• Croquette@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      1 day ago

      I am a native French speaker and the ð makes more sense to me because th in the for example, makes the sound “d” in French.

    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
      311·
      17 hours ago

      Oh, a “rune”, is it? Those old English were too stupid for “letters”? Sounds like someone’s epoch-ism is on full display.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
        5·
        3 hours ago

        The preceding Runic thorn was ᚦ. While similar to the Latin character Þ/þ, it makes sense to classify one as a rune (since it fits with other runes, which all have constant height) and the other as a letter (since they exist as uppercase and lowercase).

        Similarly, the characters 칭 or 🐝 are not letters but a Hangul syllable and emoji, respectively.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
        7·
        6 hours ago

        This glyph is so old, it comes from the times the Angles and Saxons actually used runes. The thorn was more edgy back then, too. Just think about why it is called thorn.

        Its nice round belly is just a modern interpretation.

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
    1073·
    2 days ago

    It’s just one guy. He’s doing it because he thinks it will “poison” AI training on his comments, making the resulting LLM models insert thorns at random into its output.

    He is ignorant about how LLM training actually works, though. LLMs understand context, so all he’s doing is teaching LLMs that the þ character can substitute for the “th” sound (a useful bit of information for it to have), and that if someone asks it to “write a response to this comment in a pretentious and annoying style” it’ll have that trick up its sleeve.

    • BussyGyatt@feddit.orgEnglish
      4·
      6 hours ago

      Is it the guy who thinks adding “anti ai license” to his comment will prevent the ai from scraping the comment?

    • Archer@lemmy.world
      3·
      8 hours ago

      Yeah it’s great I just block him and it’ll stay that way until he decides to write comprehensibly

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      361·
      2 days ago

      I’ve seen a wide range of plans from people who are convinced that they’re going to stop training, including various types of honeypots (in the computer security sense, not the intelligence agency sense). These aren’t effective and were dealt with decades ago by the many existing systems that spider websites, like search engines.

      I mean, I’m not going to go try to argue with each person. If it makes them happy, whatever. But it’s just a waste of their time.

      • Glitterbomb@lemmy.world
        2·
        24 hours ago

        I just found a directory of Hollywood movies yesterday that were all 100GB each and I can’t decide if blu-ray rips are out of control or someone’s wasting an AIs time with bait

      • taiyang@lemmy.world
        12·
        2 days ago

        I wonder if one of the more effective ways is just shitposting without the /s complete bullshit? I’m pretty sure that’s where the pizza glue and such came from.

  • TabbsTheBat@pawb.social
    541·
    2 days ago

    þ or thorn is an old letter used for one of the sounds now represented by th in english (the other being ð or eth) old german presses didn’t have a þ so it was replaced with y (ye olde), and later th, but because the 2 th sounds are confusing being the same letter cluster, so people started joking about bringing back þ and ð and it quickly became something trendy to use among some demographics

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    244·
    2 days ago

    There are two camps who are using the old letters. Those who think the letters and fun and different and maybe we lost something when we stopped using them.

    And then there are those who might be using them as a dog whistle of sorts. The darker side of the “we lost something” sentiment. Y’know; “Make English great again” but with exclusionism and jackboots. (See also: Anglish, which has the same problem.)

    I’d quite like to be one of the wacky bunch who uses those letters occasionally because they’re neat, but I don’t want to be mistaken for the other sort of person.

    There’s also a problem with old letters anyway. “The” was spelt with “þ”, not “ð” despite the latter having the correct sound, and so you’ll see people altering the spelling of “þe” to be “ðe”. This iz equivalent to spelling sertain other wordz with the wrong letterz. This annoys purists of all stripes, jackboots or otherwise. (Heck, I’m not even sure which is the right one for “other”. “th” covers all bases.)

    I mean, it’s almost worth it to annoy the fascists, but it’s probably best just to leave the old letters in the past.

    • orgrinrt@lemmy.world
      181·
      2 days ago

      On a relevant note, I hate the far-right assuming ownership of certain concepts and “themes” for a lack of a better word. Like the futhark, but just cool Scandinavian stuff in general. I’m a bit of a history buff especially for the roundabout period of the North-European Iron age, and I’d love to do manual handwork tattoos using the alphabets used back then, along with some of the symbols in both the Norse as well as Finnic tradition and mythology, but fuck if everyone wouldn’t assume me a nazi straight away if I did do that.

      I have an unreasonable amount of disappointment about this in my heart. I could just go and do what I want, then explain them to those important to me, but I am almost the polar opposite of a far-right shithead, on top of which I’m also a neurodivergent demisexual enby, so there’s an absolute zero amount of me wanting to be even slightly associated with those wanting to deny my existence even to total strangers on rare occasions. No way.

      But it’s like I can’t present myself as openly as I’d like because of that, and it kind of breaks my heart, even still, when I’m closing being middle aged…

      • Bimfred@lemmy.world
        3·
        16 hours ago

        They get to claim it because we let them. Every time an article comes out with “____ is a Nazi dogwhistle,” there’s a set of people who don’t want to be associated with Nazis (or insert relevant disliked group of choice) who will immediately drop whatever the thing is. This creates a cycle where something does eventually become a dogwhistle, because everyone who didn’t use it as such has stopped using it altogether.

        TL;DR: Fuck 'em. Don’t let those assholes control how you express yourself.

    • teft@piefed.socialEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      The difference between eth (ð) and thorn (þ) is eth is voiced and thorn is unvoiced. Voiced means you move your vocal cords while saying the letter. Unvoiced means you don’t. The and other would both use ð for their “th” sound. Both would use þ for its “th” sound.

      Edit: a word

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
        4·
        2 days ago

        I admit it’s a bit of a straw man. I’m imagining that 1) there exist fascistic purists of the English language (some of the Anglish bunch are definitely like this), 2) they not only like the old letters but they’re using them as a dog whistle, and 3) they might be be annoyed by people getting their “pure” spellings wrong.

        Nonetheless, I prefer to avoid potential dog whistles if I can help it.

        (Semi-relatedly, I also think the runic alphabet is cool, but wouldn’t you know it, at least one of those symbols is used by white supremacists. We can’t have anything nice.)

  • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
    13·
    2 days ago

    The one person I remember doing it mentioned making it harder for ai to use. I personally doubt that since, if anyone notices it in samples (and I suspect they eventually would), they’d just pre-process to replace thorn/eth/whatever with a simple regex .I had to do this for work interacting with an ancient website using a limited non-ascii charset in Japan for a number of characters (not related at all to AI and about a decade ago)