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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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The problem is, it's not "intelligence". It's an enormous statistical based autocorrect.
AI doesn't understand math, it just knows that the next character in a string starting "2+2=" is almost unanimously "4" in all the data it's statistically analyzed. If you try to have it solve an equation that isn't commonly repeated, it can't solve it. Even when you try to train it on textbooks, it doesn't 'learn' the math, it tries to analyze the word patterns in the text of the book and attempts to replicate it. That's why it 'hallucinates', and also why it doesn't matter how much data you feed it, it won't be 'intelligent'.
It seems intelligent because we associate intelligence with language, and LLMs mimic language in an amazing way. But it's not 'thinking' the way we associate with intelligence. It's running complex math about what word should come next in a sentence based on the other sentences of that sort it's seen before.
Interns aren't that intelligent, either. But they can generate content even if they're not intelligent and that's helpful, too.
Having the right answer is a lot less useful than looking like you have the right answer, sadly.
An intern has the capacity to learn, an LLM does not.
Only if you care about accuracy, which is 100% the problem with LLMs.
Which is what I said: It got some stuff wrong but it got a lot more right, which saved me a ton of time generating content.