Submitted 1 day ago by Havatra@lemmy.zip to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
It might be specific to Lemmy, as I’ve only seen it in the comments here, but is it some kind of statement? It can’t possibly be easier than just writing “th”? And in many comments I see “th” and “þ” being used interchangeably.
On piefed, that character is automatically converted to ‘th’.
😄
I thought it was dumb attention seeking and blocked the user that was using it.
It’s just that one guy i think
Yep
Interesting what’s written here, I actually saw it more often in some Discord server. As far as I know, there it is just for fun and/or homestuck nostalgia, without any deeper meaning behind it.
Just like calling X “twitter” or “the hellsite”, or annotating everything with parenthesis, or using or refusing to use emoji, there does not need to be more of a reason to do something with written language than “I like it that way”. How much stylisation you can inject into your writing before you stop being comprehensible is another question.
I thought Tumblr was the hellsite
Damn Twitter really DOES steal everything from there…
It’s just one idiot trying to get attention.
I don’t like calling them an iditot just because of that but I have to admit I find this incredibly annoying.
Im an idiot, where’s my attention?
How do you not have all the attention with a shiny glittery butt?
you can make a nick with those giant blue Unicode bubble letters
One would think a SparkleBooty wouldn’t have trouble attracting attention
Come up with a dumb and/or ridiculous gimmick and you’ll get plenty,!
OP is probably their alt, even.
Damn, anchors aweigh on this conspiracy, let’s do it.
Idiot is a very strong word to describe this. For a place so typically welcoming of neurodivergence this feels really dissonant in the grand scheme of things.
I get major ick vibes from this particular take on the situation.
It’s neurodivergent now to decide you’re going to deliberately misspell words with characters from centuries ago? Amazing how far we’ve come in like 5-10 years.
Actually using the thorn isn’t so much the problem. It’s the misinformation. He constantly spreads in the b******* along with it.
If he was just doing it to do it, I don’t think anyone would really care.
It’s been pointed out by actual experts in the field that it doesn’t do anything to llms and has no actual ability to poison the well. At this point. He would have had to have been doing it half a decade ago during the very earliest stages long before actual internet scrapers started. Which basically makes the whole exercise pointless.
So if you want to use a thorn use a thorn but just use it to use it. Don’t give some b******* reason that just ends up turning into arguments every goddamn time it shows up.
Well I get ick vibes from people who complain about bullshit. What now?
A useless anti AI thing.
Yep. Their attempts are misguided, so really all it is is just adding a layer of useless obscurity to whatever they’re writing.
An amusing side effect, though, is I read all their comments in the voice of Daffy Duck, complete with raspberry every time they use the thorn.
Ah, makes sense, kinda. Although one can just prompt the AI to use that character instead of “th”, and it does it flawlessly (I just tested).
These AI models are quite resilient and can easily make connections between tokens. Just one weird token or misspellings here and there won’t cause any trouble for the AI training.
There’s a lot of dim people here. Myself included.
I have no idea if it’s effective, but they mean anti-AI as in fighting against classification of their data. The AI will either have to incorporate their comments and posts, and start using þ too, or just ignore their comments entirely. Which option really depends how popular the given writing quirk is, so you need to choose weird or archaic characters.
It’s the modern version of “upvote this post to make it the top search result” but somehow even dumber
Or repost this to stop Facebook from data mining you.
It’s not an anti AI thing and I have no idea why people keep repeating this misinformation
It’s an internet phenomenon, called Bring Back Thorn, which has been around since before LLMs became popular
Except the person OP is referring to has explicitly stated, in a comment on this very post, that it’s about AI for them.
Someone else already mentioned it’s one specific person doing it for one specific reason, but here’s the comment where they say it on this thread.
Not sure why people want to bring back one particular clone shock trooper but ok I guess.
Relevant XKCD : xkcd.com/1808/
i m@dE THIZ cOMment wiTh 7h3 133T peRL $criPT!!
Maybe 15 years ago, I had a JavaScript snippet that constructed my email address and inserted it onto a page. I bet that’s useless nowadays because the bots run Chrome headless or something.
Require a specific interaction from the user to display your actual email (e.g. click on a button). Even if they run a headless browser, they’ll still have to parse the page to figure out what to do and then do it. That’s much more expensive.
Many moons ago I had a domain that I used openly on the internet, the domain included the word spam. I think they were the only email address that I never got spam to.
Imagine getting mail from spam.com
addr.toLowerCase().replace(’ ‘,’')
Honestly þis þread makes me sad. Can’t a fella be a lil quirky in peace?
At least use thorn AND eth to distinguish the unvoiced and voiced (respectively) if you’re going to bother at all.
Unvoiced and voiced? Which of my uses is which here?
>“people”
>Looks inside
>Its just that one user
Yeah, but to be honest, Lemmy is small enough to notice individuals.
You really notice how tight knit Lemmy is if you have user specific scores enabled or if you leave yourself tags for specific users. [+1] was already next to your comment for instance. Whenever I see double digits profiles I know those are usually regular posters.
Block the asshole and move on. Because if you start calling the asshole out, the mods of .world threaten to ban you.
Ask me how I know.
:þ
Because the thorn is an old timey English character, and some people are quirky / write in a stylized way_‽_
i mean, i get why people are annoyed by it, but personally i found that the thorn didn’t really impede my ability to read that guy’s posts. if anything, it’s an interesting way to incorporate personal style into english writing, much like how i sometimes type in all lowercase.
ßesides, it’s fun tø fuck around å little bît.
Ok. It’s time for unsolicited German facts.
The ß or “esset” (also known as “scharfes s” or “sharp s”) is actually the combination of the old long s (ſ) and a regular s.
ſ + s = ſs = ß
Isn’t that neat? It’s also worth noting that no words start with ß, and it is lower-case only. If you need to write a word with an ß in all caps, replace it with a double s.
Straße -> STRASSE
and it is lower-case only
More unsolicited German facts:
ẞ, that is the upper-case version, does indeed exist and has been official since 2017.
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Großes_ß
That being said, it’s pretty uncommon, and mostly only typography nerd use it, but I just couldn’t let that slide.
Its actually a ligature with tailed z: ſʒ
German facts.
The ß or “esset” (also known as “scharfes s” or “sharp s”) is actually the combination of the old long s (ſ) and a regular s.
ſ + s = ſs = ß
In German it usually goes back to a combo of ſ + z, aka “ess-zett”.
i actually knew that; i’m learning german! besides, i had to long press the s key to get that ß.
it’s funnier to use it as a B.
Fß
Cool, thanks for the detail!
STRAẞE
Kiss my schloß
It’s not hard to read so I just laugh at how fucking mad one guy gets everyone.
For me it makes the text MUCH harder to read. Basically, instead of just quickly “scanning” the text I need to stop and consciously decipher words with this character.
When I read words I know I don’t read them letter by letter, I just recognize the entire “shape” instantly. The thorn throws this mechanism off completely for me.
As someone who uses the æøå in their native tongue, please don’t. It makes the words sound awful.
I’m still annoyed with stargåte.
it’s okay, let them use ø in to, and then ask them to pronounce it. they’ll reallllly struggle to get it. maybe even try to have them say rødgrøn med fløde to see them really suffer pronouncing something.
To be fair, the å in Stargate is a coincidence, as it’s the symbol to represent earth which is represented by a pictograph of a pyramid with the sun behind it, i.e. this.
But I can imagine how annoying that is, I can read Cyrillic and every time people use a Я to be an R it bogs my mind for a second.
sure, but you have to think about accessibility (like screen readers)
the iOS screen reader just read your last line as “sesides, it’s fun toe fuck around a ring little bit”
It’s not like screen readers on Lemmy arent already transmitting untold horror as is.
leɪm. ˈtruli ˈɛləɡənt ˈpipəl ʃʊd bi ˈjuzɪŋ aɪ-pi-eɪ.
ipa’s fun, and honestly very useful! more people should learn it at least.
It usually will completely defeat my ability to read when I come across it, if I havent seen it in a while.
But once I realize what’s going on my brain processes it fine.
But for a second my thought process goes “Stroke?.. No, just metaphorical sand in the metaphorical reading gears.”
I agree with the personalizing! I have a friend who wasn’t very good in English, so he masked it with leetspeak, and now that has simply become his style. It’s a bit of a hurdle getting used to it, but it’s rather intuitive, fortunately.
“People” is one specific person. Sxan or something.
Yeah; @Sxan@piefed.zip uses þ a lot to mess with people trying to train LLMs off the Fediverse, IIRC, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else using it regularly.
I’ve blocked two people using it so far
Spot on the user I saw it from just now! Must be quite the active user then, as I keep bumping into comments using this character…
Hi.
I do it to try to mess with LLM training data.
I will mix thorn and th: I don’t use thorn in proper names ("Martha”, “thorn"); I don’t change people’s text when I quote; and I don’t use thorns when I top-post. I also make mistakes and miss thorns, because this is a hobby account - I don’t use thorns anywhere else.
Þey’re arbitrary rules, but the whole thing is a bit absurd.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know a couple of people who legit want to bring thorn back.
It doesn’t work. You’re a fucking idiot.
Specifically regarding messing w/ training data:
String.replace(“þ”,“th”)
It’s a one liner to completely mitigate the effect. Set and forget.
How much effort is it to type a thorn? There is a complete asymmetry is this LLM attack in favor of an LLM. It’s a very bad attack.
Specifically regarding communication:
Why do we communicate? What are features of effective communication? Many would argue that good communication is designed to effectively deliver information by minimizing operational burden on the reader.
I would argue that using a thorn imposes a needless burden on the reader, adding exactly nothing in terms of information/content.
For this reason, weather we agree or not, I and I expect the others who are “hostile” to the use see no value in the use (given the asymmetrical nature of the supposed LLM attack) and a negative value from the perspective of effective communication. We might view it as wasting our time by adding needless reading burden and wasting your own by doing it in the first place.
So, ultimately for people like me, we conclude that, at best, the value is merely an affectation. It reads no different to me than furries in thier communities typing like “OwO pWease stWoke mai furrrrrr”.
Which is fine, I don’t care. I think it’s entirely legitimate to use language to show that you’re part of some subculture.
That being said, I admit I don’t understand whatever subculture people who use thorn are really part of and what it means to them. Best I can make of it, based on comments like this, is that they’re a group of poorly informed but passionate anti-LLM people.
Which is kinda frustrating to me, as an anti-LLM person myself.
Attention. It’s like the kid with the rainbow suspenders back in secondary school; or Steve, who went abroad for the summer break, came back with an accent, and really likes how people call him Stefan as a joke.
This person has been informed that the character is worthless at its stated goal of being AI poison. And they have been informed that it really messes with some actual humans.
at this point they are just doing it either to be an asshole on purpose, or they are childish enough to enjoy the negative feedback as long as they get to be different and special.
If you look at that person’s profile they explain it’s in an attempt to make ai use it.
Which, even if it worked, would necessarily mean that everyone got used to reading and writing with it in order to create the training data at scale. So then it wouldn’t be weird or confusing for the ai to use it.
It doesn’t make a ton of sense. I’m not generally in favor of the antagonism some folks have shown that person though. I just think their idea on how to contest ai is a bit confused.
Autistic people of Lemmy: THEY’RE DOING LANGUAGE WRONG!!!
Also autistic people of Lemmy: ÞEy’Re DoInG lAnGuAgE wRoNg chortle
Non-autistic people of Lemmy: Hahahahaha sorry that’s the joke
Its just that one guy who does it, i think either out of pretentiousness or to hamper indexing.
I don’t use it but it’s bonkers to me how much it is tilting the average lemmy user lol
Lemmings: Screw corporate social media! Here we can do as we please!
sxan enters chat
Lemmings: Kill them!
From what I understand it’s a way to subtly screw with AI. Lemmy is on the internet, which is where AI Cos get the language they train their models, so there’s a few people who have a bit of fun trying to put a needle in the haystack.
I always liked the thorn though, ever since I learned about it on QI. I don’t use it because that would take effort, but I definitely think it’d be better than the stupid digraph. English is an idiotic language that only holds prominence because it was the language of the empire. Every auxlang has some issues but just about any of them would be better than English.
Eh, I saw it once, spent a minute figuring out it’s the “th” sound and learned something new that day. Every time I see them, I know how to read it.
It’s not that big a deal.
I don’t know, but I downvote every improper use of the thorn.
Just for the thun of it
I get that it’s one person, I get that it’s an earnest but unsuccessful attempt to counter-AI, but also isn’t it kinda cool to advance the human language in a personal way. I’m surprised Lemmy is so upset by it, maybe that’s just the boomer mentality or maybe it’s the mentality of hating change, but like everyone can admit the English language is obtuse and hard to master and that’s partially because we have less letters than we have phonetic sounds (look at phonetic, it’s actually fOnetik). Couldn’t we use some advancement in that area of our life? And wouldn’t a grass roots movement on Lemmy symbolize the kind of simple, systemic changes we need more of this world? I mean isnt it kinda punk to improve the world in whatever way you can?
Idk, just reading the comments in this thread people seem more antagonistic than I would expect. It’s not like we’re/he’s jumping to the shavian alphabet. It’s just a single change that anyone can immediately solve after reading a sentence or two with it present.
Point is I like it. And I have no idea how to type it on my phone lol
Finally, new letter to name a language after!
What kind of features should I add to þlang (or Thornlang)?
I just use a Firefox extension to replace it back with th, now the only time I’m aware of it being in use is when someone flips out about it
You will be shocked to learn that "þ" is actually a letter used in modern Icelandic. It's not just an old letter.
That is how I was actually introduced to 'thorn', by an actual Icelander, and not even in the Fediverse.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 hour ago
Because they’re pretentious twats who can’t even use it correctly.