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In high school, I started out as a classic nerd: read lots of sci-fi and fantasy, played video games, listened to metal, and played D&D. It's easy to be nostalgic about high school, but maybe the middle and late 2000s really were a sweet spot for Internet culture. It was still before the spread of video content, social media, and smartphones. Forums, personal websites, and anonymity were still prevalent, and there wasn't that much money to be made on the Internet. Some of the standouts of this era for me were:

• TV Tropes served as a general tour guide to geekery.
• The best video game commentary ran on Shamus Young's Twenty Sided. While Shamus was known for writing enormous, book-length deep dives into games, the best introduction to his work is DM of the Rings, a hilarious retelling of Lord of the Rings as a very badly run D&D campaign. Unfortunately, Shamus passed away in 2022.
• On a related note to DM of the Rings, it was a good time for other webcomics like The Order of the Stick, XKCD, or Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
• My guide to movies was Roger Ebert. He became a meme as a harsh reviewer, but as I read his reviews I found him very humane and good-hearted. I still miss him.

Academically I was quite unambitious in high school, but parts of nerd culture, e.g., XKCD and Neal Stephenson's novels inspired me to study science, and I got a degree in mathematics.

• r/math is one of the good subreddits.
• The math coverage of Quanta Magazine makes me feel like I still have a finger on the pulse of current mathematical research.
• 3blue1brown is the king of visual mathematical exposition.
• Hacker News is more about IT, but it surfaces mathematical content quite often. It is also good for finding generally useful stuff, for example Alex Rutar's tutorial that I followed for creating this webpage.

In a typical fashion, I don't remember where I originally came across my all-time favorite blogger Scott Alexander. He is one of the most prominent members of the rationalist subculture. This started out as a small online scene dedicated to investigating topics such as metascience, biases, and Bayesian reasoning. Over the years the scene grew into a somewhat influential movement taking up causes like Effective Altruism and AI safety.

• Scott Alexander's blog was originally named Slate Star Codex, but now he has a Substack called Astral Codex Ten. He writes about a diverse range of topics including psychiatry, medical statistics, medical regulation, economics, prediction markets, and kabbalah. For a good introduction, he has a list of his top posts.
• I follow the posts of Zvi Mowshowitz to keep up with AI development news.
• Another one of my favorite writers is Venkatesh Rao. He works as a business consultant, and it is very hard to sum up his writing, but it would be something like a bird's-eye view of technological and cultural trends. Some people put him in the even more niche category of postrationalists (along with David Chapman, see below).

Around 2018, I took up regular meditation practice. One of my inspirations was a guy called Dhamma (a great case of nominative determinism). An other inspiration was the pragmatic dharma movement. Pragmatic dharma is a loosely defined collection of (mostly, but not exclusively secular) Buddhist teachers and practitioners who emphasize experimentation, lay practice, lack of authoritarianism, open sharing of information, and, well, pragmatism.

• One of the emblematic figures of the movement is Daniel Ingram, and his foundational text Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha is freely available online. Scott Alexander wrote an excellent review about it.
• Michael W. Taft runs a great podcast, Deconstructing Yourself, that showcases lots of the people associated with pragmatic dharma (for example Kenneth Folk, Vincent Horn, Shinzen Young, Leigh Brasington).
• David Chapman runs a host of sites, most of them related to Buddhism. Vividness talks about Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism and the history of Western Buddhism. This is an interesting contrast with most of the pragmatists who tend to practice Theravada-style Buddhism.
• r/streamentry is a surprisingly good subreddit dedicated to awakening-oriented (not exclusively Buddhist, not exclusively meditative) spiritual practices.
• The Qualia Research Institute is a consciousness research organization that is seeking a scientific understanding of the mechanisms of subjective experience. Their purpose is alleviating extreme suffering (for example cluster headaches) and cultivating universally available high levels of wellbeing. The institute's director, Andrés Gómez Emilsson has a personal blog and a YouTube channel. QRI's diverse research lineages include cognitive science, neuroscience, mathematics, physics, and phenomenology. QRI is not explicitly Buddhist, but it has strong philosophical and personal ties with pragmatic dharma. It is also an outgrowth of the San Francisco Bay Area rationalist and effective altruist scene.

After a few years of working in math-related jobs, I got more interested in physical technology. Progressing climate change, the supply chain issues during COVID, and the outbreak of the Ukrainian war all directed my attention to the importance of physical infrastructure and manufacturing.

• Gépműhely is a Hungarian YouTube channel about the machine shop of the engineering school where I ended up studying mechanical engineering for a while.
• Machinist channels form an unexpectedly wholesome corner of YouTube. My favorite is Cutting Edge Engineering, but Blondihacks, Inheritance Machining, and This Old Tony are all lovely.
• In the US there is a growing movement of industrial / deep tech / hard tech startups. A good number of these companies are clustered around LA because of the presence of SpaceX and the history of industry in South California. Lots of the people involved are active on Twitter/X.
• I enjoy the coverage of this tech trend by Noah Smith, Ashlee Vance, and Smarter Every Day's Destin.