this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Showerthoughts
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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
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- 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
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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.
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It isn’t just you and me. Not even the people who designed them fully understand why they give the responses they give. It’s a well-known problem. Our understanding is definitely improving over time, but we still don’t fully know how they do it.
Here’s the latest exploration of this topic I could find.
Hmm. That is interesting, and I admit it does seem like the company that made it is also still researching their own model, but some parts of the article seem a bit dramatic (not sure if there is a better word).
Like when it says the model doesn't "admit" to how it solved the math problem when asked. Of course it doesn't, it is made for humans to interact with so it is not going to tell a human how a computer does math, it makes more sense for it to explain the "human" method.
Interesting stuff though, thanks for the article!
The wording is very sensationalist. It's currently hard to trace any single output specifically, but that doesn't mean we don't know how it works. The algorithm and theory behind it are very well understood. It's just that the algorithm is very complex (and uses very large amounts of data), which is what makes tracing a single response token by token so hard.
When you read something about how we don't understand how AI works, you can safely skip that article, they intentionally use dishonest language to make it sound like something mystical is going on.
Yeah that makes a lot more sense to me. I can definitely understand that the algorithm might be very large and complex for one person to understand, but it isn't magic.