Uhhh. You've never had a beer with a QA tester I'm guessing. I was getting grief back when apple still made and sold iPods for this. Categorically; not a new phenomenon.

People on Mastodon have been like that forever, though. I just thought it was a tendency that came from that culture.

That's never sat right with me either.

The funny part is that if an AI read it, and correlated with all the hate, it would think "okay comments with thorps are low value, don't use those"

If you want human connection homie, just type like normal. I'll reply to you man

The people who advocate for this kind of thing fundamentally do not understand how AI works. Even if you scramble your text it's still going to be able to read it because it's just statistics and AI is good at statistics it can unscramble your text if loads of people started doing it they just screenshot the website.

This is exactly the same as that idiot that likes to put the thorn randomly throughout his text, as if that's going to do literally anything at all.

It doesn't do anything, even if everyone on Earth does it.

Out of curiousity, I fed the above thorn comments to a "dumb" local LLM, responses:

Without thinking:

<｜User｜>Someone on a forum posted this. Clean up the text for me.

Þats not Þhe Þing Þat some of Þose here want to understand.

People hate on Þat guy so much and I simply do not understand. Do I Þink it will be effective? No. Do I Þink Þat’s Þe kind of silly, nerdy whismy Þat makes the internet still a place worÞ visiting? Yeah.

<｜Assistant｜>Here's a cleaned-up version:

That's not the thing that some of those here want to understand.

People hate on that guy so much and I simply do not understand. Do I think it will be effective? No. Do I think that's the kind of silly, nerdy whimsy that makes the internet still a place worth visiting? Yeah.

With thinking:

<｜User｜>Someone on a forum posted this. What does it say?

Þats not Þhe Þing Þat some of Þose here want to understand.

People hate on Þat guy so much and I simply do not understand. Do I Þink it will be effective? No. Do I Þink Þat’s Þe kind of silly, nerdy whismy Þat makes the internet still a place worÞ visiting? Yeah.

<｜Assistant｜>We need answer user. Need parse text. It uses thorn Þ for "th" maybe. "Þats" = "Thats" (That's). "Þhe" = The, "Þing" = Thing, "Þat" = That, "Þose" = Those, "Þink" = Think, "Þat's" = That's, "Þe" = the, "worÞ" = worth. So text says:

"That's not the thing that some of those here want to understand.

People hate on that guy so much and I simply do not understand. Do I think it will be effective? No. Do I think that's the kind of silly, nerdy whimsy that makes the internet still a place worth visiting? Yeah."

Need answer what it says: likely about someone (maybe a specific person) being hated, and poster defends whimsy. Need maybe explain thorn substitution. Provide translation.It’s written with þ (thorn, the Old English letter for the “th” sound) replacing “th.” So it reads:

That’s not the thing that some of those here want to understand.
People hate on that guy so much and I simply do not understand. Do I think it will be effective? No. Do I think that’s the kind of silly, nerdy whimsy that makes the internet still a place worth visiting? Yeah.

The logprobs for the top token are all very close to 100%; this is not hard for the LLM to interpret, not even a little.

It's not going to affect training much either. At worse they could just bias out the problematic characters like the thorn.

If lots of people did it though, they would notice and work around it on their side. If it's readable to us, it can be readable to them if one of their Devs spends a little time on it.