this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
78 points (95.3% liked)

Showerthoughts

38688 readers
223 users here now

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.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
all 15 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 54 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Fairly obvious if you grew up in a non-anglophone country. It's part of the reason why certain kinds of people set their machines to English even if everything is localized well. And it's not just error messages, most of the good learning material is in English, too, especially for niche or very recent software.

Makes me wonder what kind of device you're using in the shower, though.

[–] YICHM@lemmy.world 15 points 1 month ago

A water multiplexer (faucet) and a water demultiplexer (showerhead).

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Let's not kid ourselves. Most localization in software is trash because technocrats refuse to pay actual translators. Part of the reason I have involved myself in FOSS localization efforts is because it is extremely obvious it is either being done by amateurs who don't speak the language, or using machine translation (AI or otherwise) that never gets the context right. Most people doing quality localization are scattered thin and the only ones paying good money for quality localization (FAAMG or whatever they call themselves now) are now laying off massive amounts of workers to replace them with poorly implemented AI.

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 7 points 1 month ago

I suppose I'm relatively spoiled as a German.

FAAMG or whatever they call themselves now) are now laying off massive amounts of workers to replace them with poorly implemented AI.

I do remember setting my webbrowser to English to avoid YouTube's absurd automatic title translations, and that was before the LLM hype ...

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

Or the software is so shitty that you cannot get translations correct because they assumed every language in the world works like English.

[–] Strider@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Also gaming, mmorpg, I concur. Always English.

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Oh yeah. It sucks trying to search for tips, solutions etc. when you only know the localized terms, and it's rare that help resources in different languages are even somewhat useful and up-to-date.

Also, localized voice acting tends to be lame. For one reason or another they're rarely as good as the original ones. Conversely, I found that German voice acting for games that were originally written in German can be quite good - it seems that localization just doesn't have the same energy as the original.

[–] MicrowavedTea 3 points 1 month ago

A good rule of thumb is to set each machine/website to its original language (English in most cases). Because when you set your devices to english then sites and apps will also try to change to english and that usually sucks for government websites for example.

[–] joyjoy@lemmy.zip 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is why error codes exist. Localize the message all you want, but keep the error code or id.

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 month ago

Well codes are very simplified and not able to depict the extent of all messages

[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

This was the main reason, why I moved 99% of my apps to English. Even worse is when they take liberties with the translation.

[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A fair amount of zhongguoren on here

[–] YICHM@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
  1. it's interesting that, for me, "中國人" is easier to read than "zhongguoren"
  2. from the use of traditional glyphs, you can assume that i don't live in the PRC
  3. you are technically correct. see also: Republic of China.
[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I mean, officially the Republic of China is still China and the people there can be described as Chinese. It's just not controlled by the communists. So I'm not wrong (assuming you're taiwanese). I couldn't tell if the screenshot was Traditional or Simplified. Ironically, the only character I know to look for in order to tell the difference is 国/國