r/MachineLearning - [Discussion] My boss is convinced you can do a SVM using ASCII integer codes as features

Where do I even begin this rant? I am a machine learning intern. We have a labelling problem in which we want to classify strings into category "Something" and category "Not Something". These are not sentences so we can't use any standard NLP library. My boss is convinced we should turn these strings into ASCII codes, in order to make them "non categorical", with each feature being the ASCII code for the character in question.