Showerthoughts

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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:

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- 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
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When I was a kid, computers expanded your mind and your freedoms, bringing power to the individual. With AI, now it does the thinking for you, takes your job, gives power only to a few billionaires. (lemmus.org)

submitted 6 days ago by realitista@lemmus.org to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world

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When I was young and starting out with computers, programming, BBS' and later the early internet, technology was something that expanded my mind, helped me to research, learn new skills, and meet people and have interesting conversations. Something decentralized that put power into the hands of the little guy who could start his own business venture with his PC or expand his skillset.

Where we are now with AI, the opposite seems to be happening. We are asking AI to do things for us rather than learning how to do things ourselves. We are losing our research skills. Many people are talking to AI's about their problems instead of other people. And they will take away our jobs and centralize all power into a handful of billionaire sociopaths with robot armies to carry out whatever nefarious deeds they want to do.

I hope we somehow make it through this part of history with some semblance of freedom and autonomy intact, but I'm having a hard time seeing how.

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[–] AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I can see it happening there, especially for graphic artists (however actual graphic design is much better than anything a model can currently spit out). Translation is surprising to me, because in my experience, LLMs are actually kind of bad at actual translation especially when sounding natural according to local dialect. So I might consider that one to be a case of dumb bosses that don't know any better.

I'm a DevOps engineer and dumb bosses are absolutely firing in my industry. However, our products have suffered the consequences and they continue to get worse and less maintainable.

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 2 points 5 days ago

As someone who uses machine translation on a daily basis, I've watched it go from being barely usable to as good as human translation for most tasks. It's really uncommon that I find issues with it any more. And even if there is one issue in 1000 words or whatever, you can just have a human proofread it instead of translating the whole thing, it will reduce your headcount my 90%. But I think for most things, no one calls translators any more, they just go to google translate. Translators now only do realtime voice translation, not documents which used to be most of their work.

These things creep up on you. They aren't good and you get comfortable that they don't work that well, and then over time they start working as well or better than humans and suddenly there's really no reason to employ someone for it.