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estebarb 19 hours ago [-]
"Uniqlo x Akamai sells another design of shirt in the same range which is plainly incomplete"
Imagine having to return a t-shirt because that malfunction!
— I don't understand why are you returning this, was the size wrong or you didn't like it?
— No, there is a syntax error at line 37 that makes it impossible to run, and I'm concerned people on the street may think I promote unsafe bash scripting.
_joel 18 hours ago [-]
Worked on my torso
arikrahman 6 hours ago [-]
Not everyone has a 6 pack sir!
mcdonje 14 hours ago [-]
ATTN, Uniqlo customer service employees: If someone tries to return a shirt claiming an error in the printed computer code, decline the request and reply, "A real script kiddie would've spotted that error before buying."
deathanatos 13 hours ago [-]
A real hacker, maybe. A script kiddie is by definition someone who wouldn't notice.
I made the slightly alarming realization yesterday that some script kiddies are old enough to have grandkids by now.
QuantumNomad_ 10 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many of them graduated to the level of hacker witches / hacker wizards, and how many of them are nothing but script grannies / script grampses even today.
noisy_boy 16 hours ago [-]
- I am shell-shocked at the lack of quality assurance! Can you at least apply a patch?
This is really cool, and I appreciated your reverse engineering.
MattDamonSpace 7 hours ago [-]
Is that really a Quine
edit: it’s impressive as all hell but like
raphlinus 18 hours ago [-]
The font is Roboto Mono, not Consolas.
There's something else a lot stranger going on, though. It is a proper monospace font, but the typesetting on the shirt is not. There's some kerning going on (I noticed it especially in the 'Iy' pair), and also it appears that narrower characters such as 'i' take less horizontal space. If I had to guess, I would say that it was set with a tool such as "optical kerning" in InDesign.
somat 17 hours ago [-]
Has anyone ever made a monospace font with dynamic kerning? Which is a silly thing I never thought of until I read the above comment. This sounds nonsensical at first glance(and it may be) but hear me out.
We use monospace fonts for a reason, they stack in a grid nicely. But within the confines of that grid there is room to shift a character left or right a bit which may lead to a nicer to read monospace. (it is equally likely to lead to a hideous mess, every time a letter would shift left it would leave a larger space right)
roblabla 17 hours ago [-]
Monaspace has a feature called "texture healing" that does something similar: it allows bigger letters to "steal" space from adjascent smaller letters, to make it easier to read. The result is that the letters are still in a grid, while still allowing for bigger letters to "breathe".
I'm open to trying it, but my gosh, having one 'w' offset slightly by a few pixels from the one right above it feels like it would drive me bonkers eventually.
And: doesn't this result in text that "jumps around" as you type?
gavinray 16 hours ago [-]
What a brilliant idea, neat. Thanks for the link.
Lalabadie 16 hours ago [-]
iA Writer has Mono, Duo and Quattro fonts, with the latter two being almost monospaced. They concede some size variations for specific characters (Duo has 150% width characters, Quattro also uses 50% and 75% for narrow characters).
It's a fun subtle adaptation to keep close to the typewriter-like experience of the app.
Shifting a letter left or right a bit can break the grid. What if the user writes the text that keeps triggering left shifts? A better solution is to use ligatures, so that specific character combinations look better while the ligature can maintain the overall width correctly.
speerer 17 hours ago [-]
Thank you, I think you're right! I've added a correction in the post and cited your comment.
wbh1 21 hours ago [-]
I love this shirt! Here's a nice video from the actual designer about the process of making this shirt (including intentionally making it hard to OCR): https://youtu.be/jocGLiecpjU?t=526
criddell 18 hours ago [-]
It would probably be quicker to type it in than figure out how to OCR it. It would be like typing in a game from a COMPUTE! magazine 45 years go.
At least that stuff was written in cleartext. You'd immediately know you just typed the wrong character if you saw PRONT on your screen.
marcus_holmes 5 hours ago [-]
This was my reaction!
OCR? oh my sweet summer child, you cannot know the days we spent typing in raw code from a magazine, and the joy when it finally ran.
speerer 20 hours ago [-]
Author here. Thank you so much for the link which I hadn't seen! I'm very happy to see this and I'm gratified that it was deliberately difficult to OCR, not just me.
heresie-dabord 8 hours ago [-]
As much as I hope for Peace, I would have suggested
I watched the link but I didn’t see where he talked about making it difficult to OCR? What exactly was done that made it difficult to OCR?
fennecfoxy 15 hours ago [-]
But it's not hard to OCR? And I don't know why the article dedicates an entire section to it.
On a Samsung S24U I held down the "circle to search" homescreen button which brings up the AI tools interface (I don't know what it's officially called), held down on the text and copied the whole thing in one shot.
It took like 2 seconds.
kyusan0 15 hours ago [-]
Did it get every character correct?
Tiberium 22 hours ago [-]
OCRing this is a nightmare and is a good benchmark to any self-proclaimed good OCR/vision model.
I think though it could likely be easily OCR'd if you give the image to any decent agentic harness with a good vision model, e.g. newest Claude/GPT ones, and tell them to split the image per lines, and then just OCR each line individually.
I wonder if the script itself was written by an LLM before obfuscation? There seem to be a lot of comments in it, but in this case it's still ok :)
lemagedurage 21 hours ago [-]
I don't think it was written by an LLM, some things stand out:
The congratulations text is both in English and Japanese. Contains a single heart emoji.
There was an intention to have a cyan to orange gradient, but the range starts in an ANSI block, ends halfway through the 256 color block and 256 terminal colors are not arranged like a gradient at all.
There's no sleep at the end of the loop where I feel like an LLM would add that defensively.
n2j3 21 hours ago [-]
Human here. I added a sleep 0.5 at the end, it's too fast to read otherwise. Makes for a nice terminal screensaver!
INTPenis 20 hours ago [-]
Hi fellow human, I got the same idea. Just a sleep 0.1 before the echo "" makes it readable. Otherwise it scrolls way too fast.
make3 20 hours ago [-]
"the code is not quite detail oriented enough to be AI", times are changing
pkilgore 17 hours ago [-]
Flawless, completely unnecessary abstraction is a better tell of LLM code than "comment clearly responding to a part of a prompt that I cannot see".
DaSHacka 20 hours ago [-]
More like 'not boilerplate-y enough'
lemagedurage 20 hours ago [-]
Ehh, AI makes plenty mistakes but they have a different vibe to it.
In my mind an AI would do something the most popular way even when that's not appropriate.
A human might do things in an unpopular way even when that's not appropriate.
grumbelbart2 18 hours ago [-]
> OCRing this is a nightmare and is a good benchmark to any self-proclaimed good OCR/vision model.
It's not that difficult, our industrial OCR model read it correctly on its first attempt with default parameters. The characters are easily separable, there is no structured background (think expiration dates on yogurt aluminum lids) that confuses the reader, there is no almost-text-like texture anywhere that would clutter the result. The font is also nice and standard.
mmooss 9 hours ago [-]
Cool. What's an industrial OCR model?
grumbelbart2 1 hours ago [-]
Essentially part of a machine vision software package, which in turn is computer vision specialized for factory automation. It's "industrial" because it was trained on such data (more expiration dates and SEMI-font on wafers, less random pictures of streets with some text).
That, plus engineering and support: a robust implementation, deployment on almost any system, fast and good long-term support so your factory doesn't stop for too long if something goes wrong etc.
netsharc 20 hours ago [-]
The last time Internet people were obsessed with OCRing some base64 was a few months ago when the DoJ released tons of emails from some guy who died, but they were released as rasterized PDFs.
Can't remember his name now, there's been so many distractions...
helterskelter 12 hours ago [-]
All I remember is that it had some to do with Bill Clinton sleeping with underage girls and Bill Gates with a nasty case of VD.
netsharc 10 hours ago [-]
I think there's also someone who's very close to him who currently has the reins of power in government... or you forgot about this?
He even sent the now-deceased man a birthday card with some words that strongly suggest he knew what was going on..
2 hours ago [-]
helterskelter 9 hours ago [-]
Huh? You talking about Iran?
(.../s)
OtherShrezzing 20 hours ago [-]
Safari's copy-text-from-image feature manages the entire base64 part of the string, except for the first character (I instead of a T). Weirdly, it gets much worse performance if you try to copy the entire string, including the hashbang part.
I wonder what it's doing under the hood to get such good performance?
khurs 20 hours ago [-]
Didn't know Safari had this.
Looked it up, you put mouse over text, then just select and copy it - very cool!
It’s actually a system feature, not strictly a Safari feature. It also works in Photos, Preview, etc.
On meetings I will often take a screenshot of the URL someone is presenting. I’m then able to just open the image and click the URL in the image.
iamflimflam1 20 hours ago [-]
There’s a whole bunch of hidden features that no one seems to be aware of.
Preview has pretty good background removal.
Notes will transcribe audio from audio files.
al_borland 18 hours ago [-]
Notes will do OCR as well. Trigger the feature, point the camera at something, and it will input just the text.
lostlogin 17 hours ago [-]
Notes is amazing.
Autocompleting equations, converting jpg to pdf and various other admin chores.
The seamless cloud sync between devices is much appreciated too.
19 hours ago [-]
agys 20 hours ago [-]
Preview has it too… And it works extremely well.
shakna 20 hours ago [-]
> I wonder if the script itself was written by an LLM before obfuscation?
From the prototype shown here [0], and the way they talk about their process, I sincerely doubt it. Especially as they mention trying to make it hard for AI to handle the output.
I watched that whole video link - thank you for that - and he doesn't really say. In fact, he spends much more time on the beige color harkening to computer case plastics of the 80s & 90s.
The AI not handling the output relates to the final base64 output on the T-shirt (which other comments in this thread mention manually keying in or TFA discusses in the context of OCR). So, that is just not relevant to the question.
What made me start to wonder, personally, was that the output seems identical if you use "♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALL" instead of the version with internal repeats. IF there is any point to that "manual expansion of the cycles", IMO that deserves a comment much more so than "# Calculate length of text; text_length=".
Also, that `echo -n ...` followed by `echo ""` instead of just plain `echo` in the first place seems like the kind of copy-pasta code LLMs generate. Then again, regular devs also write pretty bad copy-pasta code.
There is also this the weirdly "broken down" calculation with 3 `bc` invocations not 1 as if it was translated from a language with more arithmetic/special function power than bash.
There is also the color scale stuff done in the loop instead of outside (except the one color=$(..)) which seems very unnatural and also very like machine translation.
Also, at least for me, on my bash-5.3.15(1), `char="${text:t % text_length:1}"` does not work to slice out the multi-byte UTF8 heart symbols, but it sure does look like the kind of thing an LLM would do translating from a python3 script (such as something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830669) into bash.
Another thing is, as others here have observed, there is nothing "gradual" about the xterm-256 color cube. So, "gradient" is a misnomer and exactly the kind of weird things LLMs do when they cobble text together.
Finally, all the tput stuff the script does instead of just "print x spaces" really smells like a human description of the side scroll in the video game graphic he shows inspired him somehow LLM-corrupted/complexified into the vertical scroll terminals do.
None of this is conclusive, but the video mentions 2023..2025 as when he did it and given that he was a designer and his concerns more visual than code-oriented, I'd have to say I disagree with your sincere doubt and I do strongly suspect the decoded script was very likely LLM-circa2024-generated, possibly with light post-edits by hand.
shakna 18 hours ago [-]
You mention someone else's Python version. Did you note that the prototype in the video was... Python?
All the smells you pointed out, just look like a Python dev approaching bash without fully understanding it.
bigfishrunning 18 hours ago [-]
> All the smells you pointed out, just look like a Python dev approaching bash without fully understanding it.
also, referring to Linux as "the language of the internet" when bash isn't particularly suited for internet tasks also smell like "excited windows Python dev"...
cb321 17 hours ago [-]
FWIW, his screens looked a lot like OSX to me (which tracks with graphic design users in my experience).
Anyway, he seems like a very nice fellow and I wish him and almost all T-shirt designers well. That bash script just gave me a lot of pause. (And even that seems possibly downstream of him being nice and doing it himself to spare his team from what he called a "FrankenProject".)
jolmg 13 hours ago [-]
"Linux, the open-source language of the internet" comes from the linked akamai.com press release, not the blog post author. Their putting that as a section title to the quote may be their poking light fun at it.
cb321 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah. The Flask web-page prototype was indeed in Python. (The prequel shirt was Go.)
{ Also, it was my own Py version which I mostly did in case anyone wanted to actually run the thing after such interest was expressed on this thread. :-) }
I already said regular devs and LLMs can both gen copy-pasta. That said, being "mostly" a Python dev, asking some LLM to translate to bash for him seems even more likely to me. Only he or those close to him knows for sure. You & I cannot settle it here conclusively (as also said).
I also noted from the video that the ♥s (hearts) worked on whatever version of bash he tested with though it failed for me (which is why I wrote that Python). And his terminal title bar is switching between `tput` and `bc` and such meaning that what he was demoing was not some Python script. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
EDIT: Ah..another resolution of the hearts is to not run in an LC_ALL=C environment. Oops! `LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 bash ..` fixed it. Oh well, I think the Python script is nicer in almost every way. E.g., you could |head -n60 and send it to a line printer/dot matrix reminiscent of the 1980s computers he shows in the video, although your printer driver would have to strip the color escapes with a `sed` or maybe https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/noc.nim. ;-)
underyx 19 hours ago [-]
I gave the photo to Opus 4.8 and it reconstructed the same script in one shot. Although it did say it had to correct some parts of it based on context where it suspected OCR mistakes.
ErroneousBosh 16 hours ago [-]
Those of us who grew up in the 8-bit era would have just typed it in, carefully, in silence, with no-one allowed to enter or leave the room until we were done ;-)
richstokes 12 hours ago [-]
Is it a nightmare? I pasted the first, zoomed out, image of the shirt into ChatGPT, and it decoded it / let me know what the bash script does in one shot
fennecfoxy 15 hours ago [-]
Is it? Android tap and hold/image text select one-shotted it in 2 seconds.
justusthane 18 hours ago [-]
What is it about this that makes it particularly hard to OCR?
da_grift_shift 19 hours ago [-]
>I wonder if the script itself was written by an LLM before obfuscation?
I seem to recall seeing an Akamai-branded base64'd shell script on a white shirt pre-2021(?), so unless they've changed the code since then, I doubt it...
IshKebab 21 hours ago [-]
Definitely LLM. No humans write that many comments.
ChrisMarshallNY 21 hours ago [-]
Ahem...
My code usually clocs at 50/50 (or thereabouts)[0]. Has, since my very first real engineering project (in 1987)[1]. I discuss in detail, here[2].
But one reason that I like LLMs, is that they help me to write even more documentation. I have found that I can instruct an LLM to revise my documentation, and make it even more effective.
[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY (My GH profile. Pretty much everything there, is like that -has, since long before LLMs were a broken rubber on the drug store shelf).
An LLM would have commented `// Create temporary UI view.`
Completely redundant comments like this are a classic hallmark of LLMs:
# Set frequency scaling factor
freq=0.2
Dunno why I have been downvoted for stating the obvious.
Also from my brief look at one file it looks like you have 50% comments because you have a gazillion comment separator lines.
ChrisMarshallNY 16 hours ago [-]
I didn't downvote. There's nothing wrong with your comment. It's just a bit silly, because humans definitely write that much. I learned from Apple and Adobe headerdocs.
I worked for a Japanese company that accreted comments.
Yeah, lots of whitespace.
petu 21 hours ago [-]
Human could write that many comments to get enough base64 text for a design. Maybe to even get some of the highlighted characters in places they want (roughly equally spaced apart).
latexr 21 hours ago [-]
> No humans write that many comments.
Especially in a case like this, I would definitely write a lot of comments to aid in understanding, thus increasing trust so people would try it out and tinker with it.
boomboomsubban 21 hours ago [-]
Plus the main point of this code is to have people look at it, the function is secondary to being an easter egg.
ivolimmen 18 hours ago [-]
Since LLM's are mimicking our code my guess we do...
NamlchakKhandro 17 hours ago [-]
I do
Tiberium 21 hours ago [-]
Honestly it's a bit of a shame. I checked and they could've shortened their base64 payload by 304 chars by removing all comments except the top two congratulatory ones, or by 524 if they removed those too.
OtherShrezzing 21 hours ago [-]
Would they still get the highlighted "PEACE FOR ALL" text throughout the shortened string? It looks like the length, and presence of those characters, was an explicit design choice.
lemagedurage 21 hours ago [-]
Maybe they added the comments to get a longer payload for the sake of the shirt's design.
The comments can be more cute/awe inspiring for people who aren't as familiar with bash but like solving puzzles as well.
yborg 20 hours ago [-]
The HN optimizing T-shirt compiler is the next stage here :D
saidnooneever 21 hours ago [-]
im just sad it didnt render a qr code leading to malware :'). the different ways ppl look at obfuscated codes and scripts hah
world2vec 21 hours ago [-]
Oh wow I saw that tshirt at the store and said to my girlfriend "no way that script is functional, probably just for show". I should have persevered.
actionfromafar 20 hours ago [-]
An easy miss. :-) Most of the time our thoughts are on autopilot, since we are not calm.
haileys 21 hours ago [-]
I thought it was funny that the author used a variety of OCR tools with mixed success before spending a lot of time manually fixing up the output from the best one, rather than just typing it in
christoph 21 hours ago [-]
That was also my thought… but I grew up mashing rubber keys for hours copying “games” out of magazines and books! Then hours after fixing all the typos!
forinti 18 hours ago [-]
I spent hours typing 6502 assembly. It went a lot better when someone dictated: LDA, STA, BEQ, LDY, STY...
acters 21 hours ago [-]
I ran it through paddle paddle OCR and it flawlessly did it.
Google's OCR through my phone's Google lens had also worked at getting a very good extraction but not 100% correct. Definitely would spend less time fixing it than hand copying.
IDK what the author was using but I feel like he could have shared how his OCR attempt went, but I am thinking he tried some naive OCR tools.
speerer 20 hours ago [-]
Author here - that's a good idea actually, it shouldn't be too hard to compare the various attempts. The tools I used were whatever my Android built-in is (likely Google Gemini, but I can't tell whether this is something Samsung has replaced in OneUI); tesseract; tesseract with various tweaks and charsrt restrictions; Claude; and finally, manual fixes based on disagreements between all the previous.
rtldg 21 hours ago [-]
Took me almost 2 minutes for 4 lines (and I missed a character in one of them!).
I would opt for OCR too, obviously so I'm prepared for the next bash t-shirt I'd come across...
OtherShrezzing 21 hours ago [-]
I think this is a case where two people can successfully complete the task manually faster than one attempting to automate it. Get a ruler, read five centimetres of characters to your colleague, have them type it in as you go, then repeat that five centimetres back to you. Correct as you go. Format your string with the same line-breaks as the t-shirt, and remove them at the end, so you can be sure you've got the correct length on each row. Trial-and-error adjust the five-cm distance depending on your success rate as you go along
All in, you should have a non-corrupted string in 10-15 min.
conductr 17 hours ago [-]
Feels like my experienced reality of task automation in corporate environments. We routinely have engineers spend 40+ hours automating tasks that an entry level person can do manually in 10 minutes and only need to be done weekly. Automation at all costs seems to be the future
e28eta 16 hours ago [-]
It’s certainly not a new phenomenon. I appreciate this XKCD [1], with a chart of “How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you’re spending more time than you save”
It’s not the final word, since automation has other benefits: documenting the procedure’s steps, reducing human errors, increasing consistency, etc.
"just typing it" would be more error prone for the average human
t-3 13 hours ago [-]
Not really. Transcribing long sequences of nonsense is annoying but quite easy to do without error as long you're patient enough to follow a simple process of reading, typing, and double-checking character-by-character.
grumbel 20 hours ago [-]
Gemini3.5 Flash didn't have a problem OCR'ing and base64 decoding it, despite the OCR step having errors, it just fixed them in the base64 decoding step.
speerer 20 hours ago [-]
(Author here) Yes I agree. It was a fun side-quest though. Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1205/
duskdozer 21 hours ago [-]
I'm guilty of this, but for me this kind of thing is optimizing over annoyance rather than time.
mk_stjames 17 hours ago [-]
Neat. My only critique of the script is that I would have added a
sleep 0.1
in the loop so that as this prints in a terminal it is actually readable; any modern terminal will scroll so fast you can't see the message in flight.
Slowing it to a 10hz refresh makes it look great.
whartung 17 hours ago [-]
Maybe you can sew a patch into it?
chrysoprace 20 hours ago [-]
My old colleague had one with a Go program[0] which I always thought was quite cool.
Basically it just clusters same characters and asks the human to find the problems, which is easy when you're looking at a series of pictures like ssssss5sss.
The UI is kinda least-effort. Should ask a modern AI agent to make it look nice and intuitive, sometime maybe.
nico 17 hours ago [-]
Very cool. It reminded me of the DeCSS t-shirts, which had source code with the decryption keys for DVDs
so they presume there is bash in my system, and it is under /bin
well, i guess no peace for me then
raffael_de 18 hours ago [-]
while base64 can be considered obfuscation in this context and its inverse as decoding I can't help but feel this title is overselling and catering to a rather cyber-cheesy marketing campaign at that.
ape4 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah, its a bit of a cheat. The best obfuscated C programs have the source looking like a Christmas tree (or something) and then play an xmas song (or whatever)
raffael_de 18 hours ago [-]
the base64 thing they did feels like a cheap version of that green-obscure-symbols-raining-on-a-terminal animation in The Matrix. should have gone with "Hack the Planet" instead ...
cb321 17 hours ago [-]
That Matrix visual was actually specifically mentioned as an inspiration in the video by the designer being linked to/discussed elsethread (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830326 )
18 hours ago [-]
NikxDa 17 hours ago [-]
Super cool, especially that the code is annotated!
In case the author is reading: The decorative feather images are between 2MB to almost 5MB in size. Compression might be in order to save users time and bandwidth, and make the site look less broken while the images are partially loaded :)
webprofusion 4 hours ago [-]
I have the one with Go code on it, unfortunately I don't think that one would even compile.
episode404 7 hours ago [-]
> Calling base64 encoding obfuscation
I was expecting some cool js deobfuscation tricks, so to put nicely I’ll just say that my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
sixtyj 19 hours ago [-]
> Interesting. I told my wife "that’s basically how people ship viruses’ and bought it.
It’s a movie plot.
9dev 17 hours ago [-]
Huh! I was sure the copy-text-from-image feature in MacOS would handle this flawlessly. But the best run I managed produced the following:
base64: stdin: (null): error decoding base64 input stream
#!/bin/bash
# Congratulations! You found thu eastur ugg!#B��O��
# おめでとう��M�ぇM�す！隣C��わM�サ�#ライ����見でM�������！O��
# Define thu tuxt to anima|e
text="♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALOB��PEACE♵FOR♵ALL♵PEACE♥FOR♥ALL♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALL♥PEACE♵FOR♵ALL♥"
# Get termb�al dmmensions
cols=$(tput cols)
linus=$(tput lines)
pacofonix 18 hours ago [-]
For a non English locale that use comma instead of dot for decimals (in my case, Spanish), this script is partially crashing. Run using something like `chmod +x shirt.sh; LC_NUMERIC=C ./shirt.sh`.
thomaslwang 17 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of the old "code on a shirt" tradition - MIT used to sell shirts with Lisp one-liners. What I find interesting is that the script actually runs. Most of these novelty shirts just print something that looks like code but is meaningless. The fact that someone at Akamai went through the trouble of writing a self-evaluating obfuscated script for a retail product is either a great prank or someone's pet project that made it to production.
_kst_ 9 hours ago [-]
The image shows the `eval` on the same line as the `#!/bin/bash`.
For anyone that cares, this is a slightly less stupid Python version:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
from os import environ; E = environ.get
from math import sin
from time import sleep
text = "♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALL" # The text to sine-scroll animate
nText = len(text) # Number of utf8 chars
freq = 0.2 # Frequency scaling factor
color0 = 12 # xt256 Color cube segment 12..<208
color1 = 208; nColor = color1 - color0
(w, h) = (int(E("COLUMNS", 80)), int(E("LINES", 24)))
t = 0
while True:
x = (w/2) + (w/4)*sin(t*freq) # x pos via sine value
x = max(0, min(w - 1, int(x + 0.5))) # bound to tty width
color = color0 + ((nColor*t)//h)%nColor # cycle colors
ch = text[t%nText] # Get char & Use xterm-256 color escs
print("%*s\033[38;5;%sm%s\033[m\n" % (x, "", color, ch))
t += 1
sleep(0.1) # original used bc shell outs to rate-limit
> I guess Uniqlo is run through Windows though: one thing that struck me was the font, which I’m almost certain is Consolas,
Surely this would use whatever font the virtual terminal profile was set to? I don’t know of any method to choose a virtual terminal font from bash and don’t see any code that addresses it?
nisiddharth 21 hours ago [-]
They're referring to the font on the T-shirt.
DrewADesign 15 hours ago [-]
Ah, I see. I’m sure the clothing designer that actually made the design couldn’t care less about technical consistency and was just looking for something ‘tech’ looking that also read well in that design context in that medium.
tym0 21 hours ago [-]
Thank you for spelling it out for me because I thought I was looking at a completely hallucinated AI article...
speerer 18 hours ago [-]
Author here. All hallucinations are my own. Now you point it out, I see why the jump in context from the terminal back to the tshirt font would give the wrong impression.
tym0 18 hours ago [-]
Honestly it was quite a whiplash to go from what looked like a good article to something that seemed completely made up. But I would chalk that up more to my reading comprehension than your writing.
DrewADesign 15 hours ago [-]
I didn’t read it as generated text, but the context definitely threw me.
efreak 7 hours ago [-]
I don't recall the exact command I used, but I had my console font set to Comic Sans for a while (though it wasn't quite recognizable due to low resolution and aliasing). There's tools out there to convert type 1 and other fonts to console font format (I couldn't quite manage to get the opentype converter tool working, but truetype worked fine at large sizes)
onraglanroad 12 hours ago [-]
There is so much there that could be code golfed. I'm tempted to try when I'm back. Anyone done it already though?
high_byte 22 hours ago [-]
what if it contained a zero day for tesseract and the script you thought you got is just a throwaway
20 hours ago [-]
chrisweekly 18 hours ago [-]
Great post! It's interesting, detailed but concise, and well-written. Also, I appreciate the "no cookies or tracking" and attractive, functional and performant site design.
kijin 20 hours ago [-]
Well at least they're not instructing consumers to run curl | bash.
That's better than half the tech howtos out there.
INTPenis 20 hours ago [-]
No, they're instructing their customers to run unknown base64 encoded code instead. :D
bigfishrunning 18 hours ago [-]
They should have just had the base64 block and forced you to decode and read it before running it, rather then having the `eval` bit at the beginning...
kijin 17 hours ago [-]
But that wouldn't have looked like a bash script, only a random sequence of characters. The shebang at the start definitely contributes to the geek factor.
_flux 19 hours ago [-]
On one hand it's nice how it's clean and commented, but on the other hand some golfing could have made the encoded block a lot more reasonable to actually manually enter.
puttycat 19 hours ago [-]
The comments just mean they used AI to do that in 3 seconds
speerer 18 hours ago [-]
It might not have filled up the whole shirt then?
_flux 14 hours ago [-]
Could have used bigger font.
dylanzhangdev 21 hours ago [-]
Cool! I bought one a few months ago as soon as I spotted it at a Uniqlo store, and later ordered a larger size online—I really love wearing them. But it never occurred to me to look into the story behind them.
l337h4x0rz 21 hours ago [-]
there's no newline between the shebang and the actual code
shim__ 19 hours ago [-]
Could have saved 50% with 'base64 -d | gzip -d'
speerer 18 hours ago [-]
Maybe useful for those XS sizes.
jibal 6 hours ago [-]
I used to work for the first CDN company, Sandpiper Networks Inc. Akamai drank our milkshake.
preetham_rangu 20 hours ago [-]
The real threat model here isn't the base64 payload, it's Uniqlo turning a T-shirt into a QR code that requires a human OCR pipeline to redeem.
teo_zero 18 hours ago [-]
I don't know... I prefer unobfuscated text that you can immediately grok. The other day I saw this on a T-shirt:
> May the m×s/t² be with you
jolmg 13 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't be interesting enough to nerd-snipe people.
brightball 19 hours ago [-]
Nice!
Might have to do something like that for a verse on the next Carolina Code Conference shirt. Been trying to figure out a good way to pull in cybersecurity.
icevl 21 hours ago [-]
Base64 without error correction turns the t-shirt itself into a lossy transport layer, so the OCR/transcription step becomes the actual challenge.
brazzy 21 hours ago [-]
After being primed by the article, I read the author's name as "Shirtliker"...
speerer 18 hours ago [-]
That's a new one and oddly apt :)
doppp 21 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the post! Love Easter Eggs like these!
Gabrys1 18 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the font bit. This is a terminal script, it uses the font that your terminal uses?
LeifCarrotson 16 hours ago [-]
Your terminal doesn't typically use Consolas. You can do:
and use Consolas on Linux, but it's not available by default.
What they're suggesting is that a lot of their users are logging into an Akamai Linux box from a Windows machine, and therefore aren't "real Linux geeks".
SebRollen 17 hours ago [-]
They're talking about the font on the shirt
18 hours ago [-]
creaturemachine 18 hours ago [-]
What Bash blog would be complete without some Windows trash-talk?
15 hours ago [-]
felineflock 17 hours ago [-]
Phew! I was hoping it was not a novel way of spreading a malicious script!
khurs 20 hours ago [-]
Brilliant marketing when you can get people to pay to walk around advertising with your logo!!
khernandezrt 18 hours ago [-]
Ive been to 3 Uniqlos in my are and i havent been blessed with a bash shirt :(
Looks like it has a few shellcheck issues, and no set -euo pipefail? ;)
alexpotato 19 hours ago [-]
Fascinating that we have base64 but not error correction for it!
jack_pp 10 hours ago [-]
Love the font on the blog
luciana1u 16 hours ago [-]
finally, a t-shirt that ships with a CVE. i'm waiting for the limited edition that requires a firmware update before washing.
FijiBY 20 hours ago [-]
Nice investigation, thx
grepsedawk 9 hours ago [-]
This is so sick!
tiagod 7 hours ago [-]
>peace for all
>akamai
ha!
tantalor 19 hours ago [-]
TIL Consolas is a Windows font
mgaunard 17 hours ago [-]
how is it obfuscated? It's literally written as plain black monospace text on a white background.
Pretty sure any AI can solve it in 20 seconds.
sanmarzano 16 hours ago [-]
It’s encoded not obfuscated. It’s even commented, which is the opposite of obfuscated. Plus it’s not really an Easter egg that was found: it is literally printed in a shirt. Easter eggs are supposed to be hidden and either only found by insider knowledge or deep investigation. This was neither.
busymom0 14 hours ago [-]
> I’ve no idea at all how many views this site gets, but I’m willing to bet it’s not even double-digit humans per month.
I'd take that bet considering it's got close to thousand upvotes and on front page of HN
Brian_K_White 14 hours ago [-]
I want to submit a pr to s/SIGINT/0
You want to do that cleanup regardless why you exit.
brcmthrowaway 14 hours ago [-]
Whats going on with Uniqlo? Is it still popular in the US?
mschuster91 16 hours ago [-]
> # Hide the cursor \ tput civis
Never thought I'd learn shell tricks from the back of a fast-fashion t-shirt, but here we are.
koiueo 19 hours ago [-]
> I ran OCR in a few ways: First, using the built-in OCR of the circle-to-search feature on Android, which is often very good. Second, by using Tesseract with a few options and tweaks. And third by running it through Claude. After diffing the three to look for mismatches and getting Claude to output a table of locations for quick scanning, it became trivial but time-consuimg to tidy up the remainder
I bet 10$ I'd spend less time typing it from the t-shirt. And I wouldn't boil two kettles of water in the process.
But hey, AI makes you 10x more productive, I suppose
speerer 18 hours ago [-]
(Author here) for unrelated reasons my typing is very slow at the moment, so I was keen to automate. I see that people are getting different results from Claude than I did though.
Thanks for doing this, I almost bought it just to decode it, lol.
jnaina 8 hours ago [-]
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tancop 21 hours ago [-]
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devnull810 19 hours ago [-]
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kotberg 14 hours ago [-]
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huflungdung 20 hours ago [-]
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BeatrizPerez 18 hours ago [-]
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lloydatkinson 21 hours ago [-]
P
./cool.sh: line 31: bc: command not found
./cool.sh: line 34: bc: command not found
./cool.sh: line 37: bc: command not found
E
./cool.sh: line 31: bc: command not found
./cool.sh: line 34: bc: command not found
./cool.sh: line 37: bc: command not found
Very wow. Shame they assumed everyone has "bc"...
em500 21 hours ago [-]
Why would that be a shame? "bc" is a mandatory POSIX command, while /bin/bash isn't (/bin/sh is the standard).
21 hours ago [-]
greazy 21 hours ago [-]
Which distro are you running? Perchance did you run the shell script in alpine Linux (docker)?
piacos_ 21 hours ago [-]
it doesn't seem to be installed on my endeavouros laptop
20 hours ago [-]
lloydatkinson 20 hours ago [-]
Debian.
cb321 9 hours ago [-]
There is a python3 variant in this thread [1], but if that is not "standard enough" (as someone else may have mentioned bash itself is not POSIX), this awk would also work { Warning - this awk is 1000s of times faster than the bash. So, you really probably want that sleep { and sure 100s of times faster yet may be possible. } }:
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {
# Split on spaces so multi-byte utf8 works
nText = split("♥ P E A C E ♥ F O R ♥ A L L", tmp, " ")
for (i = 0; i < nText; i++) text[i] = tmp[i + 1]
color0 = 12; color1 = 208 # xterm-256 color cube range
nColor = color1 - color0 # Could be a pretty gradient
w = ENVIRON["COLUMNS"]; if (w == "") w = 80
h = ENVIRON["LINES"]; if (h == "") h = 24
freq = 0.2
for (t = 0; 1; t++) {
x = int(w/2 + w/4*sin(t*freq) + 0.5) # x pos ~ sine
color = color0 + int((nColor*t)/h)%nColor # cycle colors
ch = text[t % nText] # cycle chars
printf("%*s\033[38;5;%dm%s\033[m\n", x, "", color, ch)
fflush()
# system("sleep 0.1") # awk has no builtin sleep
}
}
As to "bug reports", the T-shirt published script also fails with LC_ALL=C for me as mentioned else-thread.
FWIW, I think ancient practice to reach for `bc` instead of `awk` or even the arithmetic built into shells often annoys. The only reason I keep `bc` installed at all is to compile Linux kernels. Someone had some patch set to Linux to eliminate this very dependency many years ago now.
Imagine having to return a t-shirt because that malfunction!
— I don't understand why are you returning this, was the size wrong or you didn't like it?
— No, there is a syntax error at line 37 that makes it impossible to run, and I'm concerned people on the street may think I promote unsafe bash scripting.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/script-kiddies.html
.. was trying to think of a way to somehow incorporate "k-rad" but couldn't figure anything out haha ( https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=k-rad )
https://aem1k.com/qlock/
I reverse engineered it to a unobfuscated version a few years ago:
https://gist.github.com/olooney/a89db3932b089925b71b68d7e9f2...
He's done a ton of other great ASCII visualizations as well:
https://aem1k.com/
edit: it’s impressive as all hell but like
There's something else a lot stranger going on, though. It is a proper monospace font, but the typesetting on the shirt is not. There's some kerning going on (I noticed it especially in the 'Iy' pair), and also it appears that narrower characters such as 'i' take less horizontal space. If I had to guess, I would say that it was set with a tool such as "optical kerning" in InDesign.
We use monospace fonts for a reason, they stack in a grid nicely. But within the confines of that grid there is room to shift a character left or right a bit which may lead to a nicer to read monospace. (it is equally likely to lead to a hideous mess, every time a letter would shift left it would leave a larger space right)
https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/blob/main/docs/Textu...
It's the main reason I use monaspace as a font.
And: doesn't this result in text that "jumps around" as you type?
It's a fun subtle adaptation to keep close to the typewriter-like experience of the app.
https://ia.net/topics/a-typographic-christmas
https://etceteratype.co/pages/trispace
https://archive.org/details/1983-01-compute-magazine/page/96...
OCR? oh my sweet summer child, you cannot know the days we spent typing in raw code from a magazine, and the joy when it finally ran.
echo "Fgnaq+sbe+Qrzbpenpl!" | tr 'A-Za-z+' 'N-ZA-Mn-za-m '
On a Samsung S24U I held down the "circle to search" homescreen button which brings up the AI tools interface (I don't know what it's officially called), held down on the text and copied the whole thing in one shot.
It took like 2 seconds.
I think though it could likely be easily OCR'd if you give the image to any decent agentic harness with a good vision model, e.g. newest Claude/GPT ones, and tell them to split the image per lines, and then just OCR each line individually.
I wonder if the script itself was written by an LLM before obfuscation? There seem to be a lot of comments in it, but in this case it's still ok :)
The congratulations text is both in English and Japanese. Contains a single heart emoji.
There was an intention to have a cyan to orange gradient, but the range starts in an ANSI block, ends halfway through the 256 color block and 256 terminal colors are not arranged like a gradient at all.
There's no sleep at the end of the loop where I feel like an LLM would add that defensively.
In my mind an AI would do something the most popular way even when that's not appropriate.
A human might do things in an unpopular way even when that's not appropriate.
It's not that difficult, our industrial OCR model read it correctly on its first attempt with default parameters. The characters are easily separable, there is no structured background (think expiration dates on yogurt aluminum lids) that confuses the reader, there is no almost-text-like texture anywhere that would clutter the result. The font is also nice and standard.
That, plus engineering and support: a robust implementation, deployment on almost any system, fast and good long-term support so your factory doesn't stop for too long if something goes wrong etc.
Can't remember his name now, there's been so many distractions...
He even sent the now-deceased man a birthday card with some words that strongly suggest he knew what was going on..
(.../s)
I wonder what it's doing under the hood to get such good performance?
Looked it up, you put mouse over text, then just select and copy it - very cool!
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/safari/ibrw20183ad7/ma...
On meetings I will often take a screenshot of the URL someone is presenting. I’m then able to just open the image and click the URL in the image.
Preview has pretty good background removal.
Notes will transcribe audio from audio files.
The seamless cloud sync between devices is much appreciated too.
From the prototype shown here [0], and the way they talk about their process, I sincerely doubt it. Especially as they mention trying to make it hard for AI to handle the output.
[0] https://youtu.be/jocGLiecpjU?t=567
The AI not handling the output relates to the final base64 output on the T-shirt (which other comments in this thread mention manually keying in or TFA discusses in the context of OCR). So, that is just not relevant to the question.
What made me start to wonder, personally, was that the output seems identical if you use "♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALL" instead of the version with internal repeats. IF there is any point to that "manual expansion of the cycles", IMO that deserves a comment much more so than "# Calculate length of text; text_length=".
Also, that `echo -n ...` followed by `echo ""` instead of just plain `echo` in the first place seems like the kind of copy-pasta code LLMs generate. Then again, regular devs also write pretty bad copy-pasta code.
There is also this the weirdly "broken down" calculation with 3 `bc` invocations not 1 as if it was translated from a language with more arithmetic/special function power than bash.
There is also the color scale stuff done in the loop instead of outside (except the one color=$(..)) which seems very unnatural and also very like machine translation.
Also, at least for me, on my bash-5.3.15(1), `char="${text:t % text_length:1}"` does not work to slice out the multi-byte UTF8 heart symbols, but it sure does look like the kind of thing an LLM would do translating from a python3 script (such as something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830669) into bash.
Another thing is, as others here have observed, there is nothing "gradual" about the xterm-256 color cube. So, "gradient" is a misnomer and exactly the kind of weird things LLMs do when they cobble text together.
Finally, all the tput stuff the script does instead of just "print x spaces" really smells like a human description of the side scroll in the video game graphic he shows inspired him somehow LLM-corrupted/complexified into the vertical scroll terminals do.
None of this is conclusive, but the video mentions 2023..2025 as when he did it and given that he was a designer and his concerns more visual than code-oriented, I'd have to say I disagree with your sincere doubt and I do strongly suspect the decoded script was very likely LLM-circa2024-generated, possibly with light post-edits by hand.
All the smells you pointed out, just look like a Python dev approaching bash without fully understanding it.
also, referring to Linux as "the language of the internet" when bash isn't particularly suited for internet tasks also smell like "excited windows Python dev"...
Anyway, he seems like a very nice fellow and I wish him and almost all T-shirt designers well. That bash script just gave me a lot of pause. (And even that seems possibly downstream of him being nice and doing it himself to spare his team from what he called a "FrankenProject".)
{ Also, it was my own Py version which I mostly did in case anyone wanted to actually run the thing after such interest was expressed on this thread. :-) }
I already said regular devs and LLMs can both gen copy-pasta. That said, being "mostly" a Python dev, asking some LLM to translate to bash for him seems even more likely to me. Only he or those close to him knows for sure. You & I cannot settle it here conclusively (as also said).
I also noted from the video that the ♥s (hearts) worked on whatever version of bash he tested with though it failed for me (which is why I wrote that Python). And his terminal title bar is switching between `tput` and `bc` and such meaning that what he was demoing was not some Python script. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
EDIT: Ah..another resolution of the hearts is to not run in an LC_ALL=C environment. Oops! `LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 bash ..` fixed it. Oh well, I think the Python script is nicer in almost every way. E.g., you could |head -n60 and send it to a line printer/dot matrix reminiscent of the 1980s computers he shows in the video, although your printer driver would have to strip the color escapes with a `sed` or maybe https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/noc.nim. ;-)
I seem to recall seeing an Akamai-branded base64'd shell script on a white shirt pre-2021(?), so unless they've changed the code since then, I doubt it...
My code usually clocs at 50/50 (or thereabouts)[0]. Has, since my very first real engineering project (in 1987)[1]. I discuss in detail, here[2].
But one reason that I like LLMs, is that they help me to write even more documentation. I have found that I can instruct an LLM to revise my documentation, and make it even more effective.
[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY (My GH profile. Pretty much everything there, is like that -has, since long before LLMs were a broken rubber on the drug store shelf).
[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/TF30... (Downloads a PDF)
[2] https://littlegreenviper.com/leaving-a-legacy/
https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner/blob/d44ee...
An LLM would have commented `// Create temporary UI view.`
Completely redundant comments like this are a classic hallmark of LLMs:
Dunno why I have been downvoted for stating the obvious.Also from my brief look at one file it looks like you have 50% comments because you have a gazillion comment separator lines.
I worked for a Japanese company that accreted comments.
Yeah, lots of whitespace.
Especially in a case like this, I would definitely write a lot of comments to aid in understanding, thus increasing trust so people would try it out and tinker with it.
The comments can be more cute/awe inspiring for people who aren't as familiar with bash but like solving puzzles as well.
IDK what the author was using but I feel like he could have shared how his OCR attempt went, but I am thinking he tried some naive OCR tools.
All in, you should have a non-corrupted string in 10-15 min.
It’s not the final word, since automation has other benefits: documenting the procedure’s steps, reducing human errors, increasing consistency, etc.
1: https://xkcd.com/1205/
Slowing it to a 10hz refresh makes it look great.
[0] https://github.com/GL-Kageyama/UNIQLO_Akamai_T-shirt_Code
Upon seeing this, I decided to golf and came up with a shorter version:
raku -e 'say "etbjxntqrdke".comb.map(*.succ).join'
Basically it just clusters same characters and asks the human to find the problems, which is easy when you're looking at a series of pictures like ssssss5sss.
The UI is kinda least-effort. Should ask a modern AI agent to make it look nice and intuitive, sometime maybe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E480814-000/00?srsltid... (US)
well, i guess no peace for me then
In case the author is reading: The decorative feather images are between 2MB to almost 5MB in size. Compression might be in order to save users time and bandwidth, and make the site look less broken while the images are partially loaded :)
I was expecting some cool js deobfuscation tricks, so to put nicely I’ll just say that my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
It’s a movie plot.
It should be on a separate line.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beige_box_(phreaking)
Surely this would use whatever font the virtual terminal profile was set to? I don’t know of any method to choose a virtual terminal font from bash and don’t see any code that addresses it?
That's better than half the tech howtos out there.
> May the m×s/t² be with you
Might have to do something like that for a verse on the next Carolina Code Conference shirt. Been trying to figure out a good way to pull in cybersecurity.
What they're suggesting is that a lot of their users are logging into an Akamai Linux box from a Windows machine, and therefore aren't "real Linux geeks".
Pretty sure any AI can solve it in 20 seconds.
I'd take that bet considering it's got close to thousand upvotes and on front page of HN
You want to do that cleanup regardless why you exit.
Never thought I'd learn shell tricks from the back of a fast-fashion t-shirt, but here we are.
I bet 10$ I'd spend less time typing it from the t-shirt. And I wouldn't boil two kettles of water in the process.
But hey, AI makes you 10x more productive, I suppose
My bet is against manual OCR with various engines + finding mistakes later using an LLM.
https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt...
Very wow. Shame they assumed everyone has "bc"...
FWIW, I think ancient practice to reach for `bc` instead of `awk` or even the arithmetic built into shells often annoys. The only reason I keep `bc` installed at all is to compile Linux kernels. Someone had some patch set to Linux to eliminate this very dependency many years ago now.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830669
This seems to work pretty well
The old one was: https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E459561-000/00
The guy who founded the new political party Team Mirai also wears it frequently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahiro_Anno