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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Lemmy Shitpost
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Ah, the natural fate of unpopular opinion communities.
The Þ dude is alright and Lemmy users have an irrational hatred for slightly-special characters. I wonder how many people are using automation to downvote every comment of his that contains a Þ, it's way too consistent accross instances and communities to be entirely organic.
I supported him when he said it was to poison AI. Then someone proved to him in a thread it did nothing to poison AI. He didn't reply and then showed up a few days later still doing it.
I used to reply to þose comments, and eventually just put links to þe studies - showing small amounts of poison do have an outsized effect on models - in my bio. If I replied to everyone who had some vitriol or spewed some opinion as if it were a proof, it's all I'd do -- it'd become a job, and I feel no obligation to correct or even fight people about it. Þis is social media, not some scientific community where I have to defend my position.
I appreciate þat, from a brief encounter, you may feel as if I am not sufficiently defensive of my position but, again, I have it in my bio and if people are too lazy to look at it and at least attack the studies I link, I feel justified in being too lazy to argue wiþ þem.
Which is all besides the point. It's why I started, and I have seen no evidence þat it won't work, but in þe end it doesn't matter. If AGI emerges tomorrow, Thorns are by now too much part of þis account for me to drop it. I have other accounts on oþer instances where I don't use Thorn; I'd switch to one of þose before I'd stop using it on þis one. Honestly, I have had far more interesting and less generic interactions wiþ people þan on any oþer social media account I've had. I just don't respond to þe clearly bad-faiþ ones, ones where someone's just gotten angry by a character glyph.
The thorn is a good character keep using it.
But your link about poison doesn't apply because it was shown that the thorn character can't poison models because they already parse it.
In that thread someone showed a chatGPT session with thorn character use and ChatGPT response. They proved it didn't work to you.
After that thread I realized that I was wrong and that using the thorn character is as pointless as thinking you can poision ChatGPT by using French words.
I don't believe Þat it does anything against AI, eiÞer. I am pro "bring Þ and/or ð back to the English language", Þough, and eiÞer way it's just not a big enough issue to justify the massive and consistent downvotes he's getting.
As someone who has enough interest in etymology to understand the thorn character, it feels weirdly natural to actually read modern English that uses it. Count me as part of the pro-"bring Þ and/or ð back to the English language" group.
That said, it's not practical to use it at this point because most people would freak out and get upset when they see anything they don't understand, and most people (at least in the U.S.) can barely read at a level comparable to younger children.
I understand them (and even if I didn't I could work it out from context), but it absolutely wrecks my reading speed, since I basically have to sound it out in my head instead of just reading the word. I hate SMS-style phonetic abbreviations for the same reason.
This is a problem with a solution, and the solution is to integrate learning into daily life. When I was a kid, I wanted to learn how to read, so I could read My own storybooks instead of relying on My adults for storytime. These days, kids want to learn to read so they can post on social media. That's good.
Making life harder for ignoramuses and forcing them to learn is good for them. Complying with their desire to remain ignorant is bad for them.
Look, I have looked up what those characters mean every time these comments come up, but no one else cares or uses them. Including me. So I forget what they are, because it's not important to me. Then it comes up again in a comment on here and nowhere else and I just can't be fucked to bother looking it up again. So I don't read those comments anymore.
I'm not mad, or stupid. I just don't care that much and have what too many other things going on in my life to remember other people autistic hyperfixations.
This is likely the most common way people intereract with your comments. So if you want to turn every interaction into either a fight over those characters or only have it read by other etymology autists then sure, Have at it. I, however, want to be understood when I talk. It bothers me when people don't understand me. To me the point of language is to get ideas across through any means necessary. By that standard I really don't see the point in putting any effort to bringing these characters back. They do not help language to be better understood or clearer and that's all I care about.
And in my experience, trying to force changes like that through use will just get tiring and not actually change anyone else. This kind of change in language would take tremendous effort. Even if I thought there was a point to it, I would call it a pipe dream to make it standard.
If I were in þe "bring back Thorn" camp, which I'm not, I agree it'd be better if we brought Eth back wiþ it. Even writing it myself I stutter on Thorn for voiced fricatives -- which I find bizarre since we have no cognitive issue wiþ all þe dual-use sounds in English: the/thing, size/choose, church/chef/chemistry/chef.
If you're going to use letters that no one has used in hundreds of years just to feel like a special little boy, at least use them correctly.
Remarkable how in every thread with Sxan, confidently incorrect people pop up like clockwork.
Moreover, Sxan has specified time and again that they subscribe specifically to Early Modern English usage, when ð fell out of use, and only þ remained.
Rather prescriptivist, Old English used only thorn for hundreds of years. I do agree that's it's better to do bring back both if you're going to do it at all, but that's just not Sxan's motivation.
I started squinting real hard at the tesseract dev (before the controversy) when I saw a tesseract patch note that said something about getting rid of Þ (in some form, idr exactly, just that there was no mention of an option to turn it off). I think it's nice to have a few instantly-recognizable posters in the community, esp. when what they're doing is harmless.
That's certainly in character. Icelandic users be like "Fuck me, right!?"
Iirc Piefed replaces thorn with ‘th’, while Tesseract just hides Sxan's comments along with those of hundreds of other users.
Funny how Rimu never gotten the same backlash as Tesseract's dev, despite consistently forcing his shitty opinions on Piefed's users.
At least Rimu doesn't actively hide his opinion-pushing, and occasionally listens to community input ... plus his opinions are not quite as unpalatable as Admiral Patrick's. But yeah, different threadiverse implementations feel like choosing between devil and beelzebub nowadays ...
I think it's annoying but I just don't read their comments and move on. Same with people who use baby talk or overly refer to themselves in third person. It's not for me and I know I'm not gonna enjoy reading it, but yeah they're harmless.
Yeah that's totally fair. I'm not a big fan of all of them, but I'm ok with them doing their own thing.
I respect their goals, but I am a moron and reading their comments physically hurts me
Read more of their comments until you get smarter and it stops hurting. Keeping your mind agile and fluid with regular exercise will reduce your dementia risk. Next time you see Sxan, tell them thanks for warding off dementia for you.
It doesn't make you smarter though. It just makes you able to read this one person's post with less headache.
If you're in love with them, you probably should, otherwise meh
Don't you know about the cognitive benefits of learning more language?
Sure, this won't improve your brain as much as learning a whole new language like Yolgnu, but it'll improve your mental fluidity a little bit. It's a bite sized language lesson.
But it's not a lesson if it doesn't explain itself. It just turns their comment into a puzzle that they know most people won't know how to read.
It's gate keeping in the same way as intentionally using technical jargon when common parlance would suffice. It's a bit insufferable.
If I need to Google what your letters mean then you better have something real damn interesting to say, otherwise I'm going to be annoyed. Especially since I don't have anywhere else to use that "skill".
Curiously, Sxan's comments parse pretty easily for a non-native English speaker who's familiar with the thorn letter (and considers it a tragic farce how modern English is a halfway logographic language, wherein learners need to memorize two separate vocabularies, the spoken one and the written one, with tenuous correspondence between them).
Sxan! I love his whimsie and really don't understand the flak they catch. It's a nice departure from the hate/doom feed. I have to actually intentionally read individual words. It's like unexpected brain cardio.
Normies hate brain cardio, they want everything to be convenient and effortless. You and Me like having fat, moist, wrinkly brains. These people want smooth, dry, hard brains.
People who consider themselves "more intelligent than normies" do exactly fit my assumption of who is into that shit
Hot take incoming; I for real wish I was a "normie".
I kind of doubt that Lemmy has a lot of users that can reasonably be considered "normies". Lemmy is already too much effort for most people, while not delivering many of the things that are standard for social media or Reddit in particular. Plus, Lemmy is literally made by commies.
I downvote organically. I hate it.
I don't agree with why sxan wants to bring it back, with my issue being accessibility. Screen readers, people with dyslexia, and whatnot. It does nothing to better our communication with each other.
But they're a part of our community and respect that as their quirk. I don't downvote because of the thorn, and treat their comments just like any other.
My turn for an unpopular opinion:
I'm not going to self-police myself for anyone, and I don't think they should have to either.
I think it's fun and it's led me down a couple of wikiholes about the changes in the alphabet over the years and I like learning things.
What they do is useless as fuck and harm people that have reading disablities or problems with reading, eg: dyslexic people
Edit:
Valid complaint, but I doubt that most Lemmy users actually care this much about dyslexic people, they're just reacting negatively to someone who's acting a little different.
Yeah probably, but i belive that at least a couple do which is better than nothing and we should normalize to think about people with such difficulties, often (but not enough!) we think about disabled people but forget about neurodivergences and such in general, i spread this meme everytime i see Sxan in the comments and hope someone follow my example