this post was submitted on 27 Mar 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
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
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- 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
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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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As someone who has a fair bit of experience with coding and with charlatans, don't trust the one in the OP. They just joined Lemmy today, and they've been spreading unfounded conspiracist FUD. Learn IT stuff first and foremost if you value your privacy; the OP has no fucking idea what they're talking about and gives zero practical examples to illustrate their point. Programming knowledge has rarely if ever been anything more than a tangential aid in maintaining my privacy.
By all means, learn how to program; it's a great skill. Just don't learn it because some stranger on the Internet tells you "I promise bro it'll be the privacy apocalypse if you don't know how to code in, like, the coming months(TM) for some reason." The OP doesn't even indicate they know how to code, not that it'd make much of a difference.
(Also, this isn't a shower thought; this is the OP soapboxing.)
Edit: Just to steelman the OP and assume their wholly unfounded and obviously bullshit claim of "you will not be able to use most popular communication platforms in the coming months" (which ones, fuckass?): amateur programming knowledge does not help with that, and it shows they know absolute jack shit about infosec. If you're an amateur programmer building your own communication platform for the sake of privacy, you're about to be fucked forwards and backwards until the friction from the fucking vaporizes you to cinders. You need real knowledge of mathematical fields like cryptography, not just "haha
while(1)go brrrrrrr", to build a messenger secure from the kinds of threat actors the OP vaguely alludes to.I mean, there are software libraries that handle encryption for you. I'm imagining that OP is thinking of some kind of scenario where it becomes illegal to distribute communication software without ID verification, and people must write their own client programs, which is not an impossible task.
You still need to know what you are doing to use them correctly and not introduce vulnerabilities.
If the library is high level enough that it is for the communication protocol itself, of which there are lots, it will probably be fine. Even if you aren't rolling your own code in this scenario, it would still be useful to learn because it may be hard to verify as trustworthy sources of illegal software without reading the source code yourself.