Ken Karakotsios

Note taking is building a relationship with a future version of yourself.

Our notes are a reflection of our lives. Think about using an LLM to summarize a key relationship or pattern in your thinking over time. It could produce a history of your mind on a particular topic, including a summary and a timeline of key events that could help you understand yourself, and your world, better.

We’ve cast AI in the role of a God-like entity, when we should be thinking of it more like an intern: an intern who is linguistically capable, sometimes makes decisions in ways we don’t quite understand, and perhaps most importantly—if we put in the time to work with them—has the potential to surprise us

Before you can use AI to maximize the meaning in your work and life, you’ll need to be able to articulate what you draw meaning from.

too strong a sense of continuity with one’s past self might hamper efforts in the present to abandon “sunk costs” — investments already made in a doomed plan or projec

when you read an old note you have to load its context back into your head about when you took it and why before you understand what it’s saying, and whether or not it’s relevant to the task at hand.

why is our Universe the precise way it is, rather than any other way we could’ve imagined? There are only three things that make it so:

the laws of nature themselves,

the fundamental constants governing reality,

and the initial conditions that our Universe was born with.

In terms of the other constants known at the time, α = e²/(4πε_0)ħc, where:

e is the electron’s charge,

ε_0 is the electromagnetic constant for the permittivity of free space,

ħ is Planck’s constant,

and c is the speed of light.

Unlike these other constants, which have units associated with them, α is a truly dimensionless constant