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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 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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They’re useful, but not anything like to the degree that’s being claimed. It’s being pushed as if it’s going to be able to do everything.
For one example, does generative AI have a use in coding? Absolutely. If you’re a coder who knows what they are doing, it can help you have ideas and it can do some of the tedious stuff. But you still need to know what you’re doing, use it as a tool, and absolutely do not use its code without checking it all. And that’s not how it’s being pushed. It’s being pushed as if you can just type in “pretend it’s 1999 and code me a Doom sequel” and you’ll get a full, working programme out.
Even getting it to do things in chunks seems to be a trial. There’s a video I watched a day or two ago (if you’re interested, I’ll look for a link when I’ve got more time) where a guy tried to get ChatGPT to code for him. He had a specific end goal in mind and asked it to do things step by step. While there were several occasions that he was impressed by what it produced, he kept getting stuck because it would seemingly only fix problems in one area of the code by eliminating another area entirely. He found that most of his time was spent going round in circles trying to ensure that it actually did what he was asking of it. It hallucinated, too, and at one point he had to solve the problem for it by referring to a specific repository, which he said he himself only knew about because he’s got more than a decade’s experience.
That’s the biggest issue - what LLMs are capable of is far, far below what they’re sold as.
When coding (my main job since lot of years) I like to use LLMs for brainstorming, reviewing my code for the "quickly visible" errors etc. Oh, and I found out LLMS are not bad explaining query plans and suggesting optimizations for SQL queries in PostgreSQL. I feel the older a technology is (when there's a lot of reference materials available) the better LLMs are with those topics.
But don't put them to the task of suggesting something on new tech or creative. They lie without blushing. And in the end you just get a "Good Catch, that can't really work" for wasting your time.
I think you need to get a feel for what they can and can't do. In any event all the shit they are being pushed for - that will "go well". Ah recently, I saw claude or so being able to edit exel sheets. Yep. Combine the most untestable tool guilty of producing tons of false data with LLMs. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?!?! Users blindly asking the llm to do stuff in excel and then just betting their companies on the results....
Microsoft just had a push for CoPilot in Excel. Its own promotional material said that for the tasks it was most suited to it had a success rate of 56%. For other tasks the success rate was 20%.
Imagine relying on that for anything even halfway important.