this post was submitted on 24 Jul 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
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- 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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It's an interesting tool.
It can shave hours off of experienced programmers work if they use it in the right scenarios. You can use it in places where you need to do something that's mundane but fiddly. It's suboptimal for crapping out a large project, But it's super effective at generating a single function or module to do a task. It might even come up with a better idea than you would use for some things. The key is if it does something that's not quite right or not the best idea You need to be able to read it to understand that it's going a little off the rails.
If you're a spreadsheet junkie, It's capable of writing really really complicated rules without getting lost in the minutia.
For non-developers that don't know anything it's a dicer proposition. After a couple thousand lines of code You might start running into interesting problems. When it starts having to go and do problem solving mode, and you're just feeding it back The errors and asking it to fix the problem You can get bogged down pretty quickly.
For DevOps it's the diggity bomb. Practically everything in that profession is either a one-off quick emergency script or a well thought out plan of templates.
Here are my five Amazon accounts give me a shell script that goes into every account in every availability zone, enumerate every security group and give me a tool to add remove or replace a given IP with a description and port based on the existence of other IPs descriptions or ports. Or write me an ansible script to install zabix monitoring playbooks with these templates.
This is what I’m talking about. So many people talk about it in white or black.
I was able to “code” a front end that my contractors can log into to view the files they are authorized to see.
It helped me write so many different things that all work together to solve my problem.
It may or may not be the most efficient code, but in terms of overall business operation, it’s extremely efficient.
Tip, when you're done having it do your project, restart the chat, tell it that it's a security engineer and ask it to check for any vulnerabilities or anything that should be done to protect the site against malicious activities. Ask it if there's anything with your hosting or site that should be addressed.
Most of the training data out there is on how to get a task done and the best way to do the task, there's a lot less training on completing a project with security in mind. There is however a lot of data on specifically how to secure already written code so it can do it, but it generally will not unless you ask it to.
That's a great tip: having it review the security of code that an earlier context generated.
I plan on having it write unit tests, or at least try to...
Thanks! I’m going to do that Nita a great idea.
At least 2/3 of the time I spend with AI coding is getting it to compile without errors - that's more than a little off the rails, but it's also much more helpful when you finally do get to a working example that you can look at, instead of beating your own head against the Stack Exchange archives hoping for inspiration, let it try for you.