| This page describes the intent for this website, how I find my ideas, site content, how I organize information, why I write, and all technical aspects of the site |
| ~O~ | n this site, my hope for the content is to offer my informed take on various subjects that involve programming, philosophy, biology, self-experiments, psychology, economics, AI, and some musings on practical life. |
| All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible. |
| T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom |
The extent of my existing writing spans several years. Still, it is a hodge-podge of unfinished essays, a massive amount of densely linked notes in roam, journal entries, and archived Substack articles. Three years ago, I created a website similar to this one to write there exclusively, but my capacity for implementing and managing a website was very minimal. I soon dropped that project but continued to write in small chunks on various topics that I found interesting. Here, I hope to expand those writings into more long-form pages with a more intentional approach to research and writing.
For as long as I can remember, I have been a voracious reader. Early on, the majority of my reading was in the science fiction genre, with some sprinklings of biographies and history books. My reading sections have always been explicitly curated (even when I was young) to what I am obsessed with at the moment. There are rare moments when I pursue some tangent after stumbling across an esoteric book, but for the most part, my book selections match my current interests. The hope for this site is to continue my current modus operandi, but in a more intentional way that supports the content.
The intent here is to post long-form essays that stem from my research and reading to offer novel (hopefully) ideas and opinions on subjects that I find important and address the ever-present rabbit holes that I find myself in. I enjoy the thrill of delving into a new rabbit hole, which give that particular subject quite a strong hold over my cognitive bandwidth. Even so, I find rabbit holes to be one of the many enjoyments of my particular personality.
| "You know what’s the most terrifying thing about the universe? It doesn’t care about you." |
| Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin |
This site is meant to be a place that acts as a collated repository of every idea and question that crosses my mind. I have always had this urge to explore deeper into topics that caught my interest, but I have never created a place to produce the results of that exploration. My notes, thoughts, and ideas have always been scattered all over the place, which span a decade and a half. Much of the content (or potential content) has been lost over the years. Some of it was explicitly discarded because I deemed it unsatisfactory or more honestly, because of a lifelong ailment of crippling imposter syndrome. I want this place to be a beacon for the mind. The project as a whole will never be finished and will be an attempt at an accumulation of my research, thoughts, and writings.
I see this as an attempt to start fresh, backed by years of research, writing, and contemplating.
Writing for me has always seemed a natural feeling. When I get captured by an idea, thought, bit of information, or something I'm reading, it replays in my mind over and over. It pulls me into it during the day and wakes me up at night. It's a nagging feeling that if I don't get this down in writing, it will be lost forever. I can say more often than not, they have been lost forever. Either by my consistent forgetfulness or the busyness of everyday modern life. Since 2007 or so, I have been keeping journals to capture what is inside my mind, and I have accumulated a large number of disparate notes, excerpts, thoughts, and ideas. In retrospect, I think the time spent writing was well worth it, but at the same time, I have an unorganized mess of writing in my archives that I don't have the time to look through. I would guess that about half of my writing has been lost.
At the beginning of 2020, I decided to make writing a serious habit, from which the idea of writing a fiction book was generated. Not for the reason many people would think to write a book. This story had been deep in my mind for almost a decade, although it had changed shape and possibly even improved. I never wanted to be an "author", but I have a qualitative affliction to write (possibly for the sake of my sanity). That said, I do not have much to show for it. This site is an attempt to resolve that. Additionally, around the 2020 timeframe, I began to make writing an everyday habit, and after much experimentation, I concluded that I do my best writing in the morning (7:00am-10:00am). Anytime after this is usually frought with distractions and a lack of a single-minded focus via heavy caffeine intake.
Even though I write daily, my contributions to long-form projects are sporadic and incremental, but over time, I can see that they begin to form something like a cohesive narrative. I write in bursts, where inspiration has taken hold, and there is nothing that can stop me from getting it onto the page. My other modes of writing depend on the intended purpose of the project. If it's an essay, I can block out all distractions and buckle down, switching from research to writing and vice versa. If I am contributing to my fiction novel, the writing becomes more about presence and feeling. The basic ideas for the narrative are there but are tethered to some emotion that gives the story a certain meaning I aim to convey. I equate this somewhat to meditation (done daily), in which I am slightly separated from my body. Noticing, identifying, accepting, and realizing.
The payoff in the end is, more often than not, worth it. When I see a finished essay or chapter in the book, I do not feel that I have put a large amount of effort into it. The chain of ideas/inspiration to analysis to the page appears to me a natural flow. The last step, from experience, seems to be the most difficult (relatively). I have noticed that the majority of people struggle with the blank page and give up or deem that the effort is not worth the trouble.
| ~ INFORMATION GATHERING ~ |
|---|
| "The historian’s task is to tell the story of the past, but the researcher’s task is to uncover the truth that was forgotten." |
| Jules Michelet |
| "If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research." |
| Wilson Mizner |
For better or worse, Roam has become my central repository for bits of information from many different mediums. The transient nature of these bits requires me to insert them into my Roam notebook for easy retrieval later. I have benefited the most from the link and search features in Roam, which makes any note, link, clipping, or page retrievable. Many times, while researching, I stumble on notes from years ago that I had forgotten.
- Generally, small excerpts that I find while reading papers, Substack articles, blogs, etc, are inserted into the daily log, out of context. For larger blocks of information, I create a bracket link with a page name that corresponds to the subject and insert those paragraphs into the created page.
- While reading physical books, the location of notes and citation insertion depends on my location. Normally, I read away from my computer, and since I hate typing in the notes app on my phone, I relegate myself to writing in a small notebook. The conversion from handwritten notes to plain text is much more effort, but I find the motions between reading a physical book and writing in a notebook more natural. I have yet to implement any type of OCR software, although it would help greatly (Although my handwriting is terribly small and jumbled).
- Comments from Reddit, LessWrong, and X are copied and pasted using the organization method above.
- Much of my news information is gathered from curated RSS feeds. For that, I use Raven. I find the UI to be simple enough to navigate without much effort, and the ability to read the article in the original intended format is nice.
- In some cases, while reading a book, I write insights and thoughts about the text onto small sticky notes and place them on the respective text for reference later.
- PDFs: For reading papers, I download a local copy of the .pdf, then transfer it to the unread folder in Dropbox. Once read, and snippets are extracted and added to Roam, I transfer it to the read folder. Additionally, I add the document links to their respective read/unread folders in Roam for quick reference and retrieval to address link rot. I regularly search for papers on JSTOR, Sci-Hub, Libgen, NEJM, Nature, etc.
- With some guidance from Andy Matuschak, while away from my computer, any ideas that come to me are written down in a Maruman Mnemosyne N193A memo pad. Ideas get their own page with the date. For quick citations while reading a book, each one gets its own memo page with page number and date.
- For personal data, to satisfy a Quantified Self practice, I use a Whoop sensor located on my wrist, which tracks sleep, strain, HRV, Stress, respiratory rate, etc. I wear it 24/7 and have accumulated almost 4 years' worth of continual biometrics.
My Attempt at Evergreen Notes
After spending years developing in HTML/CSS/JS and C#/ASP.NET for multiple corporate companies, I became burned out managing and building in legacy environments, especially the latter. To avoid that headache, I began to look for lighter implementations and an environment that would allow a slight jumpstart so that I could focus more on content than developing from scratch or an existing simple framework/template. Simplicity and minimalist design have always been key factors in my previous website designs, which I wanted to translate to this web project.
The previous site created to host my writing was built using Hugo because of its simple, fast, and efficient compiling as an SSG (static site generator). Additional features like not needing a database, improved scaleability to handle increased traffic, being easily manageable with Git, and ease of use with markdown pages drew me into this environment. After working with it on and off for a few years, we decided to shelve it.
Hakyll initially caught my eye for this new website project as another type of SSG but seemed more open based on its ability to support functional programming, leverage pandoc for document processing, and custom compilers. The main source of inspiration for pursuing this stack was Gwern, who has created a beautiful example of a static site using Hakyll. After talking to Gwern about my interest in using this type of implementation, I was advised that my minimal experience using the Haskell language would be an issue, and PmWiki was suggested as an option. This was quite serendipitous, as I had been looking through wiki-type sites as an option and have ample experience building wikis in my corporate positions over many years.
Based on a recommendation, I began to look into PmWiki as an option for a personal site based on several factors, including its use of a flat-file system to avoid database bottlenecks, minimal server resources compared to database-driven wikis, and my experience building wikis, which was quite enjoyable. Looking through PmWiki documentation revealed that it still has a good community of users and that the implementation overhead would be minimal in comparison to other architectures. As a CMS, it appeared to satisfy my inclination toward simplicity and minimalistic design (or the system allows for that to be possible), and the availability of a library of cookbooks and skins provided a jump-off point to satisfy my design criteria quickly. My goal is to focus on writing, not be bogged down by the technical needs of the site. It's PHP-based architecture initially seemed like a turn-off based on my limited ability with this language. If it weren't for the existing resources and documentation, I might have skipped past PmWiki. The interface is intuitive, and editing with its custom markup is not a difficult transition from standard markup. My overarching objective is to have a site that can act as a personal knowledge management system (PKM) with minimal overhead and technical requirements. PmWiki satisfied my inclination to use as much FLOSS software as possible, which is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and the community contributions are many. The key design principles that I aim to introduce and maintain for this site: minimalism, plain-text based, site speed, and value the reader over the author (there are many UI centric features that I would like to implement, but if it hinders the reader in any way, it's a defective addition). Text is everything.
To prevent live updates and tests from effecting the reader's experience, I do all site testing here: Sandbox
Code
koenrane.xyz - GitHub
