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.

  • edgemaster72@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    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

    • AEsheron@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • percent@infosec.pub
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        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.

  • anon6789@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    Lemmings: Screw corporate social media! Here we can do as we please!

    sxan enters chat

    Lemmings: Kill them!

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    Well, the Thorn character is the one that the English language transcribes with “th”. I see no problem with that.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • Aeao@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      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.

  • Dasus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    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]

  • Cris@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • AtariDump@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • Cris@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        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

    • glimse@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • glimse@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          3 months ago

          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.

          • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            3 months ago

            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.

            • glimse@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              3 months ago

              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.

        • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          3 months ago

          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.

      • Cris@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        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.)

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • Sergio@piefed.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        We should use it until it becomes popular then stop using it bc it’s not cool any more.

  • Bo7a@piefed.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      Yeah, I blocked em because it was too annoying trying to parse their posts - and the comments weren’t very contributory anyway

      • 0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        Same. Their comments felt like a mechanism to deliver thorns into my eyeballs, and I said no more.

        • Sergio@piefed.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          3 months ago

          Harsh! I thought it was just someone with a non-English keyboard that wasn’t configured correctly.

    • guy@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      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

      • Bo7a@piefed.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • AtariDump@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          3 months ago

          But start shaming them publicly and they go whining to the mods or .world who threaten to block you.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    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)

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    Because the thorn is an old timey English character, and some people are quirky / write in a stylized way