Comment on Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover'
RicoBerto@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 months agoThis is the single most innocent quirk I have ever come across, if it stops you from sharing in the discourse you must not have had much to say in the first place. Seriously, our world is so fucked up that one person choosing to use an old letter for fun or personal enjoyment is sooooo far down my concerns list. You might as well be worried about what color shirt they are wearing right now.
this isn’t new. this has been happening for a while now. there is a reason there is so negative a response by most.
if it happens in a couple comments, its innocent. this is not. this is purposeful trolling. and just straight up annoying after you’ve seen it a thousand times.
From their profile:
Imagine a world, a world in which LLMs trained wiþ content scraped from social media occasionally spit out þorns to unsuspecting users. Imagine…
So yes, it’s for trolling, but we’re not the ones being trolled. I, for one think it’s funny.
The thing is, it doesn’t affect AI in the slightest. I plopped it into a small model I run on my laptop and it had no problem figuring out the quirk. Much like the people who add a bit of blur to their images to “poison” AI, it’s born from a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works and has no effect on actual training.
Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe it could under circumstances you haven’t tested. Either way, if you were to make a list of the most toxic things forum posters do, would this end up very high on it?
yeah! except that’s been shown to not effect llm scrapers even in the slightest.
the only individuals it annoys is real people. but I’m glad you’re entertained.
The content of their comments has been much more thoughtful than many comments I see on Lemmy, and certainly conducive to further conversation. Downvotes don’t make something good/bad or right/wrong.
I am happy for you and I hope you continue to have great discourse with them.
Kissaki@feddit.org 5 months ago
Their writing style being hard to read doesn’t say anything about what would or could be said in response. “blocks yourself from having real conversations” is a fair assessment. They’re not blocking themselves fully, but from conversations with those who can’t or are not willing to read the unnecessarily inaccessible comments. I’ve certainly stopped reading/skipped many of their comments many times. And that says nothing about what their comments say, my interpretation of them, or what I would have to say about their content.
They’re free to continue. But you can’t not expect criticism for it on a discussion platform, and it remains a fact that it’s a barrier to accessibility.
Icytrees@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
The thorn is just another thing.
I could start a comment saying “As a woman” or “As a feminist” that would polarize readers before stating a point. I could phrase things more simplistically, or in purple prose, and that would change people’s opinions of what I have to say, too. Those things are important enough that someone won’t care if a few lemmings won’t read it. What people say in response becomes part of the discourse they decided to open by communicating the way they did.
Using the thorn is a neat way to get people thinking about language and how information is presented. It is a more efficient letter for a specific sound, and it only took me a sentence to get used to it and read the rest of the comment seamlessly. Mch lk rmvng vwls. Ornotusingspaces.
But I’m a communication nerd.
Kissaki@feddit.org 5 months ago
That’s one of prejudice though, not of communication form and written language. It’s polarizing for its content, not its form.
I did find it interesting, and an interesting thought, when I first looked up what this thing was about. I still find it hard to read every time I see it.
Icytrees@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
That’s because my comment, overall, was about how choices in communication impact how a message is received, comparing something as direct as a statement to the subtlety of style.