this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
167 points (85.5% liked)
Showerthoughts
35903 readers
1806 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nah, thats just a side effect. The primary purpose of AI is being a hype object that companies can use to inflate their stock. I like how this blogpost explained it https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/30/accounting-gaffs/
The labor market effect will be quite short lived. LLMs as a replacement to human labor will be gone before long simply because they will ruin any company, government or project that relies on them. Its a sort of natural selection.
I hope you're right.
I have doubt, but also hope.
LLMs have a more mystical pull than other previous hypes, but look at what happened with crypto and blockchain. Every fucking government and company was saying that its the future and now nobody gives a shit about those anymore. It might be later than you and i would like, but eventually it will pass.
Or it will become foundational tech like the Internet. People said that was a fad too.
It all depends on whether or not it becomes reliable and cheap.
Idk why you are being downvoted. It is a real possiblity, but i just dont think its likely.
Because it simply wont ever be those things. LLMs become more expensive the better you try to make them, exponentially so. We will likely never see LLMs that are significantly better than what we have today. Basically all written human texts on the internet have been used for LLM training. Any further gains can only come from optimizing training algorithms and there hasnt been any real progress there for years now.
The internet was successful because it was predictable and reliable and filled a previously unserved purpose. LLMs could possibly serve a purpose creating text that doesn't need to be correct or accurate, but it won't replace anything that requires any level of accuracy or accountability because the design is inherently flawed due to being a prediction algorithm.
There are uses for pattern matching AI that will continue to be tools used by humans to help focus efforts in massively complex work, but they won't ever be foundational replacements.
Oh yeah for sure there are plenty of great uses for machine learning, i would never deny that.
Yes, it will take a substantial change in LLM architecture to make them viable for general use. Like you said, a couple orders of magnitude improvement in training would be the biggest help. Though I’m not sure that’s even possible.
Get blocked Ai apologist.
How is what I said AI apologism? I clearly expressed concern that the technology isn’t reliable or cheap.
Ignore the troll
Cloud everything, saas, and offshore workers are all still things that have been negatively affecting people for years and never really went away even if the hype died down.
Cloud computing is slowly crumbling too. At least in germany more and more companies are going back to on prem, because there are just a bunch of studies showing that cloud stuff is more expensive, less flexible and often actually has more downtime. But unlike other stupid projects you cant just reverse the move to cloud in a few months, it will take years to unfuck everything.