this post was submitted on 28 Jun 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:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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.

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[–] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Not to be that guy, but that's some weak ass strawman bullshit.

Surely you can think of a more solid point of critisism than whatever that was.

[–] jaykrown@lemmy.world 0 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

Surely you can learn to spell "criticism" correctly.

[–] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 5 points 23 hours ago

Funny that, I've learned how to spell that word in four different languages. But mistakes tend to happen when typing quickly on a phone. Your concern and attempt at deflection is noted.

[–] Yaky@slrpnk.net 9 points 1 day ago

You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you're giving them credit for.

from Don't Look Up.

[–] HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I partially agree with the idea that AI is the same as industrial revolution. Yes, AI is just as revolutionary as steam engine.

Except we are currently at the stage steam engine was in ancient Greece and Roman Empire - a curiosity too expensive to use for value it provides and too crude to provide anything better.

Luckily ancient times didn't have billionaires playing speculative gambling on economy by trying to push any new thing as something revolutionizing right now.

Let the AI flop now, wait a few centuries and it will return better.

[–] irish_link@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Better in terms of using less resources would be great.

[–] HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub 3 points 1 day ago

AI will cause next productivity revolution when demand for things that AI can make will heavily outweigh supply created by human workforce. This is not the case now. We automated work of artists, people we generally joke about being unneeded beggars.

Industrial revolution happened because demand for goods was so big, people would rather buy mediocre factory-made things than artisan-made high quality goods. Common folk currently do not have enough money to spend on frivolous things AI makes.

[–] fodor@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago

This is inaccurate. What's currently happening is that the AI companies are throwing away money because they're riding the bubble.

What they pretend they'll be able to sell is a replacement employee. Of course we've seen that in most fields, AI is not nearly good enough to replace us, and probably in most fields it never will be.

What you're pointing out is one way to generate more consumption of AI, and that would be monetizable if AI were actually making money on queries. But right now it's losing money on those queries.

[–] SaraTonin@lemmy.world 25 points 2 days ago (2 children)

No, that’s google. A leaked memo indicates that they deliberately made search worse so people would have to search twice and see twice the number of ads

AI companies lose money every time someone uses it. Even those that charge per-token

[–] thermal_shock@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

I refuse to use a computer or browser without ublock origin. No fucking way I'm accepting that poisonous shit they call ads.

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[–] ViscloReader@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Omg please link

This is the entire business model for most if not all of tech really

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 15 points 2 days ago (14 children)

If it worked they could be profitable already instead of continuing to burn billions of investment dollars.

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[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

That is just utter bullshit. Hallucinations are a by-product of how LLMs work under the hood, not an intentional design choice. An AI that doesn't make mistakes would be orders of magnitude more profitable.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 1 day ago

Mistakes are part of the human process... an automaton which produces only one solution for a problem is easily stuck, trapped, dead-ended. Building imperfect solution candidates and improving them until they are acceptable is how humans have designed things since forever. There are no perfect answers to the questions that matter.

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 1 points 2 days ago (4 children)

The prevalence of hallucination in LLMs is a design choice. It is a result of raising the 'temperature' which is just fancy speak for randomization so it doesn't spit out the same text for the same question over and over to make it look like it has nuance and whatever.

If it was consistent they would be able to reduce incorrect results, but they want it to look like a human response.

[–] lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Can you provide sources to “they want it to look like a human response?”

I have not read about that before.

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[–] morto@piefed.social 6 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Also, when you get used to relying on ai, you lose the practice and forget part fo your knowledge and skills. So, if you try to stop using ai, you will first have a steep decrease in productivity as you have to resharp your skills and remember a lot of stuff, and that creates a barrier preventing people from going out

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 points 1 day ago

I don't need a machine to make mistakes. 😤

[–] EyIchFragDochNur@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

And when we're done fixing, we're unnecessary and have time to eat the rich \o/

One can dream .. why not replace billionaires with AI too?

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 1 day ago

The thing about money - the only thing money is actually good for is: manipulating the behavior of humans.

You can't eat it, but you can get people to give you food in exchange for it. Money doesn't grow food, but it does get people to do the work of growing and harvesting and shipping and preparing food...

Money doesn't build your house, but it does get people to build a house for you. It doesn't make electricity, but it does get people to build and operate electrical generation systems...

So, what are Billionaires? They're actually just power-centers of people manipulation by money.

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Unless you pay more for the better model, then it makes slightly less mistakes.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The "better models" have been interesting to watch progress over the past year. I'd say the free to use models today are better than the best that were available a year ago. The ones with bigger context windows use more resources, and sometimes can give better results, often not. In LLMs, management of what is, and is not, in the context window seems to be the key to the kinds of results you get, and it feels like they have been "learning" to self-manage their context windows quite a bit better over the past 12 months.

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I agree. Over time I have learned to be a lot more careful with the context window and periodically start over to keep it small. This was one of the reasons I left the free ChatGPT, it seemed to have a very small context window and was not graceful at all about going outside it. Gemini free tier was a lot more graceful about this. I think the advantage of the paid tiers is simply that they will try to manage for longer and report to you how big your context window has gotten. So you have more time and you know when to start thinking about starting from scratch again.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I haven't tried lately, several months ago I tried asking the chatbots directly: What's the size of your context window. Gemini answered straight out: "32,767 tokens, and that's not as good for developing complex software as a larger context window like Claude Sonnet's 200,000 tokens."

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Gemini is 1 million now. But you should probably stop before then. And yes, it's surprisingly honest about whether it's the right model for your needs. It's recommended me to go with Claude for some of my projects.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 1 day ago

Back when Sonnet was 200K and Opus was 1M, there were a lot of complex programming projects where I actually got better overall results out of Sonnet... but, go back to the 3.x days and Sonnet got stuck in debug loops fairly often where Opus would break out of the loop and find a working solution more often.

and then fix the new mistakes it made while trying to fix the old ones and

[–] dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

"Drug companies sell drugs to make you more sick!" vibes.

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