this post was submitted on 24 Sep 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:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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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[–] mspencer712@programming.dev 141 points 1 week ago (2 children)

They’re working on it. They just need a little more of your internal documents and source code.

[–] BooBees@fedinsfw.app 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

They’ll announce soon that personal ai assistants require a blood sacrifice to run, on top of the monthly and metered fees.

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[–] eksb@programming.dev 122 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Because it is a scam. Just like the people selling, instead of using:

  • healing crystals
  • essential oils
  • blockchain
  • penis-enlargement pills
  • JIRA
[–] Jhex@lemmy.world 52 points 1 week ago

LOL Love the (accurate) JIRA inclusion there

[–] whyrat@lemmy.world 38 points 1 week ago

Q: Couldn't this JIRA ticket just be an email?

A: No! Because JIRA will send you like, 10 emails.

[–] dragnucs@lemmy.ml 31 points 1 week ago
[–] StealthLizardDrop@piefed.social 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] eksb@programming.dev 8 points 1 week ago

I mean yes, I hate the manager who set up JIRA that way, but JIRA is marketed to and designed for managers to over-complicate it. It is not designed as a tool for engineers to track their work. It is designed for managers to mis-manage teams, because that sells at volume.

I also have other reasons for hating JIRA:

  1. no ticket hierarchy
  2. no multiple owners
  3. slow. so very slow
  4. sometimes keyboard shortcuts work, sometimes they don't. There is no apparently pattern.
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[–] Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works 63 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

I'd wager it's simply not possible to be profitable using AI for most use-cases. You either burn way too many tokens on your queries or risk your business falling victim to an under-tokenized AI hallucination.

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] Whitebrow@lemmy.world 46 points 1 week ago (17 children)

I love the assumption that if you spend enough tokens, it won’t hallucinate, like it isn’t a mathematical certainty or anything.

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[–] motruck@lemmy.zip 60 points 1 week ago (2 children)

In a gold rush it is better, on average, to sell the shovels then to mine the gold.

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[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 37 points 1 week ago (7 children)

When potatoes came over from the New World, a lot of Europeans grew them as decorative plants. New shit makes people do weird stuff.

Not everybody is trying to make a business with so-called AI. The peddlers are just the loudest.

The companies promise their models can do all this stuff for paying customers. If the models were truly that capable, the so-called AI companies ought to be doing everything with them and be raking in the dough like mad. Which they're not because they know the limitations of the models. It's what economists call the bullshit gap between marketing and reality. And by economists I mean me.

[–] dragnucs@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago

I like your newly coined term: "marketing bullshit gap". I will start using it.

A agree with your point of view fully.

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[–] Grimy@lemmy.world 34 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

If I recall correctly, shovel companies made a lot of money while only a few of their shovels actually struck gold.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 week ago

Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the gold rush.
The wealthiest man in California during the early years of the rush was Samuel Brannan, a tireless self-promoter, shopkeeper and newspaper publisher. Brannan opened the first supply stores in Sacramento, Coloma, and other spots in the goldfields. Just as the rush began, he purchased all the prospecting supplies available in San Francisco and resold them at a substantial profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_gold_rush

[–] Don_alForno@feddit.org 33 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Because nobody but nvidia profits from LLMs.

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[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

They are going for the gold rush pick axe business model

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[–] Jaysyn@lemmy.world 31 points 1 week ago (2 children)
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[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 29 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Better question is if you can really build an app as easily as writing a prompt, why would anyone pay you for your app?

Somehow AI bros like to pretend that AI is some secret lifehack despite it being one of the most mainstream things in human history.

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[–] jason@discuss.online 24 points 1 week ago

Been shouting this from the rooftops since the beginning. If it was half as good as claimed, I would NOT have access to it.

[–] Senal@programming.dev 23 points 1 week ago (2 children)

This is exactly the question i ask "investment advisor" services when they call asking if i want help managing investments.

For you to have a system that works well enough for me to be interested , there'd be no need for you to spend money on call centers full of people ringing up strangers for money, you could take all of that money and invest it in the plan you are trying to sell me.

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[–] __Lost__@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you come to seminar at the Holiday Inn, I'll teach you why! Only $500, and at the end you'll be able to start your own AI powered business and make millions per year!

[–] dragnucs@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I guess you will teach me how to build courses using AI and sell them for $500 at a fancy resort?

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I saw a thread a few minutes ago on a profitable AI business. The business model was hacking websites at scale to steal hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers...

https://lemmy.world/post/52304304

[–] Fallibilist@feddit.uk 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

They want AGI, not LLMs. They're pretty much betting everything on getting there first knowing that if they do it'll pay them back a millionfold what they invested up front. They're taking a massive risk for a potentially massive reward. They're coaching a college kid to become a professional athlete. It's not profitable yet but they're investing heavily in them in the hopes that one day it will be.

[–] actionjbone@sh.itjust.works 34 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No, they're coaching a spreadsheet to become a professional athlete.

[–] Fredselfish@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 week ago (14 children)

Exactly LLM are unable to become AGI. So it just them wasting trillions on something that can never advance to what they want.

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[–] Jhex@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (13 children)
  1. The AI tech they peddle is impressive and has some uses; but it is nowhere near ready to live up to the hype they created in which you can just pay $10K a year for a license and get rid of a $250K employee

  2. The AI tech they sell for $10K a year, actually costs $20K to run and they know nobody would pay the full cost, let alone the cost + their profit margin

PS: those are made up numbers to answer the question, while not real numbers, they represent the points I am trying to make

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 14 points 1 week ago

That’s because the whole point of AI is to finally back us all into a corner where cloud computing is our only option and we can be monitored and controlled, our news and opinions filtered, dissenters found quickly, and our IP hoarded and summarized, our markets predicted and our products beaten before they launch.

They dazzle the brain dead middle managers who all lament the lack of flying car futures with a piece of magic, and once enterprise (the big money) isn’t demanding powerful workstations anymore then average consumers can get fucked and we will be locked out of society if we organize.

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[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 9 points 1 week ago

For the same reason that people were selling crypto mining boxes rather than just plugging them in:

The only guaranteed profit in a gold rush is to be the one selling shovels.

See Nvidia for details.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 9 points 1 week ago

Cuz it doesn't work.

[–] Waterpumpee@lemmus.org 9 points 1 week ago

They're waiting for the to big to fail bailout like the banks in '08.

[–] OccamsRazer@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

AI is becoming a pretty big problem where executives are challenging experts or subject matter experts on topics based on their Ai usage. The problem is because the answers sound really good, but often the prompts aren't quite right so then the experts need to do a bunch more work to explain and justify things that the executives just find rebuttals for through further ai prompting.

[–] seblin@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Their business is the LLMs. It's like asking if a loaf of bread is expensive, then why don't millers bake bread using their own flour

[–] hitmyspot@aussie.zone 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Yes, but selling the llms is not profitable either. They are burning through cash at extraordinary rates.

Even at highly subsidised rates, ai startups can’t make a profitable product. It’s nuts.

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[–] L7HM77@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Why does it cost so much to engineer new models? I thought AI can replace software engineers now, shouldn't the development cost of new models decrease over time?

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[–] cronenthal@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 week ago

You're on to something …

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