Jerry

@Jerry@feddit.online

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people using the "þ" character?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I asked Gemini Pro whether the thorn character messes an LLM up? If anyone is interested, here’s the answer. The short answer is it makes it harder for humans to read the text, but LLMs are not bothered by it. So, those who are using the thorn character for “th” believing that it breaks AI are not achieving anything and are just being annoying.

  Gemini Pro’s response: (Note that as I write this in PieFed, the thorn character is being converted to “th” and so you will have to convert it back in your brain.

  The belief that using the character “th” (Thorn) “messes with” LLM training has gained some traction in privacy-focused and “anti-AI” circles. Here is a breakdown of the technical reality behind that claim.

  1. The Theory: Disrupting Tokenization

  Large Language Models don’t read words; they read tokens (numerical representations of character clusters).

  Common Tokens: In standard English, the word “the” is one of the most common tokens. It is highly optimized, and the model “understands” it perfectly.

  The “Thorn” Hack: If you replace “the” with “<thorn>e,” you force the model’s tokenizer to handle a rare character. Because <thorn> is uncommon in English training data, the tokenizer might break “<thorn>e” into two separate, rare tokens (the byte for <thorn> and the letter “e"). Proponents believe this makes the text “invisible” or “garbage” to the model, preventing it from learning from the content or correctly categorizing it.

  1. Does it actually work? (Mostly No)

  While the idea is clever, it is generally ineffective against modern, high-scale LLMs for several reasons:

  Multilingual Training: Most modern models are trained on massive multilingual datasets. Icelandic uses <thorn> as a standard letter. Therefore, the models already have <thorn> in their vocabulary and have seen it millions of times.

  Byte-Level Tokenization: Modern tokenizers (using Byte Pair Encoding or BPE) are designed to handle any Unicode character by falling back to its raw bytes. They don’t “break” when they see an unfamiliar symbol; they just process it as a less-common sequence.

  Contextual Mapping: LLMs are excellent at pattern recognition. If a model sees a sentence like “<thorn>e cat sat on <thorn>e mat,” it can easily infer from the context that “<thorn>e” serves the exact same linguistic function as “the."

  1. The “Glitch Token” Phenomenon

  There is a grain of truth to the “glitching” idea. *In the past, * certain rare characters or specific strings (often called “glitch tokens") were included in a model’s vocabulary but appeared so rarely in the training data that their “embedding” (the model’s understanding of them) was never properly trained.

  When a model encounters a true glitch token, it can sometimes “hallucinate” or produce nonsensical output. However, <thorn> is a standard UTF-8 character and is too common globally to act as a true glitch token for most general-purpose models.

  Summary

  Using <thorn> is more of a digital protest or a linguistic “speed bump” than a functional way to break an AI. It might make your text harder for a simple keyword-search bot to find, but for a modern LLM, it’s just a slightly “noisy” version of English that we can still read and understand quite easily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will LW *PLEASE* do something about that hit-and-run account?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  One option is to switch to a PieFed instance running V 1.3.6. The devs did something about this for PieFed users that should help.

  v1.3.6
  Stop floods of spammy posts from very new accounts on lemmy.world.
  New accounts (< 24h old) from lemmy.world are now limited to 3 posts in their first day.

  V1.3.3
  Automatically delete posts by very young accounts that self-delete.

  piefed.social and feddit.online are two that are running the latest code. I’m sure there are others.

  Yeah, that person is quite annoying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Afghans burnt by UK data leak because someone used email to send a large sensitive dataset -- which email service, anyone know?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It's true. The media often doesn't care about the details, which are the most important bits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Afghans burnt by UK data leak because someone used email to send a large sensitive dataset -- which email service, anyone know?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The article referenced by the article just mentions it was sent to the wrong people. I don't know how this puts blame on any particular email provider.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Alabamians Want Answers About a Four-Million-Square-Foot Data Center Coming to Their Backyards⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It's amazing that a company can get public officials to sign an agreement making it illegal for them to give any information to their electorate about a project that would have a huge impact on them in every possible way. No elected official should ever sign such an agreement. Why would they? But, they did. Corruption is the only reason I can think of.

  And why is there no law against elected officials agreeing to become agents of a corporation against the interest of the electorate? Same answer, probably.

  But all these people were elected by the ones they are hurting. And the electorate most likely elected their leaders based on some emotional non-existent issues instead of picking leaders based on commitment, honesty, and a desire to help people. From what I see from the rest of the country, and we are talking about Alabama here, they may have gotten the government and outcome that they deserve and are actually responsible for their own problem. I think American voters are bringing all of this personal damage upon themselves.

  I'm a disillusioned American, by the way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I've been banned with the reason: "Spammer"⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm glad this got sorted. I know Jeena. I was stunned and confused to hear he was banned for spam. That itself sounds like satire.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You're absolutely right.

  A worse example, pharmacy.amazon.com only uses a 4-digit passcode to log in, and it's a pharmacy site!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I'm stuck in the same area as someone who is clearly sick (runny nose, coughing etc) is there some combo of short/long breaths or nose/mouth breathing that's a better defense against catching it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Everyone is answering about wearing a mask, when the poster clearly makes the point that they don't have one. They can't just poof it from the air. The answers are not helpful.

  The question is about whether shallow breathing and nose or mouth breathing is better. It's a very particular question. An interesting question.

  Does anyone know, with real scientific knowledge, what the answer to this specific question is? Can anyone answer to the specific question?