this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
103 points (89.9% liked)
Showerthoughts
34934 readers
1208 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Someone pointed out that capitalism loves subscriptions and rentals. They can sell you a widget, sure, but then they only get money once. If they can rent you a widget, then they get money forever.
AI is a path for rent skills to people. You don't need to learn to write python or learn Spanish. Just pay for LLM access. Rent the skill.
It is extremely dystopian.
Unfortunately, most people don't care about much of anything. You could tell them, with undeniable proof, that every AI search kills a puppy, and most people would be like "well puppies die anyway and I always use Google, so..."
That would be the case if corporations owned all the LLMs. However, it is possible to run open weights LLMs locally on your one hardware.
It's possible to buy music, too, but most people rent it from spotify. Most people aren't going to do the comparably hard thing of setting up their own LLM.
And even if they did run their own well tuned, ethical, LLM to write letters for them, that still leaves us with the problem of "people aren't developing core skills like writing"
Here's a fun question: Do you own the music you buy on a CD? Or is the CD just the license to listen to music that belongs legally to someone else?
Depends on what you mean by "own".
Buying the CD has a key difference from Spotify in that no one can (typically) take the cd away from you. Music disappears from Spotify all the time. You can also (typically) copy it to other storage. And, most relevant to the topic of rent vs buy, you just pay for it once and you're done. No subscription, no ads. That stuff is important to me.
You can't usually take music you got from a CD and put it in your movie, for example, but that's a whole conversation about fair use and copyright.
I understand completely but your argument is more medium based than ownership based, that was my only real point.