this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
186 points (96.5% liked)

Showerthoughts

41348 readers
1075 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:

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.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 26 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] stoly@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago

I know I’ll probably be downvoted for saying this, but there are a lot of really good managers out there. None of them, however, have a degree in business.

[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 3 points 7 hours ago

middle and upper management and llm are incompetent, but llm would at least not have an ego about it

[–] awfulawful@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 7 hours ago

I have observed a strong correlation between managers whose emails are now obviously written by AI and those who have significant shortcomings.

[–] Zink@programming.dev 2 points 7 hours ago

Middle management seems like exactly the kind of jobs that LLMs could actually replace and do a good job at.

We individual contributors do the actual creative work and make gears of industry turn.

The owners at the top will want to stay rich and stay in control because obviously being rich means they are "one of the good ones"

All the layers of hierarchy in between? Their main functions are to filter all the information about their department to send up the chain, or to take the marching orders from above and fill in the details for everybody below them. With some human margin of error. And that's the best case scenario is somebody who actually does their job and does it well.

Filtering data into summaries, generating new data from simple high-level descriptions, and not doing it "correctly" or "optimally" but "believably?" I think we found the job LLMs were invented to replace!!

(in reality, I'd much rather see $100,000 salaries go to 100,000 human managers rather than the same $10 Billion be split between tech giants and shareholders, but it's still funny)

[–] DJKJuicy@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Upper management and middle management are the same picture.

All members of management don't do the actual work and the only reason for their existence is to try to get the actual workers to do more stuff for less money.

So even though we all know that their jobs would be one of the easiest to replace with an LLM, what will happen is management will attempt to replace as many workers with LLMs to justify their "more for less" existence.

The number of managers won't go down until there's not enough workers making money to buy the goods and services that the companies are selling. But by then we're all screwed.

[–] itkovian@lemmy.world 12 points 16 hours ago

LLMs can easily replace managers and execs over anybody else. Honestly, the first things LLMs replace are scammers. Most execs are scammers too.

[–] novibe@lemmy.ml 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

No way imagine your boss being an LLM 😭 truly nightmare fuel

[–] Alvaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 11 hours ago

Can go the other way too:

"Here is that report you wanted"

"Amazing work! You bring such a unique perspective and you personal style can really be felt!"

At least ot's better than some managers

[–] Spacehooks@reddthat.com 1 points 12 hours ago

My SO boss is soo into LLM and I swear this bloke only fights and say the things for worst outcome of the department. He caves on stuff that he should have died on the hill but something trivial not even worth an ok he will drag out with hell fire.

[–] Saprophyte@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13548

LLMs respond like a sycophant because that's what CEOs expect. They expect to be surrounded by Yes Men and people who compliment them before they give feedback. That's why before you get an answer for a question, some LLMs will sometimes say "that's a great question."

You'll notice the same thing in Trump's cabinet. No one answers him directly, they provide him with a compliment before they give a response.

You mean Trump's Cabinet is actually working with LLMs ??

On a serious note, do you know of any community on lemmy where we can express our rants against Trump ???

[–] Paragone@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

That's interesting..

I tried a local LLM, & it was sooo .. ideological-against-objectivity ( made me want to puke ) AND so sycophantic, the mixture made me unwilling to tolerate the damn thing on my machine.

I hadn't understood that it was doing a mixture of ideological-&-sycophantic, but yes, that absolutely-was a dimension in what it was doing..

Thank you for identifying that current in them..

_ /\ _

[–] paranoid@lemmy.world 36 points 1 day ago (3 children)

This feels more like a shower rant than a shower thought...

Either way, I'm here for it

[–] DandomRude@piefed.social 21 points 1 day ago

Sometimes I even sing...

Welcome to the daily "screaming into hot water"-podcast.

[–] zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Honestly most of the posts in this community don't really fit the community

[–] BurgerBaron@piefed.social 11 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I'd still rather have the useless fuckwit manager because at least they're some form of human vs a dumbass chatbot.

[–] rainwall@piefed.social 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I have this exact situation. Vp runs literally 100% of his thoughts through a chatbot, which has conviced him that all his SMEs that actually do things are idiots. Hes slightly less of an idiot than the rest of his exectuve cohort, and has thus convinced all of them that we are idiots too.

Not better at all. The chatbot will not consistently fight you when you tell it that its wrong. The chatbot will not relent after being overwhelmed with actual data, then resurface the idea again in 6 weeks, then relent again, then try again in 4 weeks, on and on. I have one project that has been beaten back 5 times now, including having staff quit, hiring new people, and having them agreed it could not be done, and i know its still not over.

You do not want any form of this.

[–] spittingimage@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

Have you tried to choke out an LLM? Because I have. It wasn't easy.

[–] errer@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Depends on how malicious the manager is

[–] Toes@ani.social 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world -2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's obvious to everyone except OP, who wants to start one ring above workers somehow

[–] TheObviousSolution@thebrainbin.org 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Most people's world view can't see past what they are familiar with. LLMs do a bad job at the things they are tasked with - so make them supervise and coordinate it? Unless it's in supervision and coordination tools, where it is bad once again?

Other than "haha, let them get replaced by LLMs", this post does not logically get very far. Marketing and CEOs who spend all of their time turning social networks into their own echo chambers, though, do replace those. No change there, just savings.

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago

Zero idea what any of that means...

My point was "managers" aren't "the top" they're literally one level above the bottom

And anything they're tell the bottom ring to do, is because that's what they were told to say.

I seem to have overestimated people's work experience or critical thinking tho, loads of people seem to think of front line managers as "the boss".

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

My manager recently said their new AI tool does pretty much his whole job for him. I miss my last manager. Pretty sure it gets worse up the chain.

Only management would admit to having a machine do their job for them.