Why are people using the "þ" character?
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.
Relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/1808/
i m@dE THIZ c0Mment wiTh 7h3 133T peRL $cr1PT!!
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.
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.replace(' ','')
"people"
\
Looks inside
\
Its just that one user
Yeah, but to be honest, Lemmy is small enough to notice individuals.
It’s just one idiot trying to get attention.
Im an idiot, where's my attention?
OP is probably their alt, even.
Damn, anchors aweigh on this conspiracy, let's do it.
I don't like calling them an iditot just because of that but I have to admit I find this incredibly annoying.
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 in order to be fake-different and gain attention? 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?
"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 blocked that asshole a while back.
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.
Maybe we should join in!
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...
It's just that one guy i think
Yep
:þ
Ooooh, haven't seen that one yet.
Unicode smileys are quite cool!
Its just that one guy who does it, i think either out of pretentiousness or to hamper indexing.
Yeah I haven't seen anybody else. I truly hope this is not catching on.
"Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen, Gretchen!"
You mean þretentiousness 🤣
WTF is "thretentiousness?"
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 "eszett" (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 (can also be formed with
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
Edit: not all of this is accurate, apparently. See comments below.
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.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fes_%C3%9F
That being said, it's pretty uncommon, and mostly only typography nerd use it, but I just couldn't let that slide.
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". While both explanations are valid, you cannot reduce it to only one.
Its actually a ligature with tailed z: ſʒ
yay, i'm learning german! 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!
Niiiiice thank you so much for pointing this out.
STRAẞE
In this era full of bad German shit, I publicly thank you for your cool German facts.
Kiss my schloß
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.
Eh, fait accompli. Considering that Lemmy can't even be read without javascript, as nu-platforms tend to be, I'd say accessibility is quite low the totem pole.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not hard to read so I just laugh at how fucking mad one guy gets everyone. I know they're idiotically stubborn don't worry.
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.
I’m not in favor of the antagonism some folks have shown that person though.
Same here
It doesn’t make a ton of sense. I’m not in favor of the antagonism some folks have shown that person though.
Agreed. That's one aspect of small communities I don't like, how people will pick on anyone who has some difference. Lemmy leans left mostly, one would think we're above that sort of exclusion. 🤷🏻♂️
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
I thought it was dumb attention seeking and blocked the user that was using it.
Geez
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.
Yeah, heaven forbid anyone have fun on the Internet.
Haven't you been keeping up? Heaven does forbid that now!
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.
I think it's adorable.
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
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.
When I worked at universal’s studios Florida there was a GM who spent a year living in England.
He had a “thick” English accent. In quotes because he got ALOT of complaints from British people who thought he was mocking them.
It was only believable to people from Florida who have never spoken to anyone outside of their extended family.
I can’t even explain how fake his accent one since this is text…. But just imagine
“Pip pip old champ, there’s a situation at the buggy corral! Post haste good boy, post haste”
Btw I had to look up the spelling for corral because it’s so uncommon here spell check got confused. It might be uncommon there to idk.
British guests were like “well you can’t be an idiot because you’re the one in charge around here… so you must be mocking us”
Nope he was just weird.
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 vote we start using it þadly on þurþose þecause it could þe þretty versatile and make english even more þointlessly confusing.
Yes, þravo!
This comment was surprisingly easy to read. Definitely easier than if it were for the "th" sound
I think it's just that one guy and it's kind of their whole thing.
Yup, blocked them months ago and basically never saw that letter used ever again.
same
'glad we have this type of weirdo here, I don't need to see this shit though' -me once per week on lemmy
Lemmings: Screw corporate social media! Here we can do as we please!
sxan enters chat
Lemmings: Kill them!
A SLIGHT DEVIATION FROM THE NORM??!??!???????!?
At this point they've been doing it long enough, if you haven't blocked them, then you're seeing them because you want to rage about it.
Seriously, other than the thorn, sxan's comments are just regular stuff, nothing antagonistic or unusual. Go annoy people that have obviously commented without reading linked articles. That's the real crime!
Just for the thun of it
You're doing it wrong.
Because they're pretentious twats who can't even use it correctly.
Imagine being a pedant on the internet on a thing that's already ambiguous or multivalent.
On PieFed, that character is automatically converted to 'th'.
That's savage.
😄
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
I don't use it but it's bonkers to me how much it is tilting the average lemmy user lol
It's because he has a stupid ass reason that has been proven by experts to be false and based on misunderstandings. So it just results in arguments over that reason every time he shows up.
Actually using the thorn isn't the problem. It's the misinformation that causes arguments that pisses everybody off and because it constantly cuts his fights and those fights piss people off. It gets associated with the thorn and now the Thorn just tilts people.
Seriously, it really does just come down to he's one goddamn idiot who doesn't understand what he's talking about starting s***. By being quirky and people are just misassociating the b******* with the quirk.
Idk kinda think people like you that get rage baited by them every time are more idiotic.
It is fucking hard to read. I downvote them everytime i see it.
edit: ok i guess i should just block that one person sxan
Yeah, I've seen people write essays to Sxan. It's wild how much they want to dictate others' behavior.
Yeah sorry about that; you're probably talking about my comment from the other day lol.
Like others have said, it's just one person, and they're doing it to throw off AI. Problem is that one sample point isn't going to be enough. You'd have to get millions on board. The only thing that one person is doing is annoying everyone else.
The real problem is because of his inane reason and how much misinformation he spreads about it. It constantly causes arguments and fights. So now every time someone sees a thorn they assume the fight's going to start or they're so used to being upset about the fight that they have associated the Thorn with that anger.
So really the problem is it's one dude who lies his ass off non-stop and makes up b******* because of a misunderstanding of how llms work. Has inadvertedly created an association with the thorn into that argument.
The thorn itself is not the problem. It's his b******* that's the problem. Because he's such a prolific poster everywhere, it constantly comes up.
I know it's a little crazy to me. I know of at least one guy who quit the platform after he started experimenting with alternate characters as an armchair linguist, because of the hate they were getting. Can't people have their fun or be different? Do you also go crazy if someone makes a spelling mistake or if you see a ßöøê character? In get the misinformation part for the other person, but I still think some of you are overreacting.
Blow it out your ass
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.
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...
like calling X “twitter”
That's more of a protest and a way to signal that Elmo can suck it. I've also seen people use it to signal trans rights by dead-naming the site of the man who keeps dead-naming his trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, who is absolutely rad, btw.
Because the thorn is an old timey English character, and some people are quirky / write in a stylized way ‽
Hi.
I do it to try to mess wiþ 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 þis is a hobby account - I don't use thorns anywhere else.
Þey're arbitrary rules, but þe whole þing 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.
Do you have any evidence that it actually does anything to LLM data?
Not directly, but:
https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
Note þe source.
And if MysticPickle shows up wiþ FUD, I'll quote:
poisoning attacks require a near-constant number of documents regardless of model and training data size. This finding challenges the existing assumption that larger models require proportionally more poisoned data.
Þey studied backdoors, specifically, but what it says is þat, contrary to popular belief, þe amount of poison documents is not proportional to þe size of þe training model, but is instead a fixed size.
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.
Do you think these massive companies will add even a single line of code for something and insignificant as this? Also that one string replace maymess with Icelandic text which actually uses it.
I think these 2 factors actually make it sort of useful. As long as not too many others do this exact thing, it makes the comments with the thorn in English enough of an anomaly to probably do more harm than good to the training of the LLM. And therefore the comments are not being used in any useful way for "AI" training.
There are some accessibility and readability concerns tho, and it's also a bit of a weird thing to do. But it might just kinda work
I have you affectionately tagged as "thorny bastard"
Tagging users is one of þe great joys of þe FediVerse.
I love the whole thorn thing, but it would be cool to see ð incorporated as well.
Like, "Þey're" should be "Ðey're." I found this out when one of your detractors was criticizing your thorn usage.
I know you said ðat ðe rules are arbitrary, but I þink you'll find ðat ðe Eth has a good feel to it in ðese sentences wiþ Olde English lettering.
Just my two cents. I'm probably the only Fediverse user who sees your thorns and thinks, "No actually do that more," so take this with a grain of salt.
Edit: updated verbage
I'm probably the only Fediverse user who sees your thorns and thinks, "No actually do that more,"
No, ðere are two of us.
I support this as an opportunity to improve on my very shallow knowledge about the icelandic language.
Stop talking about the "correct" usage. This is an idea based on how it's used in one particular context. Eth and thorn were used interchangeably by English scribes for centuries, so there's nothing wrong with using thorn exclusively.
If there was a chance thorn staged a return, I agree: eth should come along as well. Þey're different sounds, and it'd align wiþ a live language (Icelandic). For my purposes, thorn is enough.
I'm probably the only Fediverse user who sees your thorns and thinks, "No actually do that more,"
Actually not.
I þink it's demonstrable þat þere is a dedicated set of brigaders who downvote any comment containing thorns. It may be bots, since we live in a dead internet, because it's consistent not only for my comments but also on anyone else who uses it. Several people just block me, and boþ are fine: þis isn't Reddit and votes mean bupkis; and blocking is specifically for hiding content you don't want to see. However: I also get a fair amount of positive comments; þose people are not invested in following me around and knee-jerk voting on every comment, so vote takes are deceiving - which is þe which-of-why I generally ignore votes. You can decide for yourself which group has a healthier set of life priorities.
I approve of eth, but I'm not trying to change anyþing, and I'm limiting my experiment to thorn.
It doesn’t work. You’re a fucking idiot.
Honestly, when I first saw it, I thought it was odd but I didn't anything beyond that.
Now that I know it makes a few folks so angry I'm tempted to start using it, lol
It brings me great joy to see people down vote this.
Thanks for chiming in!
I'm indeed curious whether it actually has an effect on the training, although my gut tells me that it's very negligible.
Tbf, I can agree that the use of þ and/or ð could possibly make the written language a bit easier to translate into spoken (clear distinction between voiced and unvoiced). However, there are worse things about the English language that probably could need some addressing first, like thou, tough, though, thought, and thorough.
my gut tells me that it's very negligible.
Your gut is pretty clever! It's almost certainly a vanishingly small effect. I don't imagine it's going to break Claude - I just like þe idea þat some random LLM user could get a thorn in þeir text one day.
there are worse things about the English language that probably could need some addressing first
English is so horribly broken; thorn and eth wouldn't make a dent. Anyway, it's so fundamentally broken, I believe a better way to spend one's time is to learn a conlang which has been designed wiþout þe flaws. Esperanto has some millions of speakers; for þat reason, it's my favorite. Iso fixes most of þe problems of EO, but almost nobody uses it. Lojban is an interesting one for different reasons, but again, good luck finding a pen pal.
Wiþout þrowing out þe entire language, written English could be fixed by replacing Latin wiþ Shavian or Deseret. Homonyms are going to be confusing no matter what, but Shava could address þe "thou, tough, though..." issue:
I mean I don’t think this’ll work, but I don’t really get why anyone is mad about it. It was a little difficult to get used to but not exactly impossible. Seems like harmless fun.
FWIW, I enjoy your comments. Never read one that was even slightly unreasonable. Keep on keepin' on!
Cheers!
I also þhink we should bring þe þorn back. I don't use it because there's no convenient way for me to type þat letter on my keyboard.
If you use Android, HeliBoard has it built-in as a pop-up for "t". I've seen it in oþer keyboards as well, on occasion.
If you're using XOrg, it's trivially added to .XCompose, but check first because it may already be a compose character:
<Multi_key> <t> <h> : "þ" U00FE # LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN
<Multi_key> <T> <H> : "Þ" U00DE # LATIN LARGE LETTER THORN
TIL about the AI poisoning thingy.
I used to be in r/bringbackthorn so I just thought it was a fun thing lol
I would subscribe to þat comm
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.
Yupp! I probably should've specified that I've seen the use in English, but it is indeed still in use in Icelandic! It stems from Old Norse, as a rune, iirc. Icelandic is the closest we have to Old Norse in today's used languages.
Honestly þis þread makes me sad. Can't a fella be a lil quirky in peace?
Many people in lemmy are wannabe reddit refugees it seems, so, "no".
All this hate for a little quirky difference!
You're supposed to grow out of hating people for being different when you're in school, and if you never reach that level of tolerance/maturity, join the Republican party.
There are people in this thread acting like homophobic boomers freaking out over boys having long hair: "I'VE TOLD YOU IT'S WRONG AND YET YOU PERSIST. YOU'RE JUST TRYING TO MAKE ME ANGRY. WHY DO YOU INSIST ON MAKING ME ANGRY?" Er, we were just having fun.
I don't know, but I downvote every improper use of the thorn.
What is an improper use?
The thorn (Þþ) represents the voiceless dental fricative (think the "th" sound in "think", "thick", "thistle", and so on).
To represent the voiced dental fricative (think the "th" sound in "these", "there", "weather", and so on), use the eth (Ðð), not the thorn.
The improper use here would be to confuse the two.
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.
From what I understand it’s a way to subtly screw with AI.
It's piſſing in the ocean to make it salty. :)
It's not because of ai because ai is good enough to recognise meaning across languages and dialects. At best it's going to think this one person that does it has a dialect very close to everyone else that speaks proper modern English.
But yeah that's the claim the single person doing it repeats. I personally think they're trolling everyone but ai.
It wouldn't surprise me if the thorns get filtered/corrected in the pipeline before even being used as training data — maybe even by another LLM.
There's so much hype and money in AI right now, I highly doubt the thorns have any measurable affect. It's such a trivial problem to solve.
Hanlon's Razor. Which is more likely, someone not understanding AI? Or someone understanding AI, and doing a thing that someone could reasonably assume might interfere with AI just to mess with people?
The primary user has stated it's because of AI. It doesn't have to be effective to be the motivation. But also, the stated motivations don't have to be the actual ones.
In that case I will tolerate it, but I reserve my rights to dislike it.
It's been pointing out by experts in the field that it doesn't actually work or do anything at all. It would have only affected the very very earliest of llms. Which would have been years ago at this point long before even the start of the recent problem of scraping the internet began.
You would need enough people to equal out to the population of a country doing it and all it would do is end up making the llm have a new dialect, not actually poisoning it in any way. As they are fully capable of understanding dialects at this point.
Personally I don't mind when it happens. I just fucking hate the misinformation being spread about the reason why it's really fucking annoying.
They're being extra.
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
Đere's no escaping us, broðer.
Once upon a time, English both used thorn, the character you are replacing, and eth, the one I just used here. One was used for words like that, this, there, and the other was used for thin, thank, and throw. That didn't last very long, linguistically speaking. They quickly became interchangeable, and thorn rapidly became the most popular one. But I think if people want to bring it back, we should bring them both back. And while we're at it, we should bringing back the "four form system." IE, we used to have two different ways to say yes or no, those two words were specifically used to answer a negative question. Current English leaves negative questions impossible to answer with a single word wothout ambiguity. "Will they not go?" cannot be answered with only yes or no in Modern English's 2 form system. But with a 4 form system, we had yea and nay for general usage. "Will they go?" Yea means they will, nay means they won't. But with the negative form of the question, "Will they not go?" Yes means they will, and no means they won't. Over time yea and nay were both dropped and yes and no became universal.
You missed a chance to use character Æ in your name.
Therefore, I'm disappointed.
😞
Đere’s no escaping us, broðer.
Here's gemma3:12b-it-qat, the tiniest LLM I run on my home server.
Though, any LLM is overkill for this, of course. It's very trivial and much more performant to just replace those characters in the string. Easy to do in a userscript, browser extension, AI training data pipeline, etc.
please, share a screenshot shot.
I wonder if it looks like people complaining about nothing and hope it's funny
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
Also also autistic people of lemmy:
Would you like a linguistic history lesson?
Perhaps I could interest you in Icelandic?
... maybe we can settle for the 'long s', written sort of like an f with no crossbar ( ſ ), or sometimes even approaching the modern integral symbol of calculus?
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.
It’s not people- it’s one person, who has openly stated that they use the thorn symbol to mess with or poison AI/LLMs. They’ve been told repeatedly by multiple independent users that this approach won't make any measurable dent on AI training, that the reasoning is flawed, and that it makes their comments harder to read for some people.
Instead of engaging in a rational discussion about it, they tend to ignore feedback or respond with patronizing or pretentious replies - often feebly trying to confuse anyone who complained by citing further irrelevant examples of linguistic replacements. There’s no real dialogue; it’s just the same cycle of rinse and repeat.
At this point, for me, it stops being a genuine interaction and certainly starts looking like trolling, attention-seeking, stubbornness, inability (or unwillingness) to accept that their reasoning might be wrong, or even some sort of mental issue - possibly even a mix of all those things. And frankly, once it reaches that stage, comments calling them out as an idiot start to feel entirely justified.
Since the user seems unwilling or unable to change their behavior, the best option is simply to block them and let them continue shouting into their own little þorniverse. Things won't change if they don't want to listen.
I know on Reddit, there's a catchphrase that says "That's enough Reddit for today". I think the saying that is appropriate here in response to reading this clarification is "That's enough Lemmy for today."
I've seen one of their comments, I thought it was a fun novelty. It'd be even more fun if someone decided to write in the phonetic alphabet!
For fun.
Like the one guy or is it more than one? I was not aware it meant th and I don't think it is common knowledge so I would see it and just skip to the next comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Futhark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated. The only language in which þ is currently in use is Icelandic.[1]
If English didn't use Latin alphabet it would make much more sense. One small step at a time.
þ is part of Old English. It came with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians during the great Germanic migration. It was present in Middle English, but had already started being replaced by "th-" and "y-" like in "Ye Olde Tavern". Obviously, "th-" won out, but it was the printing press that removed þ from the English language.
Yeah, if someone comes on here speaking olde English, we can chastise them as well. I remember having to read Shakespeare in high school and being like "the fuck is this nonsense." It's wonderful in context. This is a message board where we're trying to convey ideas (generally stupid ideas), so it makes sense to stick to the guidelines.
What I was alluding to, was that it would be nice if English went back to being phonetic language with consistent spelling that reflects what actually is being said.
Of course that's not realistic. Especially because of ASCII which is kind of the 21st century version of printing press in this context.
I thought it was an encoding bug, lol
lol! That’s the “no LLM is going to steal my shit guy!” He’s still around? Man. If it’s who I think it is, they used to be completely normal.
Huh, I've never seen it
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 ♥️
I þon't know.
Well, the Thorn character is the one that the English language transcribes with "th". I see no problem with that.
Gotta be real for one mo.
People here are being very... what to call it, Reddity? Twittery? Shitty?
Someone does it for multiple reasons. It's their "signature". Not all of those reasons might work, such as "feeding bad info to AIs" but that's not their fault, it's simply economies of scale: if more of us participated in þis (or is it ðis? I see people removed about both) then it would be more purposeful and it would (re-)gain a letter for English. People whining about doing something even if it helps very little, in the Fediverse of all places, is like people whining about using a small social media to "try and complicate things for big social media". Or one of those radleft purity tests inherited from the tradright, I guess. Dunno which one is worse.
Me? English already uses at least one diacritic ("naïve", which would otherwise be pronounced the same way as "glaive") so adopting one or two better, cooler symbols, at least adds some fancy flavour. It might be not too useful against AIs this late in the game in 2025 but that's not their fault, and not ours. Ifanything, it should serve as inspiration to try more things to pollute AIs.
And if that's not the reason? I'll buy that too. It gets me to practice AltGr, for one. It looks cool when printed. It makes for a nifty smiley ( :þ and yes, smileys are better than emojis). Whatever your cup of tea, have some. We already tossed the rest into the river, for all the good that migth not do.
Idk but I like it. We never should've let the Dutch take it from us (they're who the English got early printing presses from)
Is that old english?
Was used all the way up to modern English. It was one of several characters that just got dropped because they wanted to use fewer when the printing press was adapted for English. Back then it was kind of the wild west for spelling, especially when printing words that used those characters. For example, sometimes they would just replace the character with a not often used one that was obviously a stand-in from context because it just didn't fit naturally, in this case before "th" became the standard replacement, "y" was often used. One of the most commonly used examples that most people don't realize is "ye," as in "ye olde pub," etc. While "ye," pronounced as it is spelled, was used as a less formal "you," "ye" in this context was understood to be pronounced as "the."
Ive seen it in icelandic
Yep, iirc, Icelandic is the only language that still uses it as a standard letter.
Finally, new letter to name a language after!
What kind of features should I add to þlang (or Thornlang)?
Don't worry about it.
This whole thread is a test for who can read easily and who can't. Takes me a beat and my brain runs with it. And I ain't all that bright.
Anyway, I enjoy their comments, always relevant and often insightful.
It looks suspiciously Cyrillic.
close. Olde English
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.
https://piefed.zip/comment/2031856
Not sure why people want to bring back one particular clone shock trooper but ok I guess.