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Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

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

#141

Post by cb321 »

raffael_de wrote: post #117
ape4 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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 ...

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 )

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

#142

Post by NikxDa »

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 :)

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

#143

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

IshKebab wrote: post #8
Tiberium wrote: 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…

Definitely LLM. No humans write that many comments.

I do

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

#144

Post by lostlogin »

al_borland wrote: post #112
iamflimflam1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Notes will do OCR as well. Trigger the feature, point the camera at something, and it will input just the text.

Notes is amazing. Autocompleting equations, converting jpg to pdf and various other admin chores.

The seamless cloud sync between devices is much appreciated too.

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

#145

Post by pkilgore »

make3 wrote: post #47
lemagedurage wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"the code is not quite detail oriented enough to be AI", times are changing

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".

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

#146

Post by thomaslwang »

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.

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

#147

Post by somat »

raphlinus wrote: post #131

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 InDesi…

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)

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

#149

Post by conductr »

haileys wrote: post #9

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

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
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