Human here. I added a sleep 0.5 at the end, it's too fast to read otherwise. Makes for a nice terminal screensaver!

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

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...

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.

What made me start to 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 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.

Another thing is, as others here have observed, there is nothing "gradual" about the xterm-256 color cube. So, "gradient" is a misnomer and exactly the kind of weird things LLMs do when they cobble text together.

Finally, all the tput stuff the script does instead of just "print x spaces" really smells like a human description of the side scroll in the video game graphic he shows inspired him somehow LLM-corrupted/complexified into the vertical scroll terminals do.

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 very likely LLM-circa2024-generated, possibly with light post-edits by hand.

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).

Since LLM's are mimicking our code my guess we do...

I do

> 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.

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.