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:
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.
Government operates by accepting our individual political authority, and utilizing that investment of power to provide paid services to customers ("taxpayers").
Our investment of political power makes us shareholders. Like any shareholder, we are owed a return on our investment. The government should be paying a dividend to each and every citizen.
Nah, thats just a side effect. The primary purpose of AI is being a hype object that companies can use to inflate their stock. I like how this blogpost explained it https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/30/accounting-gaffs/
The labor market effect will be quite short lived. LLMs as a replacement to human labor will be gone before long simply because they will ruin any company, government or project that relies on them. Its a sort of natural selection.
Most people don’t want to use them in the workplace, only the super tech bros from what I’ve seen. I don’t see AI having a big impact, especially since people don’t care to have it replace their jobs. I think if AI was here the. lots of jobs could be at risk, but LLMs aren’t AI and I doubt they will be in the next 5-10 years. LLM prompts can’t do 90% of all jobs. They can help summarize and pull a first draft for some stuff, but as an end product they can be pretty trash and don’t sound natural whatsoever.
I think you’re right about the LLMs ruining the entities that rely on them though.
Probably the biggest victim of the LLM hype is academia. I dont have anything quantitative to back this up, but the students around me that rely on chatgpt a lot seem to be failing their exams more than those that arent.
I believe that, it’s probably the same people that were already going to try to cheat on their assignments and stuff, but are turning their brains off even more with LLMs. Lots of them probably aren’t even ready the slop the LLMs spit out before handing it in. I’m hoping teachers and professors make their way back to hand written answers for assignments, personally. At least then students physically have to read some of the text that’s getting written.
I hope you're right.
I have doubt, but also hope.
LLMs have a more mystical pull than other previous hypes, but look at what happened with crypto and blockchain. Every fucking government and company was saying that its the future and now nobody gives a shit about those anymore. It might be later than you and i would like, but eventually it will pass.
Or it will become foundational tech like the Internet. People said that was a fad too.
It all depends on whether or not it becomes reliable and cheap.
Idk why you are being downvoted. It is a real possiblity, but i just dont think its likely.
reliable and cheap
Because it simply wont ever be those things. LLMs become more expensive the better you try to make them, exponentially so. We will likely never see LLMs that are significantly better than what we have today. Basically all written human texts on the internet have been used for LLM training. Any further gains can only come from optimizing training algorithms and there hasnt been any real progress there for years now.
The internet was successful because it was predictable and reliable and filled a previously unserved purpose. LLMs could possibly serve a purpose creating text that doesn't need to be correct or accurate, but it won't replace anything that requires any level of accuracy or accountability because the design is inherently flawed due to being a prediction algorithm.
There are uses for pattern matching AI that will continue to be tools used by humans to help focus efforts in massively complex work, but they won't ever be foundational replacements.
Oh yeah for sure there are plenty of great uses for machine learning, i would never deny that.
Yes, it will take a substantial change in LLM architecture to make them viable for general use. Like you said, a couple orders of magnitude improvement in training would be the biggest help. Though I’m not sure that’s even possible.
Cloud everything, saas, and offshore workers are all still things that have been negatively affecting people for years and never really went away even if the hype died down.
Cloud computing is slowly crumbling too. At least in germany more and more companies are going back to on prem, because there are just a bunch of studies showing that cloud stuff is more expensive, less flexible and often actually has more downtime. But unlike other stupid projects you cant just reverse the move to cloud in a few months, it will take years to unfuck everything.
I think in a non market economy I would still work on language models. It's cool that a machine can hold a conversation.
It's not the purpose of LLMs to lower human skills' value, it's just the inevitable outcome.
Transcriptionist? Industry died with good voice recognition 10-20 years ago.
Ditch digging shovel crew? Dramatically de-valued with the advent of the steam-shovel...
and on and on... The theory goes that it gives people more free time, but the way wealth is distributed it is dividing people into those with jobs serving the wealthy and those who live on handouts.
I think: non-stigmatized "handouts" for everybody are the way of a brighter future. UBI FTW.
I'm 12 and this is deep
Not entirely true. This works only for unskilled labour, meaning anyone who is not skilled in lying and cheating your way into a management positon. Or poor people.
50 years ago - you won't believe how many paper pushers we'll be able to get rid of once this invention called computers takes off!
Also, man these robotic arms sure help automate our factories, but if you turn your head upside down you will see it as 'lowering the market value of human skills'.
The sole purpose of all tools ever created is to lower the value of human skills.
LLM's are hyped but have some value as a tool.
No it's purpose is to censor information and trap humans into bubble where the only options will be corporate locked chat or physical book. After that cut the books by lobbying for replacing public libraries with chat ( because it's cheaper ) and leave humanity with nothing. Look how they pressure education now. They want every human to speak with robot so they can control us. It's not about robot being good or wrong it's about you reading what it prints and puttng it into your brain so it melts it.