To explain the notebooks, first context of the Libers is needed. The Libers were a set of OneNote notebooks I kept with notes, questions, and lists of potential readings. Something I used to get my thoughts out of my head into a format that could be useful later while reducing cognitive load. Since the origin of these notes, a substantial amount about me has changed. I no longer use proprietary cloud storage or services for any meaningful work, and rarely if that for the fatuous. Furthermore, the composition of all my notes is done in Emacs between my 7,1 Mac Pro and Mid 2015 MacBook Pro, both running Artix Linux.
The structure of the notebooks deviates from the Libers in quite a few ways, the main being its simple formation under a single markdown note rather than the splitting of notes, questions, sources, etc. across many notes under a hierarchy of folders. I much prefer the new structure and have Cosma Shalizi to thank for that.
The inspiration for bringing the Libers/notebooks back was actually Gwern. Upon rewatching his podcast episode with Dwarkesh Patel, especially the section in which he discusses maximizing rabbit holes, it got me thinking about why so many of the things I am interested in never get followed up on. This is usually because something else takes top of mind, pushing out any previous items. However the notebooks act as a buffer, a long-term storage that lives to remind me of all past, present, and becoming rabbit holes, the reasons I love them, and various paths of further research into them.
It was the most helpful advice, as I have seen a roughly 3x on my passion coming back even as a chronic anhedonic. I am looking forward to the surgical removal of all of these rabbit holes from my head. Writing them down seems to double as therapy, as a sense of relief is gained almost as if the ideas have literally been lifted, reducing a physical pressure on my hippocampus.
The notebooks are a module of krisyotam.com, served at the /notebooks/ subpath. Each notebook is a single markdown file with YAML frontmatter (title, description, created, updated, status, certainty, importance). A Node.js build script reads the source files, parses them with gray-matter and marked, and outputs static HTML and per-notebook RSS feeds. There is no framework, no client-side JavaScript beyond MathJax, and no database. The build runs on the same Arch Linux server that hosts the main site. Images are stored on the CDN at /mnt/storage/cdn/images/notebooks/ and referenced by URL.