This reminds me of car safety features, how drivers have become more complacent to offset the benefits. QR codes were made to be robust in the face of errors, but over time this has been eaten into for aesthetic purposes. Businesses commonly put a logo in the center, eating up some error correction budget. This likely has a similar effect.
Let’s say I want to produce a QR code that is as close as possible to an image (let’s say the Nike swoosh logo), if I just added that to the center and added the 3 orientation markers on the corners it wouldn’t be a proper QR code yet, my question is what is the minimal amount of edits I would need to do from that symbol to get a valid QR code?
I’m thinking of something like people buying and hoarding domains in early 00’s (even now), if I could generate the minimal QR code (minimal is important here in the same way that .com is treated as superior to .ca or .net) of well-known symbols and buy the resulting domain it points to (if it even points to a domain) couldn’t I sell this to companies with the associated domain as a re-direct as well?
You could maybe determine this using a SAT solver. You would have to encode the entire QR code specification. I was thinking of doing this to find a minimalist QR code that just had as few black cells as possible.
Users of QR Code must be careful about deforming the code by overlaying it with an illustration or putting a a design on it. If it is deformed, the QR Code's error correction function is invoked where even a tiny missing or smeared part renders the reading operation impossible, or the response of the operation may become slow.
If you are contemplating arranging an illustration or design involving a QR Code, please consult with DENSO WAVE about your project beforehand.
Coincidentally came across this after reading a comment [1] under the recent post on _for-sale DNS records, visiting milk.com and scrolling through the owner's Mastodon
LOL! It's a sign of the times that, before I saw the year, I thought "that has to be AI generated", because this sort of outlandish silliness is exactly the type of thing that genAI excels at.
the whole technique hinges on qr scanners reading only middle point of the squares
The moment you encounter developer that thought "for redundancy let's sample the whole square" (which is a very natural thought) - it breaks
I kinda expected working the limits of error correction, honestly. Not this blunt circumvention "because it works on my machine"
The guy that made that did a writeup on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/1v52x96/
Diffusion image generation constrained to also be a valid QR code
A question I had about QR codes:
Let’s say I want to produce a QR code that is as close as possible to an image (let’s say the Nike swoosh logo), if I just added that to the center and added the 3 orientation markers on the corners it wouldn’t be a proper QR code yet, my question is what is the minimal amount of edits I would need to do from that symbol to get a valid QR code?
I’m thinking of something like people buying and hoarding domains in early 00’s (even now), if I could generate the minimal QR code (minimal is important here in the same way that .com is treated as superior to .ca or .net) of well-known symbols and buy the resulting domain it points to (if it even points to a domain) couldn’t I sell this to companies with the associated domain as a re-direct as well?
So, technically, you can run Doom inside a QR code?
https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/
I could not find any LICENSE file or statement on the Codeberg repo. We must therefore conclude that the code is © Copyright 2025-2026, by the author(s), all rights reserved. Crazy to think there are already 3 forkers who've forked you.
Furthermore, let us not forget the patent-holder of QR Codes, DENSO WAVE, and their Frequently Asked Questions:
https://www.qrcode.com/en/faq.html
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224882
Only needs a Rick Astley QR code (;->