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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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
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.
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.
Lemmings: Screw corporate social media! Here we can do as we please!
sxan enters chat
Lemmings: Kill them!
A SLIGHT DEVIATION FROM THE NORM???
Using thorn: 100 years dungeon!
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!
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.
To be fair in Florida the family can get quite extended.
This was a joke about north Florida.
Not as extended as we’d like
I thought it was an encoding bug, lol
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 bitching 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 (
:þand 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.:þ
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.
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 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.)
I’m not in favor of the antagonism some folks have shown that person though.
Same here
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
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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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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, 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.
Yeah, heaven forbid anyone have fun on the Internet.
I think it’s adorable.
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.
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Always has
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.
I don’t know, but I downvote every improper use of the thorn.
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)
I think it’s just that one guy and it’s kind of their whole thing.
I þon’t know.
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.
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
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.
