this post was submitted on 13 Aug 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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- 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
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What do people mean when they say this? You've given up on regulation and accountability? I haven't.
We need to fix some of our glaring problems before they kill us. By and large, "AI" is a harmful, wasteful scam. LLMs are not thinking machines.
LLMs - current AI isn't going anywhere.
Home run models are going to stay even when big companies fold over the resource demand.
Sure, but generally the problems with the slop machines include people thinking they're alive, people not learning how LLMs actually work, giving your data away, and centralizing more power to the Epstein class.
If you're hosting your own slop bot, you generally know, at least at a surface level, that they're not smart, and they don't think, and that they aren't alive. You know how system prompts work, you know how different models achieve different things. You also don't give your data away to the Epstein class for profit.
This isn't to say it would solve all problems or create some problems of their own. But I'd much rather have everyone hosting their own slop bots than giving money to the Epstein class.
My main problem is the ethics of their training data.
And the insane wasted amount of resources. And Imho the resources are not that insane if you only look at a single "small business/family" needs. If GPU and RAM prices would be normal - I would have my own that can run a 25b model - and I would be happy with that.
Yeah, stolen data is one of the problems it doesn't solve.
But I wasn't saying it takes an insane amount of resources to run locally. I've done it on a tiny B50. I'm saying that most people who are able to know what to install and configure to run them locally are generally more likely to be educated to know those things about LLMs.
That's true.
Right now my laptop barely runs a 1.4b indexed to nothing. And the family pc maybe can do around 10. Back in time we didn't think we would need bigger memory - because there were no games with next gen yet.... Pfft :D if only we knew...
so what happens when the west regulates but China doesn't? Throughout history the nations with the best technology win. And I'd rather be on the winning side.
If China agrees to regulate themselves, then we'll talk.
We significantly reduce the damage we are doing to our planet.
We need to stop competing and start cooperating. As humans on earth, we have shared goals and resources.
Sure. If we can convince China to regulate, then I'm all for regulating as well
Regulation and accountability are one thing. Having a fucking pipe dream and saying some version of "if we all band together, they'll fail because no one will be using it" is another.
You are not going to stop people from using AI. Thinking there is literally any scenario where people will just stop using AI, or stop creating content that AI can be trained on, means you have an utter misunderstanding of basic human nature. It's like a child thinking they can stop all wars if they just explained to everyone that killing is bad.
That's what this post is. Use sites like reddit. Don't use sites like reddit. It doesn't matter. Maybe it makes you personally feel better, but don't delude yourself into thinking it makes a difference. You would have more luck trying to fight the tide by standing on the shore with a sign that says "Tide, please don't come in today".
I see posts like this as pathetic desperation. Someone upset that technology is growing in a direction they don't like, so they are performing worthless actions and deluding themselves into thinking it means something.
The post repeatedly specifies that this is a way to stick it to AI companies, not destroy them. You "stick it" to an entity when you do something that reminds yourself that they don't have full control over you. They might not even know or care that it's happening, but you do, and that's enough.
You can stick it to your parents by sneaking out and drinking, you can stick it to your boss by slacking off whenever they're not watching, and you can stick it to AI companies by living a fulfilling life outside of the digital space.
Yes, it matters.
Stop feeding the slop machine.
You gave up. That's suicidally stupid of you. Try again while you still can.