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.
Librarian here, can confirm.
I started my Master's in Library and Information Science in 2010. We were told not to worry about the internet making us obsolete because we would be needed to teach information literacy.
Information literacy turned out to be something people didn't want. They wanted to be told what to think, not taught skills to think for themselves.
It's been the single greatest and most expensive disappointment of my life.
Needing a masters for $18/hr sucks too.
How does one go about learning information literacy?
classes in philosophy, literature, politics, and digital media. typically.
you know, those evil humanities that are destroying society... because they don't produce 'value'.
Rhetoric is a big one too, not just to use but to be able to identify when it's being used to manipulate you
They wanted to be told what to think, not taught skills to think for themselves.
This must be one of the wisest statements I ever read on the internet.
Any good thing will inevitably be corrupted by capitalism, because that is what capitalism does. It is a cancer, and it will consume everything and us all in the process.
I don't know if it was in Strauss' "Accelerando" that humanity told an AI to solve some complex problem at any cost, and the AI promptly turned all the matter in the solar system into a supercomputer capable of solving it.
That's capitalism in a nutshell: "do profit" is the only imperative, and it will destroy everything, just like a cancer is predicated upon "do growth", forever, at any cost, regardless of whether the host organism dies.
Thank you...
Apparently, I've never ever considered any LLM serious, convenient, appropriate, similar to Markov's chain, though those differ, and I disable and uninstall absolutely everything that is LLM related, or alters human effortful works, including programming suggestions, searching, and in any kind of adequate research, in the personal life or everywhere possible since 2021 (and some in 2023), where I had a few months of experimenting with those - enough to consider the time I still have to continue actually learning, discovering, and staying social as much as I can...
Please... Please, in context of such education... instead of investing your priceless, precious, finite life time... into such empty void as unknown output of unknown LLM from unknown dataset of unknown artists... developers... people... Please, instead, please consider to take your time... and try to see the love in someone's else works, courses, videos, books, articles, schemes, tables, drawings... who would be only heartfelt delighted to know... to know that someone else like you, like themselves... were reaching out for their experience they were gaining for decades and worked hard to prepare it for someone out there... in search... for someone who wishes and tries to create something, to improve the world... to reach for an achievement... to treasure a goal... to invent a miracle...
Since isn't the following the miraculous purpose to live and contribute to the infinite world? To gain experience by confident, adequate effort, to work towards achievements, to stay responsible as a human, to stay alive... Which is at least: personal contributions published, social interactions, actually felt and considered facts organized by accountable people, self-confidence and miraculous time you invest into learning the human experience published in marvelous works of books, articles, videos, forums, chats - the ineffable magnificence...
There's use for LLM, including pentesting, medicine and analyzing of unknown and random for the sake of random in scopes of "black-box", for example, sure, but overly rarely and the fear of malformed facts, unknown sources, disturbed art... will always shadow any presence of such generative technologies, I believe... Yet, shouldn't technology support you, your mind (i.e. not atrophy it but train and discipline it), your creativity, your ideas, your... existence?
Since isn't learning from someone else experience is actually important...
Isn't it ineffably magnificent to discover someone's hard work...
Isn't the process of learning and discovering actually fun!
Isn't the knowledge that you unique carry valuable...
What is the fun, the purpose, otherwise...?
Please consider your confidence, skills, mind, and... your precious time...
"If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product." ~ Tristan Harris
"Machines should work; people should think." ~ IBM Pollyanna Principle
AI isn't the only thing you can use a computer for now. If you ignore AI and corporate software, there's loads of mind expanding activities in computing.
Take a look at what you can self host with commodity hardware (barring the insane RAM prices right now).
I do lots of self hosting. But the issue is not what I will do but what the world will do and what we will be forced to do by our employers and pressure to work at an efficiency only possible with ai doing a lot of the work.
With AI, now it does the thinking for you [...]
No, it doesn't. It's just mimikry. Autocomplete on steroids.
Have you met many people?
Most people's entire lives are a form of autocomplete.
I don't think AI is taking jobs, I think dumbass execs use it as an excuse to fire people though.
It's definitely taking some jobs. Not a huge amount yet, but it's unfortunately still getting better at a pretty good clip.
Yep, its definitely gotten worse. Thats why I just live as if its 2005 in my house xD
It's a real dilemma unfortunately. On one hand if you don't get used to using it you will be at a massive disadvantage in whatever's left of a job market in the future. On the other hand if you do get used to using it you will likely be atrophying parts of your brain and giving money to exactly the machine that will destroy us.
Bud.. they said the same thing about computers when I was a kid in the 70s.
I certainly don't remember that. And I was there.
I was certainly there and I do.. this is from a google search
Key Themes and Examples from the Era
Concerns about automation and job displacement by computers were widely documented, particularly as computer technology became smaller, cheaper, and more integrated into various industries, from manufacturing floors to office settings.
Manufacturing and "Blue-Collar" Jobs: The introduction of computer numerical control (CNC) machinery led to a 24% drop in employment for high school dropouts in the metal manufacturing industry, fueling concerns about job security for skilled factory workers in the "Rust Belt".
Office and "White-Collar" Jobs: White-collar workers also felt unease. Innovations like the automated teller machine (ATM) threatened bank tellers, while photocopiers were viewed with suspicion by some in publishing. The transition to computers on every desk in the late 70s and early 80s initially led to the firing of secretarial pools, forcing others (often men) to learn typing and computer skills.
Media Coverage and Public Discourse: The topic was covered by major publications.
Well sure every new technology to some extent replaces jobs, but that wasn't my primary thesis.
My primary thesis is that it is disempowering us, and centralizing power in a handful of billionaires. Personal computers in those days were empowering to the individual, whereas AI is empowering only for a handful of billionaires and disempowering for most other people.
I don't remember anyone complaining back then that personal computers were taking their power and autonomy away and giving it to billionaires.
This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. - Plato on the invention of writing in The Phaedrus
Every notable invention associated with language (and communication in general) has elicited similar reactions. And I don't think Plato is wholly wrong, here. With each level of abstraction from the oral tradition, the social landscape of meaning is further externalized. That doesn't mean the personal landscape of meaning must be. AI only does the thinking for you if that's what you use it for. But I do fear that that's exactly what it will largely be used for. These technologies have been coming fast since radio, and it doesn't seem like society has the time to adapt to one before the next.
There's a relevant Nature article that touches on some/most of this.
I'll tell ChatGPT to analyze your prompt. Can you give me a summary in the meantime?
If AI can even half ass your job you barely had one to begin with. All us healthcare workers and the tradies are still making a half decent wage for real work just like we always have. And the food service and sanitation workers still aren't doing the absolute best but they're not hurting for work either. I'm not going to tell you I like the way my work is valued under capitalism but at least I'm tangibly benefitting other humans.
I don't think it's fair to say that just because you were a commercial graphic designer or translator or copywriter that you were doing bullshit work that was barely worth being called work.
Yes, healthcare is a very commendable line of work, no doubt, but we will see radiologists out of work fairly soon IMO, as well as anyone who interprets lab results, and very likely those who make diagnoses of all types. These are all things that AI will likely be doing better if they aren't already.
Physical care will take longer and won't be replaced until we have AI robots, but the gains there are happening fast too. We may only have another decade or so until we see a lot of that stuff being automated. It's really hard to tell how fast this will all happen. Things do tend to happen slower than the hype around them, but the progress that's happening every year is pretty staggering if you are really tracking it. I'd love to think that my job which requires mostly creative ways of dealing with people and negotiation is safe for some time, but I'm really doubting that I can make it the next 12 years I need to until retirement without some disruption.
Unless you were a hard GNU fan when you were a kid, it was the same process of giving power to billionares. Just that now it sits on 50 years of wins for the billionares side. So it's closer to the endgame.
I've been a GNU fan since 1995. And yes, while buying software did make some billionaires, I never felt like it was taking away my abilities or autonomy or freedom until now. Back then I felt like it was giving me more of those things.
As far as I'm concerned the generative AI that we see in chatbots has no goal associated with it: it just exists for no purpose at all. In contrast to google translate or other translation apps (which BTW still use machine learning algorithms) have a far more practical use to it as being a resource to translate other languages in real-time. I don't care what companies call it (if it's a tool or not) at the moment its a big fucking turd that AI companies are trying to force feed down our fucking mouth.
You also see this tech slop happening historically in the evolution of search engines. Way before we had recommendation algorithms in most modern search engines. A search engine was basically a database where the user had to thoughtfully word its queries to get good search results, then came the recommendation algorithm and I could only imagine no one, literally no one, cared about it since we could already do the things this algorithm offered to solve. Still, however, it was pushed, and sooner than later integrated into most popular search engines. Now you see the same thing happening with generative AI...
The purpose of generative AI, much like the recommendation algorithm is solving nothing hence the analogy "its just a big fucking turd" is what I'm trying to persuade here: We could already do the things it offered to solve. If you can see the pattern, its just this downward spiraling affect. It appeals to anti intellectuals (which is most of the US at this point) and google and other major companies are making record profit by selling user data to brokers: its a win for both parties.
Switching to Linux a few years ago gave me (at last part of) that feeling back