• lost_faith@lemmy.ca
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      12 days ago

      I think they use that to poison AI scrapers, someone that uses this said that a while back

      • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
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        12 days ago

        Nope, it’s been a thing before the current LLM boom

        Basically, þ (thorn) was a letter in Old and Middle English (and s still used in Icelandic) that represents the “th” sounds in “the” or “through”. There’s a community of people who believe replacing the digraph “th” with Þþ improves the English spelling system by making it more efficent

        “þ” is the most common of these spelling changes, but ð is also seen, and occasionally other letters

        It ties into a whole thing called English spelling reforms, where the spelling system of English is modified to improve it, often by making the letter-sound connection clearer

        • MasterBlaster@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Huh, this is the first I heard of this. So, Thunar rune in English. Nifty.

          Seems a bit odd to me, but I understand the idea.

          OTOH, using this in typed correspondence would actualally make it harder to type for native English speakers as we’d have to insert special characters. This would require either a mouse menu interaction or a Unicode entry and a program that can translate that to the right glyph.