this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
76 points (88.8% liked)
Showerthoughts
42624 readers
382 users here now
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
Rules
- 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.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not just "looking like a human response" it's also functioning like a human response. The randomness of results enables iterative soltions that make forward progress instead of getting stuck.
There are a vast set of problems which don't have a single perfect "correct" answer where all others are wrong, there are just collections of "answers" which - when taken as a set - work together to form a working solution. You may have 100 questions to answer, and how you answer the first 10 will affect what does or does not work for the next 10, and the next, down the line, and you may find when you get to the last set of 10 that you can't get to the end solution unless you revise some of the answers that you previously gave - answers that looked resonable until you built the next 80% of the product...
Life isn't school - there aren't 10 question quizzes with pick one of 4 multiple choice possible answers where you can get a perfect score just by answering each question correctly one at a time. Real-life school is being in charge of class assignments for 1000 students, chosing which 25 students go in each room with each teacher. What classes do they get, what combinations of students should be kept together, kept apart, grouped with which teachers... they aren't impossible problems, but they are impossible to optimize for all possible considerations. Tradeoffs have to be made.