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.

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

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.

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

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.

An easy miss. :-) Most of the time our thoughts are on autopilot, since we are not calm.

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!

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 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.

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...

(Author here) Yes I agree. It was a fun side-quest though. Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1205/

"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.

They're referring to the font on the T-shirt.

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

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)?

You are fun.

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