Personal Knowledge Management
Overview
Systems for organizing what you know and learn over time. The space spans from simple note-taking to elaborate knowledge graphs.
Evolution
- Files & folders — basic but no connections
- Wikis — interlinked, but manual maintenance kills adoption
- Zettelkasten / Obsidian — atomic notes with backlinks. Better, but still human-maintained
- LLM-maintained wikis — the maintenance problem solved. Human curates, LLM maintains (Karpathy)
Alex’s Approach
Alex sees PKM as a thinking tool, not an archive. The synthesis layer matters more than source summaries. The wiki should capture evolving positions and original thinking, not just what was read. (Source)
Current setup: MEMORY.md + daily notes + Obsidian vault. This wiki is the structured evolution of that.
Key Tension
Capture everything vs capture what matters. Too much → noise drowns signal. Too little → knowledge gaps. The LLM can help by doing high-volume capture while the human directs what gets promoted to synthesis pages.