this post was submitted on 15 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
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.
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This reminds me of a short story/presentation by computer scientist Ken Thompson titled, "Reflections on Trusting Trust".
It's worth reading but basically we use software to create software. We trust that the software we use to create software can be trusted. We have the source code, but that's just words on paper, it doesn't do anything. We have to use software to turn that code into software.
To light a campfire take a burning stick and apply it to the pile of tinder and dry wood. Where do you get a burning stick? Place one in a campfire.
I like to talk about this in my CS classes. We get compiles to compile code by compiling a compiler with a compiler. It's an infinite regression problem that terminates with someone writing a compiler in assembly... Which requires an assembler to assemble... So you write an assembler in machine code directly on the processor.
If we lost all of the currently compiled programs one day, even with the compiler source code in hand, it would be some serious work to rebuild our current tool chains.