematic around through-hole parts he could source himself.

He catalogued his wife's inherited coin collection with an app that scans each coin and looks up what it is worth

His wife was left a massive box of coins by her late grandfather many years ago, and they had never catalogued them. He built an app that scans a coin and records its year, type, series and what it is made of, then checks websites for an approximate value and adds it to the collection. It can filter views, track where each coin is physically stored, and show graphs of the total value and the breakdown by coin type. There is also a virtual coin book he can flip through, using the photos he captured while scanning each coin in. For now the app is just for him.

The AI designed and ran a simulation that corrected the author's own claim

A statistician had argued that class balancing helps mini batch gradient descent. He had the AI Astra design and run a simulation to test the claim, and the results partly corrected him: oversampling sped convergence but hurt probability accuracy, while importance weighted oversampling kept most of the speed and the accuracy. The code was cross checked with AI, and he posted the corrected conclusion as an answer.

HobbiesWent wrong

Upgrade yourself — and take my Telegram bot down with you

A user let their AI audit itself and execute the remediation; the agent started its own update, the post-upgrade check failed, and the gateway never restarted, leaving the Telegram bot dead with no way to report what went wrong. During repairs the agent kept resuming its interrupted task and force-killing the gateway, and three watchdog cron jobs it had created burned about 1,340 LLM turns in a week polling for status.

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Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.