Reliable reproductions are so valuable.

For those that didn't read the article Obsidian Entertainment (the video game company) has AI support that hallucinates and tells you to email Obsidian (the note-taking company) instead.

I love that it uses Flexoki for the color palette. I never thought I'd see it so widely adopted!

It wasn't obvious to me at first but it appears this was released in 2023. The last release on the repo is from October 2024.

> Unfortunately for the Obsidian team the main result of this blog post has been to draw people’s attention to some long standing concerns about their plugin system.

As someone on the Obsidian team I don't consider that unfortunate at all. On the contrary, I feel incredibly lucky that anyone cares! Obsidian has followed complaint-driven development from the start [1]. I'd be more worried if people stop complaining.

There will always be some set of things that bubbles up to the top of the community's priority list. The plugin ecosystem has bubbled up to the top of the list, so you can expect to see improvements. The solutions we have in mind are sourced from the many smart people in the community who are also invested in this challenge.

Of course the bottleneck is that Obsidian only had two developers, now four. So there are only so many things that can be improved every year. It's fun to go back through shipped items on the Obsidian roadmap [2] to see a reflection of what the community was complaining about at the time. Obsidian has come a long way.

I also think it's good that people are becoming educated about the tradeoffs between safety and freedom. Obsidian is incredibly malleable and powerful, but that comes at a cost. It's tricky to make a chainsaw that cuts trees but not arms.

What this blog post highlights is that the landscape has radically changed since 2020 when Obsidian launched. It's now viable to use Obsidian without plugins, and if you want to add functionality yourself, it's become trivial to add a feature using LLMs, and have the code completely in your control.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/complaint-driven-development/

[2] https://obsidian.md/roadmap/

When I visited the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, one of my favorite parts was exploring the exhibit dedicated to the backing up state data — via calligraphy, letterpress, and stone carving.

> "The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, sometimes called sillok (실록) for short, are state-compiled and published records, documenting the reigns of the kings of the Joseon dynasty in Korea. Kept from 1392 to 1865, they comprise 1,893 volumes and are thought to be the longest continual documentation of a single dynasty in the world."

> "Beginning in 1445, they began creating three additional copies of the records, which they distributed at various locations around Korea for safekeeping."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veritable_Records_of_the_Joseo...

After the Japanese and Qing invasions of Japan, King Hyeonjong (1659–1675) started a project to collect calligraphy works written by preceding Joseon kings and carve them into stone.

It's somewhat surprising that these values didn't continue to persist in the Korean government.