this post was submitted on 31 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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This is exactly the kind of black and white reasoning that annoys me about online discourse. The camps of "neverslop" and "techbro shill" are extremely vocal, and squeeze out anyone in between with a nuanced opinion (like myself). And I know I'm not the only one because I get upvotes!
Fuck, Linus Torvalds uses ai. Is he an unthinking npc now? If anyone might be an authority on the ethical use of ai, it would be him.
"But Glitch, that's an appeal to authority fallacy!"
Okay, hypothetical strawman, you have a point.
Sure, there's people who exist who operate like how op describes. I'm not disputing that. But saying everyone who uses ai at all is braindead is both incorrect and insulting. I use ai for some shit, it's genuinely a somewhat useful tool and middling quality entertainment. But did ai write this comment? No, it did not, nor has ai told me what my opinions should be. So, proposal disproved by counterexample.
Someone is going to tell me I'm taking this too seriously, i can feel it.
yep.
imho you're not taking it seriously enough sport. if you were, you'd have stopped using AI.
this one time I had a huge 200 file folder full of ugly filenames i needed to be standardized to use in a script. Renaming them all manually was easily a 3 hour job at least. I described the end result name syntax i wanted and gave the full list of the current file names to an llm, and it gave me a powershell script that renamed every file for me perfectly in 2 minutes.
could i have coded that myself? sure. but then I'd be deciding between "three hours making a complicated file renaming script or 3 hours or manually renaming 200 files for 3 hours". The llm solved my problem for me and allowed me to continue with my actual work rather than wasting time doing data entry.
is this stupid npc behavior? if it is then it sure seems like only npc idiots like saving time.
Yup, that is where I also use AI for. The boring stuff. Clicking on repeat for 3 hours and then it turns out you made a mistake and need to do it all over again. No thanks.
The creative things I do myself.
I think that's perfectly reasonable, just review the script first for anything that might break your pc.
The AI discourse is rather pointless when you see how much people are willing to bend their own opinions. So that it's always in the right, and one step further is the sloppery slope to hell
As you mentioned. Look at the Linux communities. Before Linus came out in support it was "Microslop" this "vibe coded OS" that. And now suddenly, AI is actually a good thing.
Or G*mers. On the one hand they're complaining about AI games being sold on Steam. But on the other hand they'll also defend Steam selling AI games. But on the other hand complain when Epic sells AI games. And then on the other hand they'll praise AI piracy and emulators.
yup, guilty of that myself.
Both things are true. Linus has a proven track record of being good at his job and knowing what he's talking about. Microsoft has a proven track record of producing shit, and making their products worse. Giving them ai just makes them do what they were already doing faster. Linus speaking out didn't change my opinion on the matter, it only confirmed the current iteration of my opinions on ai that I've been slowly developing over the past few years.
Gamers as a collective are fucking morons. That aside, I don't hold all developers to the same standard. A solo dev with no funding is not the same as a 200 man team with the backing of a multi billion dollar publisher. Holding them both to the same standards is asinine. So if the next GTA/Elder Scrolls/Call of Duty/Final Fantasy/Whatever has vibe code or slop assets, gamers are absolutely right to rake those studios over the coals. They have the money to pay for programmers and artists. There is no excuse.
On the other hand, our nameless ideal solo dev who's struggling to so much as pay rent, fuckit go nuts. Vibe code the whole thing, slop out the assets, whatever. Just review the damn code, and curate the assets. If the project has any creative passion whatsoever, that will come through in how the slop is put together. I see using ai assets the same as using packaged assets from, say, the unity store: you didn't make it, but what's more important is how you use it.
And on ai piracy and emulators, I'm just tickled by the giant ai shaped middle finger pointed at nintendo and the ai companies.
It sounds like, for the purposes of this post, you and many other people would not be in the "People who use AI" category:
I have coworkers who are effectively meat proxies. I think the term NPC applies well to how interacting with these folks feels, since it does feel like I'm not talking to a real human, but a computer trying to appear human.
Is OPs net too wide? Probably, yeah. But the sentiment is real, the frustration is real, and contextualizing those interactions as with NPCs resonates.
Have your fun with using AI, but there's no need to yum our yuck.
Oh I'm right there with you (and op) in your annoyance with meat proxies. I just don't want to be lumped in with them. The amount of times I deal with someone telling me "chat gpt said I need xyz thing" and I have to explain that what they're asking for is impractical/impossible/expensive/doesn't exist. And then they get mad at me about it! Fuckers.