Hi all, I was a huge fan of the Smart Connections plugin when it first launched, and I really love the functionality of just having a sidebar that for any note will show you the top 5 or top 10 notes that have embeddings similar to that note.
However, the creator of the plugin has since gone on to add a ton of functionality that I really don’t want. Moreover, they develop so quickly and constantly that the plugin is constantly breaking for me, and they don’t update the documentation as they go, making it very tedious and frustrating to figure out why things have changed or what to do about it. I totally respect their ambition, and of course they can do what they like with the plugin, but this is honestly just not for me. I also can’t find a plugin that does a similar thing.
My proposed solution is basically to roll back the version of the plugin to a version before all of this functionality was added in and just not update it. Is this a terrible idea? Are there huge security risks in doing this? What alternatives do I have?
I am not open to the solution of discussing with the plugin developer, it’s too much effort and not a scalable solution as they are constantly developing the plugin
I did this on mobile for Copilot.
You can download earlier versions from the plugin’s GitHub page and basically freeze the version you like by changing the id in the manifest.json of the plugin (so that you cannot update the plugin by mistake). But you probably know about that.
Do you have some programming experience? I don’t know about security risks. It’s likely similar to running the plugin in the first place. But as Obsidian advances, and whatever AI tools it uses advance, there will be times when you may need to modify the plugin to continue working properly. So you’ll be taking on a bit of a maintenance responsibility.
The developer of the Smart Connections plugin strongly recommends updating to the latest version, probably because it is not just bells and whistles added on but fixes for internal functionality.
But if you see the plugin working to your expectations in earlier versions, use those.
Otherwise contact the developer at the plugin’s GH page asking for a detailed outline regarding the safety or repercussions of using the online models.
Or if you use the plugin only on PC, use downloaded LLM’s (which are yes, pretty dumb).
Personally, I don’t use the plugin, as I don’t find the semantic connections nearly as effective as, say the Graph Analysis plugin’s, even with the best of the offered embedding models, Nomic 1.5…