Ask HN: What to Pursue?
I&#x27;m tired of making stuff (software) that has no impact on anyone&#x27;s lives.
Ultimately I&#x27;d like to pursue AI research and&#x2F;or to build the future of humanity in some manner, but meanwhile I also need some money to live.<p>I&#x27;ve been bouncing off various ideas, but either I&#x27;m prematurely killing them, or they haven&#x27;t had any (apparently) feasible target markets:<p>- a service to save 2-factor authentication backup codes with client-side encryption - I couldn&#x27;t convince myself finishing this was worth the effort<p>- a personal analytics service, taking in &quot;the kitchen sink&quot; from health devices and other data sources, drawing up correlations, etc. -- it didn&#x27;t seem like anyone would pay for this<p>- a service to lend expertise on demand inside software engineering teams, like a &#x27;virtual engineer&#x27; inside a client team (I figured there are loads of inefficiencies in software development) -- I couldn&#x27;t find a way to even start this. I think the &#x27;silos&#x27; separating companies from the outside are probably considered a feature so there&#x27;s no chance even for this<p>- an index of all geospatial open(&#x2F;closed) datasets -- I made some preliminary work here but ultimately I fail to see who would possibly pay for this in some way<p>- tools for geospatial processing -- GDAL&#x2F;OSGeo&#x2F;QGIS&#x2F;rasterio came short so I made some of my own for joining datasets and such -- also doesn&#x27;t seem monetizable easily?<p>- reproducible datasets and computation -- this also didn&#x27;t seem worth the effort<p>Am I just prematurely killing off all my ideas without finding a single customer?<p>Is there some productive way to refine ideas and find better ones?<p>Should I find a different viewpoint to this entirely?