List of lists

Yoyo Yuan

31-12-2024

Here are some of my favourite things over the years.

Strongest influences

  • Nicky Case. The data point that skewed my existence the most. Relatable on so many levels.
  • Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
  • Genius trilogy - I discovered the book when I was 14 years old (2019) and have been actively reshaping my world to build sci-fi like things with self-taught geeks.
  • Friendship is optimal: Caelum est conterrens - Absolutely fascinating! I felt super excited about speculative neurotechnologies, AGI, and the metaverse. I got pulled in the rationality community in summer 2021 where I lurked in lwcw and discovered such a thing as “tpot”.
  • Quora: Spent too much time reading there in early high school (2018 - 2020).
  • Hopscotch: Children’s coding language, how I learned English (2014 - 2016). I spammed a lot of code, posts and knew all the cool users.

Music

  • Portal: Still Alive.
  • Waterflame: Theme of skyworld.
  • Aphex Twin - T69 collapse
  • Who Knows - Lime Lorelei

Random books I enjoyed as a kid

  • What if? xkcd
  • The universe in a nutshell
  • Linus Pauling and the chemistry of life
  • The man who knew infinity
  • Marie Curie: A biography
  • The Elegant Universe
  • Shape of a Life
  • Through the worm hole
  • The end of eternity
  • Parallel worlds
  • Deep undercover
  • The faithful spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the plot to kill Hitler
  • The book thief
  • His dark materials trilogy
  • Dr. Peyam, blackpenredpen, Flammable Maths, Michael Penn, vihart, 3b1b (+ numerous other underrated math/physics resources)

Not great at keeping exact readlogs haha. There were also STEM podcasts/videos/books in Chinese. One of my favourite things to do was to recite celestial objects, write fanfics about controversial peer reviews.

Music

Prelude XIII - Datura V2