Here are some feature I wish existed in Obsidian without any plugins:
* Dataview [1] (this is now solved with Bases, so I really appreciate that)
* Folder Note [2] (I, and I assume many others come from Notion, and I wish this were a thing)
* Recent files [3]
* A built in calendar [4]
* Link embeds [5] (or something to store previews for pasted links)
* Waypoint [6], or something to create a table of contents
These are just things I wish existed, but whether or not these are 'basic' can be debated. Ultimately I do wish there were a robust permission system for plugins so that personal functionality gaps can be plugged, but without compromising safety.
Love Obsidian but I've previously commented about the security model for plugins here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308131. TLDR: your entire vault (and possibly filesystem) is exposed to every single plugin you install.
I really do think Obsidian needs 2 things to have any reasonable security:
1. It needs to be a lot more batteries-included. A user shouldn't need a plugin for basic functionality.
2. It needs a granular permission system, where each plugin should have to declare and prompt you to allow or reject specific permissions, just like on iOS and Android. The system should enforce that a plugin cannot bypass this.
This sounds like an engineering quality problem rather than a tooling problem.
Well structured redux (or mobx or zustand for that matter) can be highly maintainable & performant, in comparison to a codebase with poorly thought out useState calls littered everywhere and deep levels of prop drilling.
But the popularity of Redux especially in the earlier days of react means there are quite a lot of redux codebases around, and by now many of them are legacy.
I believe Gary Marcus is quite well known for terrible AI predictions. He's not in any way an expert in the field. Some of his predictions from 2022 [1]
> In 2029, AI will not be able to watch a movie and tell you accurately what is going on (what I called the comprehension challenge in The New Yorker, in 2014). Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc.
> In 2029, AI will not be able to read a novel and reliably answer questions about plot, character, conflicts, motivations, etc. Key will be going beyond the literal text, as Davis and I explain in Rebooting AI.
> In 2029, AI will not be able to work as a competent cook in an arbitrary kitchen (extending Steve Wozniak’s cup of coffee benchmark).
> In 2029, AI will not be able to reliably construct bug-free code of more than 10,000 lines from natural language specification or by interactions with a non-expert user. [Gluing together code from existing libraries doesn’t count.]
> In 2029, AI will not be able to take arbitrary proofs from the mathematical literature written in natural language and convert them into a symbolic form suitable for symbolic verification.
Many of these have already been achieved, and it's only early 2026.
> Everything about this is ridiculous, and it's all Anthropic's fault. Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage
Hard disagree. Companies can and do subsidize products to gather market share. It's just a loss leader [1]. The big money for them is likely satisfied software engineers pushing their employers to pay for more Anthropic products in an enterprise setting.
Hard disagree. There are very few scenarios where I'd pick speed (quantity) over intelligence (quality) for anything remotely to do with building systems.
Shameless self plug, but my workout tracking app[1] uses a sync engine and it has drastically simplified the complexities of things like retry logic, intermittent connectivity loss, ability to work offline etc.
Luckily this is a use case where conflict resolution is pretty straightforward (only you can update your workout data, and Last Write Wins)