this post was submitted on 04 Sep 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:

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.

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I can see someone in the future watching a program run and asking "wow, is that ai? A PERSON typed those cryptic letters? No way!"

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[–] howrar@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

LLMs are necessarily non-deterministic,

There's nothing about LLMs that force them to be non-deterministic. Given the same prompts and context, they will always output the same probability distribution. It's then up to you what you decide to do with that distribution. If you decide to always choose the most likely output, then the entire thing will be deterministic. We just don't do that because it's less useful than stochastic output.

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yes, that's why it's necessary for it to be non-deterministic. Without non-determinism, there is no error recovery if it chooses the wrong token somewhere in the middle of the completion. That's much less useful.

[–] howrar@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What's this error recovery business you speak of?

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

So you can try your prompt again. Also to avoid getting stuck in loops of repeated text. Getting stuck down a bad line of "reasoning". Etc.

Low chance of error comes with low chance of error recovery, conversely high chance of error comes with high error recovery ability (mostly just talking about temperature and top k, here)