Hi! I'm Kris Yotam. Writer. Researcher. Builder. I am a internet troll whos best work can be found at krisyotam.com provided you somehow found this before that. This is my second brain.

The purposes of these notes are simple, and they are a integral part of my knowledge management system. For those familiar with the knowledge model formalized by John R. Anderson through ACT-R knowledge can largely be sorted into that of 3 buckets. Declarative Knowledge, Procedural Knowledge, and Conditional Knowledge. These notes are the latter. They have a distinct focus on not just formalized definitions but their contextual applications.

Most importantly these notes are wrote within the concepts of Encoding Specificity, and Retreival Cue's. You will likely not gain anywhere near the benefit that I do from these notes as they are my own thoguht proccesses. However do not let that stop from you from encountering something interesting for the first time, exploring another's pkm for improving your own, or any of the other benefits one could receive from the inspection of another's notes.

The best I can offer you in way of navigation is between directories, and indexes. I'd start here.

What Areas of Research?

You will see a lot here from popular topics like AI Alignment, LLM Ethics, Aesthetics, Epistemology, Competitive Programming, etc. to more niche topics like "Spatial Cognition and Problem-Solving in the Aye-Aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis)". You have a few options for navigation. Either utilizing the full-text search bar in the top left, expanding the grid view in the top right, or navigating via "Directories" which I have setup to map out specific domains of study.

Scratchpad

At the beginning of every day I create a note titled "Scratchpad YYYY.MM.DD". I have had this process since around 2019 in early highschool and it has spanned several platforms including apple notes, google keep, day one, obsidian, kortex, and notion. These notes hold a wealth of information from book, film, music reccomendations from friends, project ideas, ideas for blog posts, essays, or other works, and the occasional event I might not want to miss. These notes become overwhelming fast and I don't intend on implementing everything on the note in day, sometimes not in a month. Now I can every once in a while have these filtered in batches because [cheap intelligence enables retroactive idea mining]. Scratchpad notes are also at the end of day converted into a checklist format by gpt which enables my review of notes the next morning and in the future to clarify which contents have already been extraced, vs. which are actively reading for pruning.

They are held in the main slipbox with all my other notes, and greppable by the yaml which allows for easy identification of past scratchpad notes. It's convenitent to have these in the main git repo for easy versioning even though notes are usually only touched on the day they are created. These notes are also filtered out at build time so they never make it to the production build.

• ideas are extraced into long term places
  • films --> watchlist
  • books --> reading list
  • ideas, companies, people are extracted into specified note types based on the taxonomy of notes.

Contact

For those interested my contact information is here.

My work is made possible by a crowd funded research grant from my patreon, Substack, and misc. donations from other platforms.

If you would like to support my research you can view ongoing projects here.

In addition to my work here you can find my complete works on krisyotam.com.