this post was submitted on 08 Oct 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
- 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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That's actually a really illuminating analogy.
I can't say I understand what people get out of playing with LLMs, but if they view writing code or drawing pictures like I view using a calculator then that explains a lot of the disconnect between the two camps.
I would 100% let some model draw me up a comic to shitpost without a second thought, and it by no means should be construed to mean that I wish I had chosen art for a career or a major or even a hobby.
Interestinger and interestinger. So you wish you could create the art (or pictures, whatever term you want to use), but the way you do it doesn't matter, so you just use the LLM because that's the easiest way to do it?
Would you normally try to soup something up in paint, or just do something else? I mean like before you could generate it with natural language.
I don’t personally use llms anymore, but when I did, it was for use cases where either I wanted a thing to be reasonably easy/fast or I would do without (a character sketch for DnD) or for visual representations that quick google searches weren’t turning up.
I watched a video where someone sent AI images to dress makers so they could make dresses. If I wanted a very specific type of dress, and I can’t draw this seems like a great way to communicate my desires and intentions.
https://youtu.be/LeGcbc87JxU
I realize I’m a little bit of a liar. I will sometimes use Be My AI to help alt-text/caption pictures that happen to have a lot going on. So they get a list of snacks instead of something like “table with various snacks”.
Yeah I've done some minor photoshop before but that isn't really the point.
It's not even that I wish I could do it. Sometimes I think of a stupid meme like the "well yes but actually no" pirate and a picture of Mr Bean and Sean Bean or something and I could let an LLM shit that side by side out instead of using meme generator and like 10 minutes of thought. Or I could just... Not. I actually haven't ever, but people who say "oh just draw it even if it's stick figures" are full of shit. If I want to make a comic I'll just do it who cares how.
Of course there is value in art, but that value doesn't come in proportion to the huge number of people studying it and it doesn't come from comics or memes either in my estimation. I don't/wouldn't use a language model for those things because I have penis envy, but rather because it's easy for dicking around. People asking for relationship advice to Claude are also not secretly wishing they had gone to school for a BS in psych.
At the risk of being dismissive, people with liberal arts or art degrees can cool their tits: basically no one is using LLMs because we secretly wish we had gone down that road, and the ones that do... Well... Bless their hearts they are a small and special minority.
Thanks for taking the time to go into it. It seems like people are having this conversation in every community and every friend group and most of the time it's just people talking past each other.
This is basically just taking a shit on the sidewalk and leaving it there.
Ok? So is Mimi comics and pizzacake if you ask me.