this post was submitted on 03 Nov 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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- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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Think about practical skills, though. Anything from repairing downspouts to rebuilding a bike wheel. You can do it, but it's becoming notably harder to find good information on these things, especially when you have some specific situations that complicate things.
Booleans. Change the year to 2020, or remove certain sites/results.
All the data is still there, just gotta know how to find it, kinda like an old school library at this point! If you’re going through the process of self learning and/or bettering yourself instead of just watching and repeating, you’ll know how to wade through crap already. And if you want the latter, well googles crapification isn’t a concern to you.
Google hasn't used most booleans for like a decade
What?
I use them almost daily.
https://booleanstrings.com/2022/11/04/boolean-search-is-dead/
Boolean operators influence your search results, but are not strictly respected the way you would expect them to be
That shouldn’t turn up no results. That poster is assuming A LOT. It also looked like a blog post and is 30% ads, what kind of source is that? The link provided by Schmidt shows that most Booleans do work on Google and is newer than your posted link as well, as well as provided by one of their engineers… so they should be taken as more knowledgeable then… a blog post to from a random person.
Because the search will turn up results that aren’t related to managers, there will absolutely be results. The only people who would assume there would be no results are people who think search engines only return proper results, and incorrectly assume Boolean are true AND, OR and NOT. When they have never been.
The issue in case you haven’t figured it out, is assuming how stuff should work and being ignorant instead of learning.
Most Booleans work on Google and have existed for decades, claiming they “don’t” or “don’t work” just means you don’t understand what the point of them has always been.
Who claimed they were? They are tools to help, they have never included all Booleans and they’ve changed over time, my link from a Google engineer even specifies that. They have never meant to be restrictive like AND, OR and NOT, where do you get this idea from?Your website is cancer FYI.
Use :before, and you’ll get no results past that time.
That doesn't help for things that are relatively new.
There is plenty of different Booleans for those situations, but there’s not many new inventions in the last 5 years.
There is in bikes.
I didn't really want to get into details of the particular thing that prompted this post, because then there's going to be too many people posting suggestions they think are helpful, and that would be missing the point. Suffice it to say that I'm cobbling together pieces from YouTube, forum posts, and old Reddit threads that, IMO, I would expect to see more consolidated. In times past, I think it would be. I do think I'll get there in the end, but it feels much harder to get everything together than it used to be.
Other than more brands and types of e-bikes? Most have existed for quite a while, just not at a consumer level.
And e-bikes are just circuits, or otherwise proprietary components. You’re gonna be following manufacturer guides, or likely videos, so use site results to specify.
For practical stuff like that, I find directly searching on YouTube to be the most useful. The wealth of free practical instruction available on YouTube is staggering. Unfortunately, that doesn't help for those who want the information in written form, and a not insignificant proportion of it is by amateurs who have no idea what they're doing nor know what the word "safety" means.
I've found YouTube search results to be even worse. The DIY videos I need are buried beneath product reviews for adjacent things and completely unrelated topics that happened to hit certain keywords.
i can literally type in a video title and a channel name and not get it. ditto for most searchengines looking at the youtube title.
would YaCy help? i keep thinking it's a floss peer to peer search engine. kinda like curating a fediverse instance? lmk if it's a good fit for solving this
https://yacy.net/
I've tried YaCy. Its results are worse than Altavista. Might be OK for searching internal documentation at an organization, but not for the public internet.
okay