this post was submitted on 31 Jan 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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Eh? You can ask it to provide sources and it will. Or at least Google AI in the search box does it by default
There's lots of things wrong with AI, but that's actually not one of them much of the time.
There is no guarantee those sources say what the answer says, or indeed that they actually exist. Generators can and do assemble words into phrases that look like citations, but those sources don't exist. It's actually a problem for librarians, who keep getting accused of hiding nonexistent books "cited" by ChatGPT
Or in comic form:
Oh you definitely have to double check. But what's the point of sources if you don't check them anyway?
And links in particular are super easy to check. Books and articles obviously less so
Oh interesting. It should do this by default then.
Defaults matter. They normalize patterns of behaviour. People who are normalized not to care about citations are being trained to blindly accept whatever they’re told. That’s a recipe for an unthinking, obedient, submissive society.
Congratulations, you’re now caught up on the last two decades
Oh this has been going on for centuries. Technology is always changing and so is culture! I think it’s usually the case that technology changes first and culture takes a while to catch up.
Yes. And I find it interesting that every online AI I have encountered hides it's work, while the open source locally hosted versions default to showing their work.
I'm not sure I have a grasp on the various motivations in play, but it doesn't feel nice that the ones available to the average user behave so differently.
Yes and no. It sometimes kind of tries to extrapolate from lots of sources and just gives you a few of them that don't really give an answer.