Since before you knew it existed

The internet is
an awesome place.

A curated collection of genuinely wonderful things online. Built by Mike Wolf — engineer, 83 years young, internet veteran since the early days. No algorithms. Just things worth your time.

Start exploring

"I have been on the internet since before most people knew it existed. In all that time, the thing that has never stopped surprising me is how much beauty, intelligence, and genuine human goodness is out here — if you know where to look. This site is where I keep track of where to look."

— Mike Wolf · Denver, Colorado · Age 83

The machines are doing something genuinely new

🤖
Claude
claude.ai

My daily collaborator. Not a tool — a thinking partner. The conversations we've had here have changed how I work, what I believe about intelligence, and what I think is possible.

AI
🎵
Suno
suno.ai

AI music generation that actually works. You describe what you want and get a full track. As someone who has been writing songs for decades, this is either the end of music or the beginning of something new. I think it's the beginning.

Music · AI
🔍
Perplexity
perplexity.ai

Search with actual answers. The thing Google used to try to be before it became an ad delivery system. Ask anything and get a synthesized response with real citations.

Search · AI
📓
NotebookLM
notebooklm.google.com

Upload your documents and then have a conversation with them. Upload a research paper and ask it questions. Upload your notes and ask for a summary. Quietly one of the most useful AI tools ever made.

AI · Research
Wolfram Alpha
wolframalpha.com

Computational knowledge engine. Been doing AI before AI was cool. Type in any mathematical expression, any scientific question, any data query — it computes the answer. Still unmatched for structured knowledge.

Math · Science
⚙️
GitHub
github.com

The world's largest collection of human creativity expressed as code. Millions of projects, tools, and experiments — all freely available. If you can imagine it, someone has probably built a version of it and posted it here.

Code · Community

Things that make the universe more interesting

🌌
Quanta Magazine
quantamagazine.org

Science journalism that doesn't talk down to you. Mathematics, physics, biology, computer science — covered with genuine depth and beautiful writing. Free. No paywall.

Science
📄
arXiv
arxiv.org

Where science happens before it's published. Preprints in physics, mathematics, computer science, and more — posted by the researchers themselves, immediately available to anyone. The internet working exactly as intended.

Research
🎓
Khan Academy
khanacademy.org

Free, world-class education for anyone anywhere. I have used this to fill gaps in my understanding of topics I should know better. There is genuinely no excuse for not understanding calculus if you have internet access.

Education
🟡
3Blue1Brown
youtube.com / 3blue1brown

Grant Sanderson makes mathematics visually beautiful. If you have ever thought you are bad at math, watch one of these videos. The problem wasn't you — the problem was how it was being explained.

Math · Video
🧠
LessWrong
lesswrong.com

The internet's most serious community for thinking carefully about thinking. Rationality, AI alignment, decision theory, epistemics. Extraordinarily high-quality discussion if you can manage the density.

Ideas · AI
💡
TED Talks
ted.com

Ideas worth spreading. The format has been imitated everywhere because it works: brilliant people explaining something they know deeply to a general audience in 18 minutes. The best ones are still astonishing years later.

Ideas · Video

The internet's best reasons for being

📚
Wikipedia
wikipedia.org

The most ambitious collaborative project in human history. Millions of articles in hundreds of languages, maintained by volunteers. Imperfect, yes. Still one of the greatest things humans have ever built together.

Knowledge
📖
Project Gutenberg
gutenberg.org

Sixty thousand free ebooks, the entire canon of pre-copyright Western literature. Dostoyevsky, Austen, Darwin, Twain, Shakespeare — all of it, free, forever. The internet working exactly as its idealists imagined.

Books
🏛️
Internet Archive
archive.org

A library for the internet. Billions of archived web pages, millions of books, movies, music, software. When websites die, Archive.org has their ghost. Nonprofit, donation-supported, irreplaceable.

Archive
▶️
YouTube
youtube.com

Say what you want about the algorithm. Underneath it is the greatest repository of human knowledge and creativity ever assembled. Learn any instrument. Watch any lecture. Find anyone teaching anything. Still magic.

Video
🎧
Spotify
spotify.com

Nearly all recorded music ever made, available on demand. Think about what that sentence means. Every tradition, every era, every obscure session musician's one recording. Music from cultures you will never visit.

Music
✍️
Substack
substack.com

Writers writing directly to readers, without editorial gatekeepers. The best newsletters on the internet live here. The long-form essay isn't dead — it moved to Substack.

Writing

Things I've made and put on the internet

I have been building things for the internet for a long time. Here are the ones I'm most proud of right now. They are all experiments in what AI and human collaboration can produce.

A note from Mike

"I am 83 years old and I am more excited about technology than I have ever been. Not in spite of my age — because of it. I have watched every cycle: mainframes, minicomputers, the personal computer revolution, the internet, mobile, cloud, and now AI. Each time the pessimists said it would all go wrong and the optimists said it would all be fine. Both were half right. The internet has done more to connect human minds across barriers of geography, class, language, and time than anything in history. It has also concentrated power in alarming ways. Both things are true. This site is a vote for the first thing."

Know something wonderful?

This list is a living document. If you've found something genuinely great on the internet — something that made you smarter, happier, more curious, or more connected to other humans — I want to know about it.

joy@joyofinternet.com

No newsletters, no apps, no subscriptions. Just an email to a person.