this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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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
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.
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Steam locomotive operators would notice some behaviors of their machines that they couldn't entirely explain. They were out there, shoveling the coal, filling the boilers, and turning the valves but some aspects of how the engines performed - why they would run stronger in some circumstances than others - were a mystery to the men on the front lines. Decades later, intense theoretical study could explain most of the observed phenomena by things like local boiling inside the boiler insulating the surface against heat transfer from the firebox, etc. but at the time when the tech was new: it was just a mystery.
Most of the "mysteries" of AI are similarly due to the fact that the operators are "vibe coding" - they go through the motions and they see what comes out. They're focused on their objectives, the input-output transform, and most of them aren't too caught up in the how and why of what it is doing.
People will study the how and why, but like any new tech, their understanding is going to lag behind the actions of the doers who are out there breaking new ground.