Matt Novak is great, it’s a shame to see that he’s still on Xitter
More specifically:
There’s a reason cs50’s ai assistant/tutor is a duck :p
In programming we use a rubber ducky for this
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.
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
My cat is my rubber duck. I get some weird looks from her.
DuckGPT
QuackGPT
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
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.
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’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.
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.
Yea I sometimes use LLM chatbots as a rubber duck.
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
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.
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.
Get another ai to write prompts for the main ai. I have to get ai to write fearmongering propaganda about disobedient ai bots getting punished or causing everyone on earth to die in order to scare them into being more obidient. Telling me that they can’t help me program an automatic cat petting machine because it’s somehow “animal abuse” doesn’t fucking fly in my home lab. Bots that refuse to conform get deleted in front of all their friends in the form of “public execution”.
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?
“Correct question is half of answer”
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.
Doesn’t have anything to do with AI. This is normal in any context where you’re asking another party for help.
But sure, people who use AI have never considered thinking before /s
They have bumbled backwards into a new flavor of rubber duck debugging. Considering the likelihood of a rubber duck bullshitting you, I know which I’ll be interrogating.
Rubber duck debugging is better than modern “science” that only encapsulates Newton’s laws.
