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Ask HN: Help me utilize my passion

2 points by jason_slack ↗ HN
To help with my mental health, I am rebooting my life. I now will work for myself, be myself, grow myself utilizing my passions in life.

I am going to spend 3 months in a remote cabin (with an ice-cold stream for ice baths) working on my passion.

I am fluent in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese and I also enjoy coding in c++.

What are some ideas for programming projects utilizing my knowledge of these languages?

7 comments

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jstx1
How is it a passion if you need other people to tell you what to work on?

Look, wanting to make a change is a healthy thing but most radical change decisions don't go anywhere. Start small and set yourself something concrete that you can achieve.

billybuckwheat
Why not spend that time in the remote cabin thinking about the kinds of projects that you want to tackle? Then, when those three months are up, dive into them.
jason_slack
This is also definitely a possibility. It may need to be this.
kadonoishi
You could use word2vec [0] to process bodies of text in those languages, then use your C++ to build cool visualizations. The geometrical shapes that the processing finds in the languages might give you interesting insights.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERibwqs9p38

jason_slack
This sounds interesting. I have built some tools in the past to parse for specific occurrences (determined by the text around the search criteria) to determine what might be most important to know from a given text and produced a Summary of the text.
mikewarot
Take no computer, only paper and pen/pencil. Spending 3 months away from the computer should give you plenty of ideas, and time to think about how you would implement them. The best art sometimes comes from working around obstacles.

You could spend that time volunteering somewhere non-computer related. Interacting with a bunch of new people might also help you discover your passion.

jason_slack
Wow! I read your blog!

This approach was at my original thought. I then talked myself out of it in way of "scope creep" telling myself I could get more done that I give myself credit for. Why not bring a few devices just in case? Etc. Ugh. My neurodivergent brain.

Thank you for indirecting reming me that the point of the time is to think and research and work out details, not to put fingers to keyboard and get distracted by any number of notifications.

This may sound weird but I have a few notebooks that I love. The quality of the paper, a special pen I only use in this particular notebook. I have one notebook that is filled with ideas starting from when I was about 10 and owned a Commodore 64.

I also have a Remarkable 2 e-ink digital notebook and I love it. I use it for so many tasks now. No notifications, no browsing, it just lets me write, draw, hash out, journal, plan my day, etc. However, I still have a paper planner I maintain. Perhaps I have trust issues :-)