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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 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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Your units don’t make sense. Watts shouldn’t be used for a fixed energy usage it’s like saying a car drove across the U.S. and it did it at 4 gallons per hour.
The more useful metric to use is Gwh so chatgpt3 used 1.3 Gwh which isn’t bad but gpt4 used 62.3 Gwh in training plus an extra 1 Gwh per day
I get what you're saying now.
That said, I still get the analogy by saying a car used 4 gallons per hour - it still indicates how fuel efficient something is. Especially if compared to something else
But the problem is you don’t have anything to tie that to. if you have a car that gets 4 gph but goes 100 mph then it’s more efficient than a car that gets 3 gph but only goes 50mph but even with those you miss out on the actual efficiency which for a car is usually transporting people.
So if car A gets 4 gph at 100 mph and transports 2 people it gets 50 passenger miles per gallon of gas which is finally an actually useful metric
For LLMs that becomes much harder to quantify but a useful metric might be wh per minute of time saved or mL of water per minute of time saved. Unfortunately to quantify those you would need to do much more in depth analysis and probably also factor in false readings and time lost from that