this post was submitted on 04 Jun 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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I think what's important is to understand that these things work because they are at a certain scale. Algorithms are notoriously bad at predicting individual behaviour, hence why recommendation engines are a specialization that is far from solved. But when you have large amounts of traffic, the law of large numbers allows you to predict group behaviour with some accuracy.
So you can't follow a user around and predict their next move and show them the right ad at the right time. But you can take 50 000 middle-aged males, and bet that at least 10 of them will buy a motorbike if you randomly show them a picture of a guy riding in the sunset. Once you have a good volume of this kind of data you can do some casino math to tilt all your bets slightly in your favour, and start betting 24/7.
It's really cold reading, like they do in those mentalist shows. It's a lot dumber than it looks, but it's way more effective than you think.