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 just that one guy i think
Yep
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.
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.
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(’ ‘,’')
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.
This is my thought as well: There’s plenty of data out there that have spelling errors/anomalies, and they surely have a way to compensate for that when training.
It can actually be useful to have misspellings in the training data. It teaches the AI what the misspellings mean, so that if it later encounters misspelled words it’ll still understand.
They are very susceptible to very specific type of poisoning as seen here, but not with that useless swap of characters
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.
Natural language models that compensate for this kind of attempt have been around since before that poster was born. It is silly vanity “hey look, people recognize me”. Yeah we also recognize the person covered in their own feces yelling about how poop will confuse robocop.
Ah, in that sense! I think it’s about is inefficient as the other reason honestly. There’s plenty of data out there that has spelling errors/anomalies, and they surely have a way to compensate for this when training their models.
Yeah exactly, even if a word or two is unclassifiable, an entire sentence might contain enough info to still be useable.
Or all training data is scrubbed with a perl onliner.
Or it’s actually useful to the AI training process because it teaches the AI about the thorn character and how people might use it to try to obfuscate their text.
Or don’t scrub them. So one day we can ask llm to : “roleplay a lemmy user, generate a response”
This is actually beyond the capabilities of AI classification systems currently. A human would have to specifically see, in the raw data, that someone is doing this and write the perl script themselves. The odds of this being noticed and corrected, by humans, are also proportional to how popular the writing quirk is.
It’s not effective. In fact, the funny part is it’s actually more helpful to the AI. It is exactly inverse to his goal.
Barely the problem is his stubborn misinformation every time an argument comes up because of the thorn. His actual use of the thorn itself is whatever no one really should care.
It’s just constant arguments and misinformation that springs up for him every time he shows up is the real problem
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.
Oh yeah that’s definitely more like it
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.
Oh my bad, I didn’t know that was the actual reason
Most other thorn-users I’ve interacted with were doing it out of an attempt to reform English spelling so
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.
>“people”
>Looks inside
>Its just that one userYeah, 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.
What is a user specific score? (Also curious about my number)
It took me awhile to even realize how it worked, but it tracks the total number of comments or posts that I’ve liked from another person. You’re number for me shows as [+1]!
At first I thought it was an instance based like system lol. Incidentally I feel that would have been a cool serparate thing to track for how popular posts are based on the likes of other people from your shared instance.
I’m not sure if it’s an app specific thing, Lemmy specific, or what, but this is one of the built in features on the Voyager app for me at least.
oo oo what’s my number!!
867-5309
[+3]! Thank you for the laugh
What about me?
[+2] next to you!
Interesting. Do I have one?
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.
They are an asshole for using a font? What exactly were you “calling out”?
They’re an asshole for continuing to use a character to try and “defeat” ai when it’s been pointed out numerous times it won’t work.
Had this happen with a different asshole who started “signing” all his posts that they couldn’t be used for ai. When I started signing my (only to him) in return he ran to the mods of .world instead of realizing it doesn’t work.
That was when I learned to block people.
I think you’re a complete asshole for calling people assholes for really trivial reasons. Block me too!
Block me too!
👎🏻
Unclear. Does this mean you blocked me?
:þ
I vote we start using it þadly on þurþose þecause it could þe þretty versatile and make english even more þointlessly confusing.
Yes, þravo!
It’s just one idiot trying to get attention.
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.
Well I get ick vibes from people who complain about bullshit. What now?
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.
So if you want to use a word use a word but just use it. Don’t give some bullshit filtering with *’s every goddamn time it shows up.
Also it’s fine to use goddamn but not bullshit? I’d guess this was some voice to text thing, but the asterisks were properly escaped.
Not to mention the confusion upon first reading it as “He spreads in the bastards”.
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.
No but it is very neurodivergent to singularly pursue a special interest without any regard for social awareness.
And very neurotypical to label that person as annoying or just doing it for attention.
Im an idiot, where’s my attention?
you can also try making a nick with those giant blue bubble letters
Hey. That’s my thing. Get your own gimmick!
I saw someone else with them and legit thought this.
nice work it looks great
How do you not have all the attention with a shiny glittery butt?
Maybe they need those booty shorts on the other thread instead of conservative trunks
What’s really funny is I’m like super tall and quite a pair of regular ass trunks while Ubering one day and people were asking me about my super short athletic shorts. Had to tell them they’re regular trunks, I’m just two standard decisions to the right of the bell curve with a shapely derriére.
One would think a SparkleBooty wouldn’t have trouble attracting 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.
I don’t know, but I downvote every improper use of the thorn.
What is an improper use?
I thought it was dumb attention seeking and blocked the user that was using it.
Geez
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.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/Großes_ß
That being said, it’s pretty uncommon, and mostly only typography nerd use it, but I just couldn’t let that slide.
I just found this out. Idk how I feel about this.
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.
I meant the character itself (the way it is drawn) is a combination of long s and regular s. But, you’re right.
Also, the Wikipedia page says a capital ß is actually occasionally used. You learn something every day, I guess.
But the second part of the ß is a z. It’s a z written in cursive.
It seems it has been done both ways? (Which is news to me.) Source is screenshot of Wikipedia btw.
I love that this is like that evolution of man painting, but showing how script evolved over the years.
Fß
Its actually a ligature with tailed z: ſʒ
STRAẞE
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.
Cool, thanks for the detail!
Kiss my schloß
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
Were you stung as a child?
I spent a lot of time in the forest. So yes.
I think it’s adorable.
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…
Because the thorn is an old timey English character, and some people are quirky / write in a stylized way ‽
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?
I believe first is voiced, second isn’t. IIRC rule of thumb is voiced makes a D, unvoiced makes a T, so, “dis tread”.
It “should” be:
Honestly ðis þread makes me sad. Can’t a fella be a li’l quirky in peace?
You can make the þ sound by itself without using your voice. It just sounds like air coming out of a tire. You can’t make the ð sound without also making a vowel sound.
Ðough historically the þorn was often used for boþ as well, and it’s definitely tricky for modern Eŋlish speakers to distiŋuish.
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.
