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.
LLMs are fucking useful, but there's not yet a good business model. You can switch to any system at any time, so everyone is trying to forcefeed you their own version of it ro get you hooked. But in the end they're just annoying the hell out of users.
I pay for Gemini and I haven’t used it in months. I don’t see any real case uses for me as an engineer. It just produces trash I have to fix and could have avoided if I did it myself in the beginning.
It's good at making up realistic looking fake data for testing and mock-ups, instead of the usual Person A in Town B.
Small scripts also work out as long as they're small enough to print on a piece of paper.
Writing some sales fluff in a document also works reasonably well.
But those are just niche applications. For something serious it's not really usable so far.
I have found one use for it: getting information from behind login/paywalls.
It still feels gross to use AI at all though. It's like putting my hand in toilet water.
The market flooding is a classic silicon valley strategy of free today charge tomorrow except they're over invested in this one financially, in global supply for GPUs, and land with viable power infrastructure.
This is how I feel, especially with companies adding "AI Use" to their performance reviews. If employees found it helpful, they'd use it. Or did you hire complete morons?
I've built several AI tools for my work which do increase productivity. They lean in to what AI is actually good at and improve the speed of getting information, like using AI embeddings to build a quick semantic search, and building MCP tools for agents to look up information in our systems quickly. I've built some AI based tools to automate very expensive tasks that require a ton of manual data curation and review, and it works at the same level as our staff doing it, and it runs in 20 minutes, that's a win.
People actually do use these tools because they save a significant amount of time with very little cost, and everyone gets to do the things they're actually good at.
Now I'm being asked to spearhead building out customer facing AI efforts. I knew this day would come, but yeah the board and investors want it. They really want to be able to tell investors and clients that we're an AI forward company.
I've been planning for this and researching/studying, and all the internal tools I've built have been test runs. I'm not going to force AI on users, but I am going to build tools and systems for the ones who do use AI.
ChatGPT is quite good and it's not in my face at all, it's just in a bookmark I access when I need it.
Copilot is hot garbage, and it's plastered all over Windows, Edge, and Office.
I haven't tried the Samsung AI, but it won't let me forget it's there.
OP absolutely has a point. The more in your face the AI is, the more garbage it is.
i think it would also be more ethical aswell if everyone needed/liked it like:
It doesnt train on anything and it asks consent from the original work and maybe pays the original work.
it would take up less power on the cpu and gpu(i dont know if this is would be possible) or that the servers are swapped with more energy efficient servers.
there would be a way to prevent AI slop or miss use.
if a company or website added AI and not shoved in your face ,it would usually be opt in not opt out.
Companies would attempt to replace AI with Humans and listening to feedback from the users(that the users dont want it) rather then shareholders and stopping that.
The AI would be actually truly open source.
AI wouldnt be driven with Greed
thats what i can think of a not shoved/ethical AI in my opinion,feel free to upvote or downvote .
in Summary:
its just that AI Companies favor greed and competition rather then ethics, I like the LLM technology but i hate how the companies handle this technology.
eyup. this is basically the case for everything. if its usefulness is worth its cost and is affordable then it will quickly be taken up by word of mouth or example. This is why companies try to subsidize things until it dominates the market and then raises costs to the point normal folk are like fuck this. it was nice but not worth it anymore.