There is a python3 variant in this thread [1], but if that is not "standard enough" (as someone else may have mentioned bash itself is not POSIX), this awk would also work { Warning - this awk is 1000s of times faster than the bash. So, you really probably want that sleep { and sure 100s of times faster yet may be possible. } }:
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {
# Split on spaces so multi-byte utf8 works
nText = split("♥ P E A C E ♥ F O R ♥ A L L", tmp, " ")
for (i = 0; i < nText; i++) text[i] = tmp[i + 1]
color0 = 12; color1 = 208 # xterm-256 color cube range
nColor = color1 - color0 # Could be a pretty gradient
w = ENVIRON["COLUMNS"]; if (w == "") w = 80
h = ENVIRON["LINES"]; if (h == "") h = 24
freq = 0.2
for (t = 0; 1; t++) {
x = int(w/2 + w/4*sin(t*freq) + 0.5) # x pos ~ sine
color = color0 + int((nColor*t)/h)%nColor # cycle colors
ch = text[t % nText] # cycle chars
printf("%*s\033[38;5;%dm%s\033[m\n", x, "", color, ch)
fflush()
# system("sleep 0.1") # awk has no builtin sleep
}
}
As to "bug reports", the T-shirt published script also fails with LC_ALL=C for me as mentioned else-thread.
FWIW, I think ancient practice to reach for `bc` instead of `awk` or even the arithmetic built into shells often annoys. The only reason I keep `bc` installed at all is to compile Linux kernels. Someone had some patch set to Linux to eliminate this very dependency many years ago now.
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 )
For anyone that cares, this is a slightly less stupid Python version:
#!/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 # xt256 Color cube segment 12..<208
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 xterm-256 color 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
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.
> All the smells you pointed out, just look like a Python dev approaching bash without fully understanding it.
also, referring to Linux as "the language of the internet" when bash isn't particularly suited for internet tasks also smell like "excited windows Python dev"...
FWIW, his screens looked a lot like OSX to me (which tracks with graphic design users in my experience).
Anyway, he seems like a very nice fellow and I wish him and almost all T-shirt designers well. That bash script just gave me a lot of pause. (And even that seems possibly downstream of him being nice and doing it himself to spare his team from what he called a "FrankenProject".)
"Linux, the open-source language of the internet" comes from the linked akamai.com press release, not the blog post author. Their putting that as a section title to the quote may be their poking light fun at it.
Yeah. The Flask web-page prototype was indeed in Python. (The prequel shirt was Go.)
{ Also, it was my own Py version which I mostly did in case anyone wanted to actually run the thing after such interest was expressed on this thread. :-) }
I already said regular devs and LLMs can both gen copy-pasta. That said, being "mostly" a Python dev, asking some LLM to translate to bash for him seems even more likely to me. Only he or those close to him knows for sure. You & I cannot settle it here conclusively (as also said).
I also noted from the video that the ♥s (hearts) worked on whatever version of bash he tested with though it failed for me (which is why I wrote that Python). And his terminal title bar is switching between `tput` and `bc` and such meaning that what he was demoing was not some Python script. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
EDIT: Ah..another resolution of the hearts is to not run in an LC_ALL=C environment. Oops! `LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 bash ..` fixed it. Oh well, I think the Python script is nicer in almost every way. E.g., you could |head -n60 and send it to a line printer/dot matrix reminiscent of the 1980s computers he shows in the video, although your printer driver would have to strip the color escapes with a `sed` or maybe https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/noc.nim. ;-)
One issue with that relative to RSS is permissions. Historically, all procs could see the RSS used by procs of all other users (at least if they could see the PIDs at all). So, RSS requires no special permissions, but the Linux kernel team decided PSS should not be as promiscuous for whatever reasons (I didn't do a deep dive). So, I'm always having to do (the equivalent of) `sudo pu`.
A different usage paradigm from *top that I have come to like better is to do differential ps-like reports and system-wide (like vmstat) reports which leaves everything in your terminal scrollback buffer as in: https://github.com/c-blake/procs { written in the uncommonly efficient, expressive Nim programming language }.
I don't really disagree much with what you said. My favored PLang Nim (https://nim-lang.org/ -- it has both `ref` and `ptr` styles of pointer, one auto-managed, one manually managed) even changed a while back it's `nim c --gc=x` command-line language to `nim c --mm=x`, and I was in favor of said change.
However, it does inspire me to write.. The kernel of all this terminology confusion is under-exposure of industrial programmers to not just academic terminology, but also the very design space you mention (which has always been nicely covered by Jones' outstanding book). Just to take an example from the root of this thread:
>widespread common usage of the term “garbage collected programming language” which specifically contrasts manual languages like C++ or Rust against garbage collected ones
Boehm-Wiser conservative collection for C, among the most manual languages of all, pre-dates its very first ANSI 1989 standard.
This underexposure itself is downstream of the kinds of oversimplifications/lies of marketing and in this particular case came from Java. The evolution I witnessed was roughly 1) linking Boehm with -lgc and deleting (or #define'ing away) all your `free()` calls is conservative - to be precise you need compiler aid and a lot of programmers are "not perfect==awful" personality types, 2) Sun Microsystems wants to leverage a lot of reliability issues with C code and become The Platform and spends gobs of money to win hearts & minds, partly succeeding, 3) part of its ad-warfare against the then WIntel hegemony and/or tutorials/introductory material for Junior Programmers (often the target of "be more reliable" material) plays fast & loose with GC terminology because marketing plays fast & loose structurally for fun but mostly profit, 4) because human language really does == language usage a la Quine, everyone in the industry re-defines what "GC" means to bind it to a programming language instead of to a specific run-time, 5) industry & academics use different language, confusion ensues and so here we are.
This is not even the 100th time that either explicit or implicit forces of marketing have achieved confusion analogously to this. If you believe most people don't need much of what they spend on then confusion is arguably intrinsic to marketing of ideas/products. The highly misleading but suggestive metaphorical language used all over "AI" in both research and in product-lines is a more current case of this, leading anyone who knows much to have to qualify "not AGI" or other such junk just to have a conversation.
So, what is my point? Basically just that the larger problem here will persist as long as there is money to be made/attention to be garnered by sowing confusion/having people talk past each other/think some product is more than it really is. I have no meta-strategy in my back pocket to block these successful confusions, but it does seem worth being aware of it.
For those new to the topic and less patient than "full conference" levels of attention, it doesn't cover things like UFCS/command-call, user-defined operators, or many other details, but for its incredibly short run-time, this video might give you a tiny taste of the flavor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHyOHQ_GkNo
This may seem like a modern conflict, but what I like about your post is its more general human cognitive orientation. Since to each new generation everything is new, people tend to forget that this kind of tension goes back to the dawn of programming with Fortran and Lisp, or even earlier if you count various notations for math.
FWIW, CPUs/hardware structurally do not have quite as much luxury for dynamism/monotyped things. So, all this does connect with how tight/abstract a bridge to the hardware world one cares about (which just varies). That naturally connects to performance, but that also becomes tricky once one moves to pragmatic problem decomposition over purity (e.g. NOT "pure" Python or "pure" Ruby). In my experience, people tend to overvalue purity as much as they tend to over-simplify. :-)
FWIW, I think ancient practice to reach for `bc` instead of `awk` or even the arithmetic built into shells often annoys. The only reason I keep `bc` installed at all is to compile Linux kernels. Someone had some patch set to Linux to eliminate this very dependency many years ago now.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830669