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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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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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LLM's have provided me pretty good info where a Google search didn't, but there's always that concern that the info isn't right.
It's great if it is info you can immediately verify though, like whether it made up a function name or command line argument, or questions like "where are the files for _____ stored on my os"
You can specify for some of them that it provide you with a confidence rating and ask for a source a lot of the time too, and I always recommend verifying on important stuff. If you're just troubleshooting dumb/basic stuff it's better than reading through an enshittified SEO website and pretty low risk.
I'm not an advocate for them for many reasons but at my work they're actually doing a decent job of teaching us how to use them helpfully (and not in a way that replaces what our job is).
Yeah I find them quite useful for "explain to me how this works" kind of stuff whereas for "how do I do this" kind of stuff I try to find a primary source to verify against just to be sure.
I usually try to iterate - read available documentation (e.g. comments in a config file, product documentation,...) and try to find stuff out. If I get stuck, an LLM answer may be confidently wrong, but it may give me some new pointers in which direction I should go next. Or maybe mention some buzzwords/techniques/concepts that I might need to investigate further.
As it's underlying concept is pattern recognition it might not be completely correct, but more often than not nudges me generally in the right direction. Bonus: Now I probably learned some things that will help me later on.
So far I never had something a little more complex that an LLM gave me a correct solution for. But as I like to tinker, explore and learn for myself, I'd probably hate getting a complete working solution without any work I did myself.