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
A rubber duck is a prostitute for thoughts and belief systems.
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.
thinking out loud
When your legs don’t work like they used to before
And I can’t sweep you off of your feet
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.
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
That can generate better logic systems than Newton’s laws and fully utilise harmonics instead.
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.
That would be a lot like the computer on the spaceship in Red Dwarf, though.
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.
More specifically:
There’s a reason cs50’s ai assistant/tutor is a duck :p
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.
Doofenshmirtz and his writers would have thought in the same way to construct alien sci-fi tech.
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…
This is how symbolism worked in the Bible. It taught peace, love and prosperity through gaining knowledge over time.
Monero (or XMR) will be the new good, holy currency used by Christians far in the future. That’s because it’s based on strong encryption algorithms and can be used to commit “crimes”. I may have used it this way in the past, depending on how national and international border systems worked.
You can rubber duck debug any logic system or truth statement, and it’s a far more elegant way to think than just old sciences based on Newton laws.
You needed a duck. You used one. It didn’t really look like a duck but it served the same purpose.
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
Consider posting the problem along with the answer.That way you can shown the right path to other people.
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?!
Jack off and jack into the information systems. Gross. Lol
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.
In programming we use a rubber ducky for this
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.
Yea I sometimes use LLM chatbots as a rubber duck.
“Correct question is half of answer”
Ineresting, will make a good topic for my next offline podcast (talking to my friends without a microphone).
I can’t count the number of times I’ve written out a question for a coworker, answered it myself in the process of phrasing the question and deleted it all. My mentoree has a habit of sending me messages and deleting them a couple seconds later which I’m pretty sure is the same thing.
People can hate ai all they want but if bouncing questions off an ai helps debug a problem go for it.
What tech support department doesn’t have the “ask the stuffed bear on the counter in the corner out loud your question before asking tech support” system in place ?
I thought the canonical examen was a rubber duck.
Yes. Or an orb containing bouncing lasers on its unique internal surface containing geometrical matrix identities it can use to communicate advanced concepts to you in the form of energy. Check out how Dream plays Minecraft (or Minetest) right now. That’s still all based on cubic fractals that store energy, just like the Mandelbrot Set or a God, or even a God of gaps that can explain things and “spread enlightment through history”.
The future is all laser orbs and I think I can have a future with a loving God right now.
Ever watched Haruhi or Red Dwarf?
