this post was submitted on 10 Sep 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:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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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More of a "waiting while cloud flare verifies my humanity thought" but this is the closest c/ I could find.

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[–] TechLich@lemmy.world 31 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Maybe something like a crowd sourced browser extension to block or warn against a blacklist of known slop sites?

[–] lemming741@lemmy.world 15 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Some search engines let you block sites from future results. If I'm on my desktop, I'll knock out the obvious ones on the first page of a search. It's not much, but it's honest work.

[–] fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 6 days ago

I've been hoping something like this comes along. I dont have the time or knowledge to do it myself.

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 18 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It's getting ridiculous. The internet is ruined.

Search for something simple like how to change a tire and you get a 10 page article starting with "Firstly, what is a tire? Well..."

[–] nek0d3r@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 5 days ago

First of all, that's an amazing question. You've tackled a serious issue in car mechanics (emdash) not only is it a common issue drivers face, but it's foundational to the understanding of vehicular operations.

(emoji, header) Preparation

First, you'll need to fill the inner tube to the brim with Elmer's school glue... (continued)

[–] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 17 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)
[–] Resol@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago

Wow. uBlock Origin is a lot more useful that I originally thought. Thanks.

[–] betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world 17 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Make the author solve a CAPTCHA for each page load too.

[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

A search engine that does something like this might actually be pretty revolutionary.

Does your website have a phone number with a real person that answers? No? Gtfo

Mostly, I was just enjoying the mental image of some beleaguered tech blogger wearily solving CAPTCHA after CAPTCHA when they get slashdotted or something.

[–] pezhore@infosec.pub 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I've started to add date limits to my web queries for things that don't require current information like recipes.

No I do not want to see your AI slop recipe for tomato sandwiches "author" from 2025, I'll go with a shitty web blog from 2021 thank you very much.

[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world -2 points 6 days ago (3 children)

AI has helped me with recipes more than anything else. It skips over all of the advertising slop and stories that recipe sites have.

[–] pezhore@infosec.pub 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It skips over all the advertising slop and stories

That's what ad block and a scroll wheel are for.

[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Even with Adblock the sites are garbage and it’s frustrating to scroll through a bunch of nonsense to find the recipe and then decide I don’t like it. It’s much easier to have a few recipes summarized for me.

[–] elephantium@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

One of my go to sites has a jump to recipe button....works on my computer but fails on my phone 😔

The recipes are good enough to put up with the inconvenience

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Same tbh. Ive done more cooking now then ever because i can just ask for substitues then and there. I will say, against slop, i have noticed the old recipe site style but with that AI slop verbosity out there. I find that worse then what it was.

Homesteaf blogs also tend to have helpful.hints i like thst ai would know to tell me

[–] BootLoop@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago

Being able to substitute ingredients I don't have or just basing a recipe off of what needs to be eaten is great.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago

Find better websites. Use kagi.

[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 16 points 6 days ago

With the quality of Assumed Intelligence detectors, this is unlikely to ever come to pass, especially since humans are involved.

[–] karashta@piefed.social 15 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's honestly getting to the point where I almost wish someone with know how would train an AI to block AI slop from my internet

[–] TheFriendlyDickhead@feddit.org 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You don't even have to realy train anything. There are more than enought ai checkers online. You would simply have to package one of them in a browser addon

[–] karashta@piefed.social 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

If you ever see such a thing, please let me know. My areas of expertise lie in other places.

[–] Meron35@lemmy.world 13 points 6 days ago

No need for any new extensions. Just add a new uBlock filter for AI slop.

https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 6 days ago

Crowdsourced block list is probably the best approach to this.

Then people could apply that blocklist however they prefer.

[–] diptchip@lemmy.world 12 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Nothing on a screen can be trusted. If only they weren't so addictive...

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I assume everything I read on the Internet is someone's opinion. Unless it's about an Internet thing, by the company that made that thing.

Like finding usage articles for Windows/office/whatever, on Microsoft's website...

[–] skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Half of Microsoft's documentation is just fanfiction anyway

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 6 points 6 days ago

It very much used to be.

Some of the newer stuff they've been putting out has been surprisingly good. Full explanations of how things interact, descriptions of what each option does, what options are available, how to configure things, useful examples....

Then you get to one option called something like "-outputformat" or something and the docs literally just say "this option configures the output format", and you fall flat on your face and perish.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 days ago

Maybe don't take some randos blog post a face value

[–] BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Realistically, if someone wanted to put a bunch of nice sounding garbage in front of you to farm clicks/ad impressions, does it really matter how it was made? Like, maybe they used AI to generate a bunch of good sounding text, but what if they just paid some company to have extremely cheap labor from some areas of the world write it instead?

You'd be viewing human written information, but it's still garbage.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

That's fair. Slop existed before AI too. If there was only a search engine algorithm that could rank how relevant a web page is... Someone could make a lot of money with that, maybe even build a huge corporation on that idea.

[–] BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip 4 points 6 days ago

That would be a great service, shame no one has tried that yet.