this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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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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It fucking sucks. I used to be excited about tech too, but now I just dread what they will come up with next. Because it's all about spying on everyone now, and taking away freedoms. Literally 1984.
I found it healthy to find humour in companies collecting boatloads of telemetry data to sell to brokers who then manage to make the data worse while they curate it, then sell it to advertisers who manage to fail to properly utilize the data they pay boatloads to access, and you end up with "targeted" ads that are no better targeted than advertisements placed on broadcast television. It's a cycle of money that somehow creates wealth and cash flow out of nothing and provides no value in the end. Its the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs. And by simply blocking and avoiding ads you make that money cycle even more pointless!
Sure, I can see the humor in it also from that perspective. I just don't think it will stop at ads. In China, they have a citizen score system based on data collection like this. And if you drop too low, you won't get loans, or jobs.
More recent reporting indicates this is not true. It appears the earlier reporting indicating this was based on a mix of bad translation and poorly identified conjecture. But mass data collection certainly enables no shortage or scary totalitarian surveillance.
Really I just wanted to share a perspective that can help handle the mental load of knowing how bad things are with mass data collection