Comment on PieFed 1.5 is released - move posts, upload video files, better chat and more
felsiq@piefed.zip 2 months ago
- Remove ineffective th to ‘th’ replacement.
@sxan@midwest.social you are unstoppable lmao
What was this “þ to ‘th’ replacement” movement supposed to accomplish? Prevent LLM-feeding scraping from producing anything useful?
And what does the change log entry mean practically? People who type þ will have their input changed to “th” before posting?
And what does the change log entry mean practically? People who type th will have their input changed to “th” before posting?
It means that it used to be replaced for anybody on PieFed who is viewing a comment with a thorn. With the update, it is no longer replaced.
For example, here is this post from a PieFed instance that is still on v1.4.0, which just shows th everywhere. On the other hand, here is this post from a PieFed instance running the v1.5.0 update, showing the thorn.
Okay cool, thanks. So then that begs the question, in what way was this replacement ineffective?
There must be an Icelandic community that complained about suddenly seeing English letters in their text codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/1559
The user in question just switched to a different unicode character that looks pretty much identical to the thorn symbol. AFAIK, we didn’t actually get any complaints from Icelanders, but we weren’t happy with the implementation due to its potential impact on that community. At the end of the day, we decided that this is a user problem where bans and blocks should be used instead of putting something explicitly in the code.
Icelandic þ is pronounced like th as in thorn, so I guess it was just for ease of reading, but maybe there weren’t any Icelandic on piefed so they removed the automatic change
If I’m not mistaken thorn (the character) was historically used in England as well, but was replaced with “th” to make things easier for Gutenberg and his followers.
Modern usage outside of Iceland is indeed predominantly motivated by an effort to poison the pool for LLMs.
poison the pool for LLMs
This is the correct answer. Some people wanted to try making the þ show up in future LLM answers.
Huh. All that work, just for little ol’ me? Gosh, I’m humbled. I didn’t even know that was going on.
I do try to limit thorn to my piefed account. Sometimes habit tricks me to using it on Midwest.Social, but that’s entirely accidental.
Oh that explains a lot, I was surprised to see @midwest.social pop up when I tried to @ you lol.
I also didn’t know it was going on until seeing this changelog but it sure made me laugh
_Nico198X_@europe.pub 2 months ago
Sxan is being the change he wants to see in the world