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.
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It’s rather amusing to me, a language nerd. I could adopt it in lemmy, not for the usual reasons, but because I love þorn ♥️
Im almost certain it’s trolling with the AI reason as an excuse. It would have very little effect on an AI, which would recognise the character as anomalous and discard it or ignore the comment. The only other person I saw doing it replied with every character replaced with similar nonsense when I stated similar to them. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was their former account as it was a while ago and it was copping bans because of it.
An AI ignoring the comment, or mis-classifying it, is the goal though
My understanding was the goal was polluting training data for AI. Not privacy and having their comments skipped. Point is AI won’t have an issue realising it’s not useful/relevant data. Worst case is minor performance issues wasted on parsing the character.
“People” is one specific person. Sxan or something.
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…
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 blocked that asshole a while back.
Maybe we should join in!
I have seen some others, but I checked the account and they haven’t posted for a year or so. Seems like they quit after they started using alternate characters.
I’ve blocked two people using it so far
It’s not þat bad
Do you remember who the second person was?
I haven’t see this thing since I blocked Sxan
Nope don’t remember
Wouldn’t be surprised if it was an alt of the same user.
Relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/1808/
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
i m@dE THIZ c0Mment wiTh 7h3 133T peRL $cr1PT!!
addr.replace(’ ‘,’')
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.
At this point, my email is in many a
git logon the internet. Good advice otherwise, though.
It looks suspiciously Cyrillic.
Finally, new letter to name a language after!
What kind of features should I add to þlang (or Thornlang)?
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.
Which is weird, because it took exactly 2 seconds to find out that þ equals th by reading an entire sentence, and thereafter one can read the text just about as good as normal text.
People who struggle with þ maybe has other reading issues 🤷Huh, þ apparently autotranslates to th when I try it. That’s funny
The point is that they are doing it purely to be annoying at this point. They have been shown many times, by people who actually work in the model training space, that their stated purpose is not achieving what they want.
But start shaming them publicly and they go whining to the mods or .world who threaten to block you.
Yeah, heaven forbid anyone have fun on the Internet.
if your idea of fun is making it harder for other people to read your posts for no reason other than annoying them.
it made sense at first if they actually believed that this was going to do anything to an AI scraper. But they obviously know by now that that’s not the case.
Were you stung as a child?
I spent a lot of time in the forest. So yes.
I think it’s adorable.
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Lunar Astronaut 1: Heaven forbids that now?
Lunar Astronaut 2: Always has.
Always has
Yeah, I blocked em because it was too annoying trying to parse their posts - and the comments weren’t very contributory anyway
Same. Their comments felt like a mechanism to deliver thorns into my eyeballs, and I said no more.
Harsh! I thought it was just someone with a non-English keyboard that wasn’t configured correctly.
On PieFed, that character is automatically converted to ‘th’.
Not everyone does it, and it’s ahistorical, but I think it’d a cool way to distinguish between voiced (ð) and unvoiced (þ) dental fricatives. Why not have two different symbols for these? Eg: ðe þin faðer þinks about ðis (the thin father thinks about this).
It’s not necessarily hard to type, on my computer it just happens to be AltGr+d (ð) and AltGr+t (þ).
Why not have both
Apart from it being redundant, superseded by th and annoying to read? It being hard to type has never been a complaint that I’ve seen about it.
One of the biggest criticisms of English is how reading a word doesn’t teach one how it is pronounced. So it’s not redundant since it addresses an actual problem.
It was indeed superseded but that doesn’t mean it disappearing was good. Limitations of printing were involved.
It is annoying to read because you’re not used to it. Were you used to it, you’d think “th” annoying. By your logic, everything you’re not already used to is automatically bad.
It being hard to type was a question from OP.
That at least serves a purpose. Or we could use the Shavian characters and slowly transition to a phonetic writing system.
Holy shit that is awesome!
I did not know that was a thing.
Woo conlangs! Woo con… scripts?
English sure is funny sometimes.
They’re being extra.
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
i can just hold ‘t’ on my phone keyboard
5
:(
Damn you Gboard
Dang, I just get a 5. Lol. I should look for new keyboards - I think that’s a thing phones can do? Which do you have? Is that a thing a person knows or can find out lol? Never once thought about my keyboard on my phone. Really big blind spot I got here I’m realizing.
I have an iPhone 13 with stock keyboard 😬 There are some popular alternative keyboards for android, but ive been out of the game too long
No. Fuck that guy.
Why? Is there a history there or is this a you thing?
They’re lot advancing jack shit; they’re trying to game an ai that is radically smart then they are, and ai is pretty stupid.
I don’t feel like you’re engaging with the concept as a whole, and are far more interested in either the specific reason a single person is doing this OR more likely just taking the opportunity to call someone dumb to make yourself feel good.
The reality is it’s probably not doing anything meaningful to AI data, but it is still an interesting concept from a language perspective. There’s no reason to get this worked up about something so trivial as combining the “th” sound into one character.
I take no delight in calling someone dumb.
The reality is it’s probably not doing anything meaningful to AI data…
Then why do it at all?
but it is still an interesting concept from a language perspective.
Why?
Read the fuckin thread you’re responding to dude. I make a case for why to do it and why it’s interesting. That’s what I’m saying, you’re going in guns blazing on such a simple, minor concept that you appear to be not thinking rationally.
Haters gonna hate.
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 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.
I’m not into antagonizing him for it but I am blunt about it. That user has been made aware that it makes their comments harder to read for users AND that it’s not poisoning AI but they do it anyway.
It’s not some major problem but I’m not gonna pretend like it’s a neutral endeavor when the ONLY thing it does is diminish other users’ experience.
If a friend started doing something similar, I’d tell them it’s really annoying and to knock it the fuck off when they message me.
I get that it’s irritating, I also thing it frankly doesn’t really matter that much, and this space is a precious escape from the shittiness of the outside world.
Ridicule makes this space worse. It normalizes a way of engaging with one another that poisons culture of the place we “live”. It’s is bad for us, collectively, to be dicks over stuff that really doesn’t matter much. Block them and move on.
I also find it grating, but this space is full of eccentrics with weird ideas, and I’d much rather not spend my time in this space angry and trying to reach someone who doesn’t care what I think, over a thing that doesn’t matter, and if we normalize that form of engagement it makes the whole platform worse, in addition to just filling me with bitterness and resentment over a thing that really isn’t that important
(I’m responding to the broad sentiment I’ve seen across many replies, not just you, I can understand the sentiment behind telling people they’re being irritating. But I’m also replying to the parts of the discussion here with the guy who said we should go back to shaming people for being idiots. That sounds like a good way to make this space toxic, unwelcoming and shitty over minor disagreements.)
Eh. I remember a time on the Internet where L33T SP34k was a thing. I look at the thorn as something similar.
It is a stylistic choice that, even if it doesn’t poison AI inputs, is acceptable in Internet forums like Lemmy.
Correct. It is acceptable for a forums website such as lemmy. Just as it is also acceptable to be ridiculed for the fact that your stated beliefs are verifably incorrect.
I dont think theyre making fun of him for doing it, no one cares. Theyre making fun of him because the reason he gave simply doesnt work.
I add “Huggggz” to the end of each of my comments, someone asks and i say that I figure it should make me rich. The logic there… isnt. That would open me up to ridicule.
Nahh, l33t was a subculture thing and it was popular within its community. Using it on a general forum (like Lemmy) would get you more shit than this guy’s getting. Probably some slurs thrown your way, too.
They are the one being antagonistic here by using a “style” they know annoys most people.
I think they just get off to farming the downvotes.
I don’t know. I look at it as a lot of people on Lemmy complain about how “normal” people force them to act in a certain way and, just in the choice of using a depreciated letter of the alphabet, they are getting hated on for not acting in the conformist manner on Lemmy.
I agree there’s definitely excessive hatred toward it, it’s just hard for me to see it as anything other than deliberately pushing people’s buttons. It does not accomplish their stated goal, it’s just annoying to read.
I was going to compare it someone mumbling so “the hidden microphones can’t understand” but even that has some merit.
Now I feel like it sounds like I’ve got some vendetta against them…I don’t mean it that way. I’m just ADHD overexplaining.
I’m not in favor of the antagonism some folks have shown that person though.
Same here
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We are the super version of humanity after all
Some kind of over people if you will
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If everyone used the thorn at scale, it would be incorporated into the English language. However, if only a few people use it, I can see it poisoning their inputs.
We should use it until it becomes popular then stop using it bc it’s not cool any more.
I’m not in favor of the antagonism some folks have shown that person…
We should go back to publicly shaming idiots. But try that on .world and the mods threaten to ban you.
It really doesn’t matter that they’re using the thorn, and going around being shitty to people on the basis that they’re weird and have confused ideas sounds like a perfect way to taint the culture of this space with the same bitterness and cruelty that is so ever present in other spaces online.
Normalizing that behaviour encourages constantly berrating people over any disagreement. When you look at spaces where that is normalized, people are often not in the right when they berate someone, but it’s the standard mode of operation. Look at league of legends all chat. I don’t want that for this space.
I think your idea is painfully ill considered and significantly more harmful than using the thorn or whatever, but I’m not going to call you a dreadful worthless moron over it and encourage that we all tell you how stupid you must be to have a bad idea, because that’s miserable and I care about this space I’m in. Thats not what I go online for.
I’m here because they’re something worthwhile and enjoyable in chatting people online, and that mode of engagement is toxic (to ME, it does emotional harm to ME), and damages this space that I care about
Because they’re pretentious twats who can’t even use it correctly.
For fun.
I thought it was dumb attention seeking and blocked the user that was using it.
