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Welcome to my Vault

What are these?

These are my notes, apparently. Instead of a traditional “notebook” approach, it implements the Digital Garden paradigm, which allows me to dynamically nourish the interconnection between notes with backlinks.

WARNING

April 1, 2026 Update: as of now, all of the notes here are created without the interference of generative AI. That said, with the advancement of LLMs, the importance of this vault has somewhat degraded — almost all of the info here now lives in the weights of any SOTA LLM.

Therefore, like any of us, I have to reconsider the way I use this vault. From this update on, the focus of my note-taking system will shift from this knowledge vault to a workspace vault, where I focus more on getting things done instead of keeping a personal wiki.

As a result, this vault you are seeing will be handed over to some AI agents that I designated. But rest assured, it will not be filled with AI slop; it will likely stay unchanged, exactly because AI do not need to take notes like this. There will likely be only rare new notes added, but the ones that do get added will still be knowledge that I distilled and curated, and that I deem not easily captured by a trivial query to an LLM.

It’s a heavy statement, I know. But I do hope you enjoy reading this vault!

Who am I?

I’m Samuel Huang, a PhD student in quantitative psychology at the University of Notre Dame. I’m enthusiastic about Productivity and ==PKM (Personal Knowledge Management)==. This Obsidian vault you are viewing is a crucial part of my system.

You may take a look at my website if you didn’t already come from it.

How do I organize this vault?

WARN

This is only a subset of my actual vault, which contains a lot more notes for personal writing and project tracking therefore are not suitable for publishing.

• Most of the notes are placed under the root directory. A flat structure to encourage Digital Garden style note taking.
• Lower-kebab case is adopted in the vault, to maximize compatibility when working from terminal and accessing from web (as you’re doing right now.)
• Each note is a concept, resulting in a Wiki style system.
• Tags
  • Nested tags are are used for categorization. e.g. cse/system, cse/algorithm, and cse/web.
  • Additional tags are used to help me retrieve related content, e.g. leetcode or marketing.

What can you do with this vault?

• Explore it, either by browsing the directory, using the search bar, or viewing the graph view.
• Share it to anyone who you think may benefit from a particular note or the idea of having a Second Brain through this link: notes.sghuang.com.
• Cite it, just make sure you’re giving credit to the author.