this post was submitted on 22 Dec 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.
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You must be very young, I'm not trying to start shit. Auto-translation became a semi-functional feature around a decade plus after smart phones existed. At first we just had very basic apps. Look funny and drink beer or see the stars from a GPS location on your phone.
It’s still not perfect but we’re getting there. Your assumption that apps magically existed and worked is adorable. Progress takes time.
I'm Gen Z lol
Oh lol I just remembered the first smartphone was invented in like 2007 (as in, actual mass market product, not just prototypes), I had my first in 2015, so probably warped worldview lol. Like my parent were still using flip phones in early 2010s and this was also around the time when I first had internet access (didn't have internet in my neighborhood in my previous country).
I always forget and thought smartphones were invented in like 2013 or something, since that's the first time I see one, my aunt had one that I just played with during family gatherings. Pretty sure I remember Google Translate to be an app already.
But I mean like smartphones paved the way for these tools to exist ubiquitiously, not as in these tools immediately existed upon the invention of smartphones, know what I sayin'?
If you're going to end your sentences with "lol" you don't also need to say that you're Gen Z. One or the other will do. 😏
I agree your original point stands, regardless of the timescales involved.
The invention of the smart phone did make international travel less intimidating, even if some of the functions took a while to appear.
I am pretty sure we lol-ed a lot already before the majority of Gen-Z was even born...
Yes, but we didn't integrate it into our sentences lol
Someone made a joke and we answered "lol"
It's more like an atmosphere indicator because of the lack of facial expressions in a face-to-face conversation. Without the "lol" feel so... serious for some reason
:P
I first encountered and used it in the online forums during the late 90's and early 00s.
Has been part of sentences back then and I still use it like that.
"lol" primarily as standalone reply sounds like something from an later messenger-centric era.
Are you a Millenial by any chance?
Sí, señor. If you like, I can give you my ICQ number.
LOL.
Nah. Lol has been part of the "texting based dictionary" for a good minute, it's like putting "haha". I'm near 30 and this definitely predates gen-x
I do that too. genx here... lol
I once missed a call from my mother on my cell phone because it was getting late...
I got in trouble due to the fact I didn't call her back.
The phone didn't have caller ID on it.. so I had no idea who had called. All it said one 1 missed call.
Cell phone tech has definitely been a process.
I got in trouble once because there was a small earthquake in Brooklyn that made everyone call each other so it clogged up the lines, this was before 5g so the congestion problems were way worse.
Mom at first thought I broke her phone lol.
Your comment reminded me of that incident lol
So every time after that, I'd bring up that incident when ever my parents falsely accuse of doing something wrong
Haha that's a great excuse...
That's so in line with the dog ate my homework, plausible but not probable.
Love it. Haha
Smartphones are much older than that. Symbian Series 60 had a substantial install base long before the iPhone. The N-Gage was a smart phone, for example, so we're not just talking high end stuff.
Never heard of it before (or maybe I did but forgot it) so I just looked it up, didn't they only have like 6% marketshare in the US? I mean that's less than amount of people who use adblockers, and I never met someone irl who uses an adblocker. My point being, its very rare and I never seen one.
I was in China before 2010, never heard of it as a kid. My dad had some motorola feature phone thingy.
I've no idea what market penetration was like on a different continent twenty years ago 😂
Many Nokia phones ran Symbian S60 (I specify because there was a number of Symbian OSes. I've never quite pinned down why). Not just Nokia, but in their day Nokia were THE phone company.
I went from a Nokia N90 to an iPhone. The iPhone had fewer features at the time (the app store came later, it couldn't record video - let alone edit it, etc.). The thing was that the features it did have were so much more user friendly. It was night and day.
Smartphones are surprisingly old although I doubt more than a tiny handful of their users actually knew what they were capable of back in the day. I had my N-Gage setup with a web browser, MSN Messenger client (the IM service of choice in the UK at the time), Xvid video player, Ogg Vorbis audio, office software, and quite a few games too (both Java and native). My N90 could use all the same software when I moved to it a few years later.
Americans for a time were made fun of for their terrible cellphones, so yeah
Believe it or not the first production smart phone was released by IBM in 1989, it was the bastard lovechild of a DOS PC and a car phone; it could do fax and modem over the phone. Blackberry put out a device you'd call a smart phone (runs an extensible OS with an app ecosystem, multimedia capable, mobile data as we know it today) in 2002. But yes the iPhone arrived in 2007 much to the unhealth of society.
The original iPhone did not have an app store.
Wikipedia has google translate (2006) pre-dating android (2008) by 2 years. Iphone was 2007. It has improved significantly since, but it was pretty good even then. Adequate enough to communicate with foreign language speakers. I used to use it to email a japanese penpal, and while it may not have been perfect, it was understandable even then.
Yeah the problem came with verbal communication, you can't transcribe a language you don't understand, and good luck getting a stranger to type sentences on your smartphone (at a time when most people didn't have one), you mostly got garbage translations. When speech-to-text got good enough for on the spot translation, that was a game changer, but that had to be around 2015 or something.
That's assuming you had a connection at all, at the time you paid for connection DURATION, not traffic, so you were offline most of the time. And roaming data had impossible costs.
The early smartphone era was wild. Motorola made the very first phone with iTunes on it for example
Not smartphone, but my dad's Motorola phone that looked like this: (pre 2010s very old)
collapsed inline media
Had some weird ninja turtle game on it.
Cool Game I thought, but parents got mad that it automaticaly billed the phone company... not my fault, I'm the younger sibling so I think I mostly got away with it and my older brother was the one that got the most trouble, he tricked me to press the download button.
Dude I didn't even realize until your comment that I completely interchanged "mobile phone" with "smart phone" because that's just how long it's been since non-smart phones were really a thing
The iPhone was released in 2007, and the Google Translate app for iOS and Android had the feature to point the phone’s camera at text to auto-translate it around 2010.