Ðe question is, wherefore art þou not?
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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Bring back þe þorn!
You just need to get wiþ ðe times
Fr ðough, lemmy has weirdos and I for one support it
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.
It's so fetch.
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.
Oh, this is actually preferable to my initial assumption that they were just doing it to try to appear smarter or cooler or quirkier than everyone else.
I'd totally go for adding a þorn to þe English alphabet.
Where do we put it, þough? And how do we change þe song?
I guess appending a "and þorn" to it would do þe trick
Is it the guy who thinks adding "anti ai license" to his comment will prevent the ai from scraping the comment?
It's a different user
It might confuse subsequent consumers of said content, though. And that's a good thing.
Yeah it’s great I just block him and it’ll stay that way until he decides to write comprehensibly
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.
Sadly in this dudes case it just makes it impossible for people with even readers to hear his comment, and like myself, it's just difficult and jarring to see at all making reading it a pain
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
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.
I thought it was just one person.
Same.
Shows how observant I am lol. Well, I guess I have very similar interests to that person then.
This is one reason I like user notes (or tags depending on your client). I added the note "uses thorns" to that person and now I always know whether it's them or the trend is becoming more widespread.
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
Thank you!
~~thank~~ þank you
FTFY
if this trend goes on a while I'll adjust but until then that is going to read as pank/bank which transforms into a shorthand for spank bank.
it's like when /hj was going around and i read it as "end handjob" even after i looked up what it was supposed to mean.
TIL about being half-joking
I don't know what /hj means but I'm just going to roll with end handjob because that is entertaining.
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:þ
Kilroy?
unironically the most convincing argument i've seen yet for thorn
Yeah, but not sure if it's a tongue or a beak.
Not everyone. Ignore. Keep rollin'.
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.
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…
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.
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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)
Seen few peops use it . Always seen it as just typing quirk (more|less)
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