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.
"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.
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
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.
For anyone that cares, this is a slightly less stupid translation to Python:
#!/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 # Color gradient 12..<208 (cyan..orange)
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 24-bit color xterm 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
One 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.
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 :)
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.
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?
> 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.
What made me 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 garbage 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.
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 probably LLM generated. The AI not handling the output relates to the final output other comments in this thread about manually keying in the base64.
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...
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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
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.
"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.
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
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.
For anyone that cares, this is a slightly less stupid translation to Python:
One 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.
The comments just mean they used AI to do that in 3 seconds
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 :)
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.
Human here. I added a sleep 0.5 at the end, it's too fast to read otherwise. Makes for a nice terminal screensaver!
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.
"the code is not quite detail oriented enough to be AI", times are changing
More like 'not boilerplate-y enough'
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.
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?
Didn't know Safari had this.
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...
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.
Preview has it too… And it works extremely well.
> 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.
What made me 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 garbage 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.
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 probably LLM generated. The AI not handling the output relates to the final output other comments in this thread about manually keying in the base64.
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...
Definitely LLM. No humans write that many comments.
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).
[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/TF30... (Downloads a PDF)
[2] https://littlegreenviper.com/leaving-a-legacy/
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).
> 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.
Plus the main point of this code is to have people look at it, the function is secondary to being an easter egg.
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.
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.
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.
The HN optimizing T-shirt compiler is the next stage here :D
im just sad it didnt render a qr code leading to malware :'). the different ways ppl look at obfuscated codes and scripts hah
My old colleague had one with a Go program[0] which I always thought was quite cool.
[0] https://github.com/GL-Kageyama/UNIQLO_Akamai_T-shirt_Code
I got one this year with the Go code. Never actually thought it is legit code, just some random stuff.
I wasn’t sure if you meant a Go solver or Go the language. Would be fun if someone wrote a Go program in Go
Or a pong clone in Racket.
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.
An easy miss. :-) Most of the time our thoughts are on autopilot, since we are not calm.
I once wrote a tool that helps with finding mistakes in OCR'd fixed width text, https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ocring-hex-dumps-or-other-...
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
"just typing it" would be more error prone for the average human
I'm guilty of this, but for me this kind of thing is optimizing over annoyance rather than time.
(Author here) Yes I agree. It was a fun side-quest though. Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1205/
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.
Could have saved 50% with 'base64 -d | gzip -d'
> 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?
They're referring to the font on the T-shirt.
Thank you for spelling it out for me because I thought I was looking at a completely hallucinated AI article...
TIL Consolas is a Windows font
Brilliant marketing when you can get people to pay to walk around advertising with your logo!!
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.
Nice investigation, thx
Thanks for the post! Love Easter Eggs like these!
After being primed by the article, I read the author's name as "Shirtliker"...
there's no newline between the shebang and the actual code
what if it contained a zero day for tesseract and the script you thought you got is just a throwaway
Base64 without error correction turns the t-shirt itself into a lossy transport layer, so the OCR/transcription step becomes the actual challenge.
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
Feels very reminiscent of the style of old DeCSS tshirts
https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt...
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"...
Why would that be a shame? "bc" is a mandatory POSIX command, while /bin/bash isn't (/bin/sh is the standard).
Which distro are you running? Perchance did you run the shell script in alpine Linux (docker)?
Debian.
it doesn't seem to be installed on my endeavouros laptop
You are fun.
Are we really at the "redditor insult" type comments stage of HN now? There is nothing wrong with saying a piece of code is broken.
Why does the shirt have an obfuscated bash script on the back?
Because it's by Akamai, the blog links to https://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/uniqlo-adds-ne...
Uniqlo frequently does collaborations. This was one with a tech company
It's at least the second one that Akamai's done, although I like this newest one the most.
The old one was: https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E459561-000/00
I have both of them and wear them to work regularly xD
The guy who founded the new political party Team Mirai also wears it frequently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahiro_Anno