this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
185 points (95.6% liked)
Showerthoughts
42550 readers
1138 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 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Chat, ? Pop off?
Can you elaborate a little more on that?
"Chat" is ChatGPT and "pop off" is popular or gaining traction.
I promise I'm old, I'm just going back to university and am surrounded by children lol
Doing HW is why my response lagged, my bad.
Thank you for explaining. Language does seem to evolve faster than i can keep up with it.
The kids today will ask a sort of rhetorical questions out loud and say something like, "chat, should I (under whatever nonsense here)". In this instance, they're pretending to be streamers and ask the viewers. But if someone says, "I'll just ask chat to write my paper (or whathaveyou)." That's ChatGPT. The difference is contextual.
That's good to know. Thank you. Yeah context can change a lot, but not even knowing the context can make it rather hard to guess any meaning.
Normally I'd say you can ignore it because it'll change soon enough, but I think "ask chat" will become synonymous with "ask ai" similar to how "Google it" is now considered personal research/look it up.
Well, 'chat' is Internet Chat, as it's been known for 30 years when it moved from academia to mainstream.
'Pop off' is just this year's slang for "rapidly gain popularity", and it'll be replaced by something equally ephemeral (like with 'fetch', 'fleek', some level of 'rizz' or 'cap') soon.
I thought pop-off was like 10 years old
Maybe for certain groups of people. It's decades old.
All fads circle back
Can confirm. I'm 40 (oldest Millenial) and shit was poppin-off back in 2010.
Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen.
This comment is streets ahead.
Thank you, but that still doesn't really explain why 2021. Chatting services we're popular way before that. Something must have happened in the year 2021 in relation to technology so that this specific year was chosen as last decent production year for technology.
I saw a comment somewhere else on Lemmy saying they heard someone refer to asking chatgpt something as "asking chat." So I think it was a meta reference to calling AI chat.
And yes, since chatgpt was released in 2022 my cutoff for searches is also 2021, so it makes perfect sense to me.
Yeah that does make sense, thank you.
This might be my "woosh" moment. But I'll bite.
I think they were referring to ChatGPT being let loose on the general public. That kinda marked the start for the current AI bubble and the enshittification of every new tech product with some sort of LLM bullshit.
Yes this
No, I'm genuinely curious why such an odd number, like 2020 would make more sense as it's the beginning of a decade.
ChatGPT was released late 2022. So it cant be that one either. Maybe some other AI chat service was released around 2021?
Yeah. Or maybe they just got the number wrong, like I did.
Fair point.