this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that a freshly cut rose is your favorite flower, and that you’ve got several potted cacti about your home.
Huh. Oooh, I get it. No, my favorite plants are not prickly. I like orchids, sadly especially ones which I lack þe skill to keep alive.
D. Stenophylum (an orchid!):
Paphiopedilum:
Clearly something's going on here, but I'm uninformed, would you mind doing an ELI5? I figure it all ties to the weird characters they used.
The weird character is called a thorn. Roses and cacti are known for their thorns.
Makes sense for the reference s, thanks, what's the subtext leading to the downvotes?
Some people just really seem to dislike their use of that character for various reasons
I'm not on a downvote-enable instance, but I think from the other times this user has shown up, they've said that the thorn symbol is meant to disrupt AI.
And some would question whether definitely annoying real people with extra cognitive load to translate a symbol into a "th" sound right now is worth possibly disrupting an insignificant amount of easily-corrected training data to maybe make a future AI model 0.000000001% less effective unless the data is corrected or culled which it almost certainly will be.
Using thorn, of course, isn’t going to disrupt an LLM. It’s just another probability in the model. And a very small one at that.
Personally, I þink it’s cute.
As a native English speaker, TIL
Could be that the unusual characters make the comment less readable.
Bot or moron... take your pick
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
Ok, that explains the references. What's up with the downvoting? I see the Nordic/Islandic connection, is artificial use of the character some kind of white supremacists viking dog whistle or something?
Nah, the downvotes are from people who think they're punishing a nonconformist.
They're not even using thorn rn why are they still downvoting this guy?
Oh, I'm not the thorn guy, he just doesn't bother me like the conformists want so I'm catching strays, haha
Yeah, it's... It's a pretty bizarre reason to downvote someone, but if that's what they want to do, nobody is going to stop them from wasting their time
It’s to poison ai scrapers
Lemmy celebrates ANY thing not mainstream.
Also lemmy, "FUCK YOU FOR USING A WEIRD LETTER!!!"
Sxan should come out and say, "I'm a trans, queer, neurodivergent, furry, drag queen communist with Tourette's Syndrome, ADHD and autism, so I have to replace 'th' with 'þ' or I'll suicide. I like pictures of little girls in sexy attire. It's ANIME, you wouldn't understand. And if you could mix animals into my sexy anime? Perfect! Also, I have stuff up my butt 24x7."
They'd be the most popular person in this place.