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.
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.
Except that you are paid to make the rubber duck do most of the work, not do most of the work yourself.
More specifically:
There’s a reason cs50’s ai assistant/tutor is a duck :p
In programming we use a rubber ducky for this
Is anyone who uses AI just an “AI folk” now?
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.
Not in my opinion. I would say “AI people” are those who believe in it too much or evangelize it
I think it’s better at explaining beliefs than science is, and has been shown to be by art throughout history.
Try watching the Haruhi anime or Your Name.
Or any sci fi.
Or fantasy.
The LLMs of today are a useful tool, but they are far from conscious.
They basically are. You should watch Youtube right now. Watch Dream play modern Minecraft.
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.
Yeah. Well done. Keep questioning this stuff. I haven’t got too far yet either
Yes
I wish it wasn’t true but yah. they consult ai for everything.
I don’t have the equipment or cybernetics to have this title yet.
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
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.
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.
DuckGPT
QuackGPT
Sometimes a realise the answer to a question when i am writing a reddit/lemmy post asking for 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.
Flavour Flauvvvvv
Explain why “flavor” is wrong, as if I was a rubber duck. You can use any help you like, including a dictionary.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
I got tired of getting basic examples as answers.
Now I write the class and add pseudo code and comments, it works a bit better.
Ineresting, will make a good topic for my next offline podcast (talking to my friends without a microphone).
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”.
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?!
Quantum mechanics builds up similar systems of logic.
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.
It’s called HAI “Human Artificial Intelligence”
What a feature. Blueskyians really don’t like birdsite.
Also, hope somebody finds this comment (& Lemmy) via web search
Possible Twitter screenshot
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
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.
Reminded of one of the most welcome kind of message to pop up on my screen
AI alarm cock.
