Live data from Hacker News

Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

tris.sherliker.net

121–130 of 253 posts

Re: Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

#121
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for spelling it out for me because I thought I was looking at a completely hallucinated AI article...

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.

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.

Re: Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

#123
post #2

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…

> 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.

Re: Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

#124
post #76
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. [0] https://youtu.be/jocGLiecpjU?t=567

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…

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.

Re: Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

#127
post #88

"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.

Oh the Karens these days!

Surely such a person would use the spelling k@r3n

Re: Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

#128
If you enjoy this kind of thing, you might also like Martin Kleppe's work, such as the Quine Clock:

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/

Re: Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

#129
post #124
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> 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"...

Re: Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

#130
post #54

Well at least they're not instructing consumers to run curl | bash. That's better than half the tech howtos out there.

No, they're instructing their customers to run unknown base64 encoded code instead. :D

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...
Post reply on HN