this post was submitted on 16 Feb 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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Yeah this is where I'm at. Actual movie level AI would be neat, but what we have right now is closer to a McDonald's toy pretending to be AI than the real deal.
I'd be overjoyed if we had decently functional AI that could be trusted to do the kind of jobs humans don't want to do, but instead we have hyped up autocomplete that's too stupid to reliably trust to run anything (see the shitshow of openclaw when they do).
There are places where machine learning has and will continue to push real progress but this whole "AI is on the road to AGI and then we'll never work again" bullshit is so destructive.
This is so we'll said.
I'm stealing this.
I'm going to use it to explain while I simultaneously have so much derision for modern AI, while I also enjoy it.
I like McDonald's toys. I just don't use them for big person work.
What we have now is "neat." It's freaking amazing it can do what it does. However it is not the AI from science fiction.
I think this is what causes this divide between the AI lovers and haters. What we have now is genuinely impressive even if largely nonfunctional. Its a confusing juxtaposition
Lots of it is very very good and totally functional. It's just that for normal people, "AI" is now equal to chatbots.
Folks don't seem to realize what LLMs are, if they did then they wouldn't be wasting trillions trying to stuff them in everything.
Like, yes, it is a minor technological miracle that we can build these massively-multidimensional maps of human language use and use them to chart human-like vectors through language space that remain coherent for tens of thousands of tokens, but there's no way you can chain these stochastic parrots together to get around the fact that a computer cannot be held responsible, algorithms have no agency no matter how much you call them "agents", and the people who let chatbots make decisions must ultimately be culpable for them.
It's not "AI", it's a n-th dimensional globe and the ruler we use to draw lines on that globe. Like all globes, it is at best a useful fiction representing a limited perspective on a much wider world.
Yeah. Like thats objectively a very interesting technological innovation. The issue is just how much its been overhyped.
The hype around AI would be warranted if it were, like, at the same level as the hype around the Rust programming language or something. Which is to say: it’s an useful innovation in certain limited domains which is worth studying and is probably really fascinating to some nerds. If we could have left the hype at that level then we would have been fine.
But then a bunch of CEOs and tech influencers started telling us that these things are going to cure cancer or aging and replace all white collar jobs by next year. Like okay buddy. Be realistic. This overhype turned something that was genuinely cool into this magical fantasy technology that doesn't exist.
Yeah, the hype is really leaning on that singularitarian angle and the investor class is massively overextended.
I'm glad that the general public is finally getting on down the hype cycle, this peak of inflated expectations has lasted way too long, but it should have been obvious three years ago.
Like, I get that I'm supposedly brighter and better educated than most folks, but I really don't feel like you need college level coursework in futures studies to be able to avoid obvious scams like cryptocurrency and "AI".
I feel like it has to be deliberate, a product of marketing effects, because some of the most interesting new technologies have languished in obscurity for years because their potential is disintermediative and wouldn't offer a path to further expanding the corporate dominion over computing.