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 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.
>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...
> 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.
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 ;-)
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
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.
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
> 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?
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)
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
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
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.
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.
Saw this the other day on the train, and probably stared a bit too hard at the dude wearing it. Surprised to see this on HN so soon after. World feels like a simulation
105 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 95.6 ms ] threadI 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 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...
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.
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?
Very wow. Shame they assumed everyone has "bc"...
https://archive.org/details/1983-01-compute-magazine/page/96...
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.
That's better than half the tech howtos out there.
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://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt...
[0] https://github.com/GL-Kageyama/UNIQLO_Akamai_T-shirt_Code