It seems like a flavour of the rubber duck method; by trying to explain it to a third party, you think about it in a different way and find a solution.
Never heard the term but I often do it intuitively
Trust me bro(ette): Rubber duck is the SHIT. I don’t even program save for a few rare instances, but any complex issue where you just know something is wrong but can’t quite put your finger on it? It works miracles. A lot better tbf if you are actually explaining it to someone who can ask questions, but any object that you can look at is a good substitute.
My cat is my rubber duck. I get some weird looks from her.
You mean prostitute
Initially I thought this comment was threaded under the “my cat is my rubber duck” comment which made it much worse.
Hey, pal - that’s my mom you’re talking about
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Of cause I know someone who can ask questions. It’s me.
No, seriously, when I explain it to myself, I come up with questions that really help
The rubber duck method is just another flavor of thinking out loud.
I think it’s a bit more than that. I think that the idea is that you simplify the problem so that the rubber duck could understand it. Or at least reformulate it in order to communicate it clearly.
It’s the simplification, reformulation or reorganisation that helps to get the breakthrough.
Just thinking out loud isn’t quite the same thing.
The small but important differences are what makes it another flavor.
You mean “flavour”, right? Another small but important difference.
As far as I am aware it is a regional difference in spelling, and that is what I get when searching for definitions.
What small but importance difference are you referring to?
Explain why “flavor” is wrong, as if I was a rubber duck. You can use any help you like, including a dictionary.
Flavour Flauvvvvv
thinking out loud
When your legs don’t work like they used to before
And I can’t sweep you off of your feet
Even though this is true for like 90% of my thinking (that I can see when I try), so far I’m concinced this ist because I am a predominantly language-and-normal-grammar-rules thinker.
There are people that mostly think via associations of words that don’t have to be formulated/ cast into grammar.
And then there supposedly people mainly thinking in pictures or smth, without words.
Anyways for some people rubber duck mode reoresents a change in thinking method, I think
Yes, saying thinks out loud requires a different change in thinking because you are verbalizing the thoughts in addition to approaching it as an explanation instead of just an understanding. I know how a phone works, but describing how it works is a different thing from knowing. The duck is just a stand in for someone else to get the mindset of explaining
I’m one of the latter that doesn’t really think in words, and a LOT of the time, thoughts have to be greatly simplified or at least much more organized to be stated in clear sentences. It’s that pause-and-refine that often gets the breakthrough for me. Sometimes it takes clear until I’m trying to put it in understandable sentences instead of a big ramble, but it still largely boils down to ACTUALLY stopping the task work to loop back over the landscape.
A lot of people do the same thing physically. Like when you’re climbing a big ladder and suddenly realize how high up you are, or how unstable the ladder is. Just a pause and broadening of attention is often enough to cue different thoughts and realizations.
AI in general is only a glorified rubber duck for most cases. The amount of bullshit cobbled together is too high for many uses
Ai, the rolling coal of tought processes
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DuckGPT
QuackGPT
I’ve been using it like that. I have been trying to program this macropad thing I bought that uses python without having done much programming and it has yet to give me a solution that works. But in the course of explaining to it why whatever it gave me doesn’t work I’ve made a lot of progress so that’s nice at least.
Maybe the real artificial intelligence is the regular intelligence we found along the way.
NOOOOOOOO BRO
YOU GOTTA TRY THIS AI I PUT IN MY DIGITAL ALARM CLOCK
AI alarm cock.
AI clock would be sweet.
Knows I slept through an alarm or forgot to set it and wakes me up or suggests the right time to set alarms based on traffic conditions
Traff… Right, no public transport.
Reminded of one of the most welcome kind of message to pop up on my screen
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More specifically:
There’s a reason cs50’s ai assistant/tutor is a duck :p
Rubber Duck debugging.
And all we needed was the electricity of a good sized industrial nation state.
She didn’t actually submit it though, so it shouldn’t have needed to process it and use up that electricity.
She didn’t, but the equipment had to exist and suck up electricity for her to get that far.
yep, came to say the same thing.
Sometimes thinking of the problem in a different way, such as describing it to another person, can help you look at it from a different direction and realize the problem.
Ha, I never knew this had an actual name.
I thought it was known as talking to a brick wall, ie. if you have a issue talk to a brick wall and you’ll get the answer
It’s got more than a name, too: it’s got a Wikipedia page! Part of my job is IT support for normies, and I love sharing that with clients (because of course they’ve not heard of it). Usually gets a laugh, and I like to think they adopt the term and “rubber duck” things in their daily life thereafter.
Except that you are paid to make the rubber duck do most of the work, not do most of the work yourself.
To be fair, I’ve written countless stack overflow posts detailing my problems in hope someone would be able to spot the mistake or error only for me to realize what it was along the way and never even submitting it.
And I didn’t even need a 🦆 for it
Education has really failed to impress upon people the importance of asking questions. It’s amazing how much time is wasted on making people learn answers to questions they don’t even know how to ask.
The most valuable tool I ever got (as a tutor/teacher) was Socratic Questioning. Students not only benefit from its application but it also helps to impress upon them the value (and relative skill) to asking thoughtful questions.
I don’t mean to sound like a Mom for Liberty, but to my mind, the American public education system (probably others) is not about developing intelligence but rather preparing children for work and keeping them busy/safe while their parents work, and I’d argue it’s not very good at its primary function. The ones who escape with curiosity, capacity, and confidence intact are woefully rare if you care about power to the people and thankfully rare if you care about keeping people easy to control.
On top of that, it doesn’t even do a good job of preparing kids for work since the majority of jobs will be in a team based environment while schools focus on individual/isolated learning almost exclusively.
The modern school system was largely developed around the early 1900s with the intent of creating factory line workers: people who could remember and perform 2 or 3 repetitive tasks. This is further compounded by the rise of standardized testing, which provides a good base level for quality of subjects across the range of individual teacher’s skills but has become an administrative crutch that puts test scores above everything else, leading to a cycle where kids are taught only to remember stuff long enough to pass the next test and then dump it from memory for the next set of test subjects.
Schooling needs a major revision from the ground up for the modern age.
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I don’t think that’s why questions aren’t asked. I find questions aren’t asked because of ego. Nobody wants to look like they don’t know things. Lots of people will judge others for asking questions. I’m a question guy and it always surprised me how other people just knew things and didn’t ask questions. But I soon started to realize that they don’t know as much as they want others to think. They just have a high value for more independent thinking.
Yeah, it’s a well known technique in programming called “rubber duck debugging”.
The process of explaining the situation forces you to think about it in a different way, which can help you with the debugging.
But, nobody actually credits the duck when it works. It’s weird that this guy seems to want to credit ChatGPT
Is it just me or is this a really weird way of repeating what the OP said? He even used the duck emoji for clarity…
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You needed a duck. You used one. It didn’t really look like a duck but it served the same purpose.
Consider posting the problem along with the answer.That way you can shown the right path to other people.
The ultimate “I solved it”.
yeah, if it’s something that other people can actually profit from I usually post it anyway, but most of the time it’s “oh goddamn, there’s two commas in line 72 where there should only be one” kinda stuff
99% of the questions I was going to post to stack overflow were solved before I hit post. Something about really having to think through your problem to give people the most complete information about your problem as possible makes it easier to find the solution.
I did just get a rubber ducky and I didn’t know what I should do with it till now.
This sounds like Rubberduck debugging.
i wanted to try this, but i only got a hard plastic duck
well that should work, unless you are the infamous reddit user, fuckswithducks, in which case it might also work.
nah, my reddit username was Unidan and i only fucked with crows
Jackdaws?!
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That’s like how I cheated through every single test in school I’ve ever taken. I literally just paid attention to what the teacher said, wrote the answers down, wrote down more answers from the book, and then read them a couple times until I remembered them. I’d come in and just write down all those answers on the test and they’d never suspect a thing. I’ve still never been caught to this day and I even use it in my life outside of school.
Back in the days of usenet if I had a Linux problem I would carefully research the issue while composing a post asking how to solve it. I needed to make sure I covered every possible option so that people would know just how odd the problem was and that I had taken every reasonable step to fix it. And this was how I hardly ever had to post anything because this process almost always found the answer.
That happened to me a lot when I was thinking about asking for help on reddit and usually if I got to the point that I still have to ask it’s hopeless anyway. Pretty sure I only got actual help that solved a problem one time over the years.
I had a winmodem issue on a laptop that Acer forgot they made that dogged made for 2 years. No answer available. And then one day the answer just popped up. I had to go back and find my original posts and edit them to include the solution.
Good on you for going back to update your posts with the solution you found. The internet needs more of that.
My tag line is “I am from the internet. I’m here to help.” It comes with certain responsibilities.
In programming we use a rubber ducky for this
Yea I sometimes use LLM chatbots as a rubber duck.
Is anyone who uses AI just an “AI folk” now?
Yes
People who are using it to solve problems which require equivalent effort of writing a sufficient prompt and just directly solving it without AI at all for sure are AI folk.
I don’t have the equipment or cybernetics to have this title yet.
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Not in my opinion. I would say “AI people” are those who believe in it too much or evangelize it
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The LLMs of today are a useful tool, but they are far from conscious.
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Are you implying that dream is an AI? Or do people like, upload AI copies of him?
If it’s the former, that’s absurd. If it’s the latter, that doesn’t prove consciousness. AI voice replication is done by text to speech. A conscious human would type out what the voice should say.
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I work in the tech industry so I am forced to understand new technologies. This one is unique in that it plays on the human brain’s innate tendency to anthropomorphize things.
It also does a great job of presenting information
I wish it wasn’t true but yah. they consult ai for everything.
I’ve seen some people on Twitter complain that their coworkers use ChatGPT to write emails or summarize text. To me this just echoes the complaints made by previous generations against phones and calculators. There’s a lot of vitriol directed at anyone who isn’t staunchly anti AI and dares to use a convenient tool that’s avaliable to them.
I’m not on twitter, but frankly the strongly anti-AI I see is often from techy places. HN and lemmy are two main ones.
HN?
Hacker News probably
Thanks.
I think my main issue with that use case is that it’s a “solution” to a relatively minor problem (which has a far simpler solution), that actually compounds the problem.
Let’s say I don’t want to write prose for my email, I have a list of bullet points I want to get across. Awesome, I feed it into the chat gippity and boom, my points are (hopefully) property represented in prose.
Now, the recipient doesn’t want to read prose. ESPECIALLY if it’s the fluffy wordy-internet-recipe-preamble that the chat gippity tends to produce. They want a bullet point summary. So they feed it into the chat gippity to get what is (hopefully) a properly condensed bullet point summary.
So, suddenly we have introduced a fallible middle translation layer for actually no reason.
Just write the clear bullet point email in the first place. Save everyone the time. Save everyone from the 2 chances for the chat gippity to fuck it up.
Case in point with you already having a downvote xD
Edit: Lmao
A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.
Charles Kettering
Charles Franklin Kettering (August 29, 1876 – November 25, 1958) sometimes known as Charles Fredrick Kettering[1] was an American inventor, engineer, businessman, and the holder of 186 patents.[2] He was a founder of Delco, and was head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947. Among his most widely used automotive developments were the electrical starting motor[3] and leaded gasoline.[4] In association with the DuPont Chemical Company, he was also responsible for the invention of Freon refrigerant for refrigeration and air conditioning systems. At DuPont he also was responsible for the development of Duco lacquers and enamels, the first practical colored paints for mass-produced automobiles. While working with the Dayton-Wright Company he developed the “Bug” aerial torpedo, considered the world’s first aerial missile.[5] He led the advancement of practical, lightweight two-stroke diesel engines, revolutionizing the locomotive and heavy equipment industries. In 1927, he founded the Kettering Foundation, a non-partisan research foundation, and was featured on the cover of Time magazine in January 1933.
“Correct question is half of answer”
