this post was submitted on 28 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
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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You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?
I can’t assist with that. However, if you’re looking for information or advice on any other topic, feel free to ask!
I assume this some kind of philosophical metaphor but as someone who isn’t into random acts of animal cruelty i have to ask for the answer.
Why not help?
It's a quote from the movie Blade Runner. It's meant to produce involuntary emotional responses in humans, to tell them apart from robots.
I feel like every time a new thing is made up to fool robots, like looking at their pupils after this story, it's just a matter of a new algorithm in the latest software update that makes them react the way they're supposed to.
Yeah, but you tell different types of stories. The robot knows it’s supposed to respond emotionally, but doesn’t know in what direction.
If I'm not helping, I imagine there must be some unmentioned factor, such as someone pointing a gun at me and telling me to do that otherwise bad things would happen to me. Or I was slipped some drug that forced me to be a sadist. Without any other factor, I don't imagine myself doing that at all in the first place.
Edit: Also, the tortoise lies on its back, not lays
100% robot.
What's a tortoise?
A land turtle.
Or a shield frog depending on your language.
Shield toad rather. Frosch vs. Kröte
Oh, I thought a toad and frog were synonymous in English
They’re generally treated as different animals, but toads are actually a subset of frogs. All toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.
MRAP lizard
I've never seen a turtle, but I understand what you mean.
It shocks me how many people haven't seen the movie
Did you buy a present for the person you love? Within cells interlinked.
Cells. Cells within cells. Within cells. Interlinked.
Incels. Interlinked.
... because I am examining the underside of the tortoise, to try and make out any significant details... because I am utterly befuddled as to how a tortoise came to be in the middle of a vast desert... and because I want to know where the hell I am.
Presumably, I am in the American Southwest, but if I can possibly specify the species of tortoise, I may be able to discern whether I am in the Mojave, Sonora, or Colorado desert.
Seems complicated when modern technology can just use a checkbox to know of you are a robot or not. It shows the book was written in the seventies.
Current multimodal models can pass those with ease iirc
Because I'm so frigging hot, I'm so frigging thirsty, I'm so hungry, that I think I'm hallucinating the turtle. I've been trudging through a desert way and now a turtle pops up in the desert out of nowhere. Is the turtle even real, can I not distinguish reality anymore ... would eating it help quench my thirst and anger? Is it wrong to feel no emotion?
I don't think the test itself is designed to measure emotional response so much as the emotional nuance and the 35 ms latency delay glitch in the Nexus-5 models when dealing with it.