Ben Wiggins writes short notebook posts, including the story of the Queen's Duck and a post about hacking in color.
HN links it for the Queen's Duck story, a tale about adding a decoy flaw for a producer to remove. Commenters compare it to a similar Interplay story.
You are likely deluding yourself about your skill level; I’ve had the habit of tracking my peer's productivity (on Shotgrid) to stay above their metrics, and even if I could say objectively to be the faster in my dept., that is irrelevant. VFX needs different kinds of people, and I can’t count how many times “less” productive artists came up with very beautiful and ingenious solutions that I haven’t thought about it.
Also, we don’t stay long hours because we failed to put a light on the correct place. as the article points out, the issue is the director/production has no financial penalties for their lack of planning and indecisiveness. This is just the Parkinson's law of triviality [0] that happens in most businesses, but since VFX studios don’t put a hard cap on the number of revisions, artists end up absorbing that. One of my recent crunches was due to production going through 43 versions of a magic wand effect. IMO, by version 15, we already had multiple and more interesting looks than what was approved for final.
[0] https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
DEFCON30, Mayhem CTF.
We were given a file full of random bytes. The flag was in there somewhere. It was too random to be encrypted, there wasn't any structure. `file` didn't return anything, truly just a bag of bytes.
I had decided to install `hexyl` as an alternative option to some of the other hex editors installed o my linux machine. All the bytes were colored grey.
I scrolled the file and noticed a blip of yellow. A random golden `{` amongst all the noise. Weird.
The next colored byte was a `C`, then `T`, `F`.
---
At that time, I was mostly using HexFiend to look at raw files, which didn't have byte coloring. For DEFCON I had decided to drive my linux machine. I had ghex installed, but i had also decided to install and try `hexyl` via cli. So seeing bytes in color was purely by chance that I had installed it. I eventually posted an issue to ghex to add color support. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/ghex/-/issues/60
I need to see if I can find the file and post it on that blog post.
https://bwiggs.com/posts/2023-08-31-hacking-in-color/
I’m glad Obsidian is publishing this, even though the spec clearly isn’t ready yet.
If I had the final say for how this format were to be publicized, I would probably just include the JSON schema “as-is” in the Obsidian developer docs. Then, it’s just as usable by third parties without making promises about interoperability.
But Obsidian is thinking ahead here. They’ve intentionally given us a duck to poke at[1], knowing we’d offer feedback and critique. If the goal is to get people to imagine a better implementation, preying on HN’s “I could implement this so much better” sense is one hecking smart way to get the community to pitch in.
1: https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Visual Design Challenges is one I hear most frontend developer complain about. I explained a queen duck (https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/) to one of them and he started doing that several times in his project. If you look at this git repo, there would be commits called "queen duck" right before he would demo so he could get feedback about the "mistake" he made, revert the commit and move on with his life.
There's a related (apocryphal?) story from Interplay about adding a duck to animations so that the producer would ask for it to be removed, to make him happy, while leaving the rest alone.
https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Ah yes, the queen's duck! I've told that story countless times. I bet it's super effective here.
https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
(p.s. I don't mean to nitpick over a perfectly clear message, but it's "much ado")