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
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?
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
That can generate better logic systems than Newton’s laws and fully utilise harmonics instead.
DuckGPT
QuackGPT
Sometimes a realise the answer to a question when i am writing a reddit/lemmy post asking for help.
Maybe the real artificial intelligence is the regular intelligence we found along the way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
“Correct question is half of answer”
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.
Ineresting, will make a good topic for my next offline podcast (talking to my friends without a microphone).
What a feature. Blueskyians really don’t like birdsite.
Also, hope somebody finds this comment (& Lemmy) via web search
Possible Twitter screenshot
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
