this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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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:
- 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
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- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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steve jobs famously called the personal computer "a bicycle for the mind", in that it's a tool that makes you more efficient. calling language models "an automobile for the mind" in that it gets you there very quickly, without any expended effort, locks you into specific intrastructure, and is bad for the environment, seems pretty apt.
This would be the same Steve Jobs that thought an all-fruit diet both killed cancer and made it so he didn't have to shower? The one who died when Eliza was still state of the art?
Well, you sorta have to be a little mad (crazy) to invent touchscreen phones, no?
Broken clock etc
just like the only guy to win two unshared nobel prizes, yes
Can't go wrong with offline and open-source!
Locking in in this context means that you're relying on an LLM for your problem solving - atrophying your skills in the meantime, making you dependent on a model. So you can indeed go wrong with open weight abd self hosted ones. At least thats my understanding of this.
Here's the scary part... The skill of developers has been for about 20 years: "look it up on stack overflow. Find a similar problem. Fix it to suit my environment."
But... No one is posting to stack overflow anymore. So LLMs have effectively become stack overflow.
I try to not let the skill atrophy by doing it the old way. Can't. The well is running dry.
What I will say is that LLMs make parsing logs a lot easier. So, doing things the old old fashioned way is still in the cards.
It's weird out here.
Remember when Google gave relevant search results? Pepperidge Farm remembers….
it wasn't what i was getting at, but that's also true. the model requires a certain setup to be effective, so now you're locked into that. the model does things a certain way, so now you're locked into that. nobody reads the code it produces, so now you're locked into that.
all the while every other way of doing things disappears from your mind.
considering the massive accidents of models deleting codebases and production db's, the fact that the tool may be open source doesn't really help.
besides, i don't know any open source models. i know of open-weight models, but i've yet to see anyone share the training regime and source data for an even vaguely effective model.