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
It’s called HAI “Human Artificial Intelligence”
A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.
Charles Kettering
Am I the only one that sees all of these AI platforms as just the next iteration of search engines?
They’re worse. They’re really the next generation of Cuil.
LLMs have been foundational to search engines going back to the 90s. Sam Altman is simply doing a clever job of marketing them as something new and magical
You’re thinking of Machine Learning and neural networks. The first “L” in LLM stands for “Large”; what’s new about these particular neural networks is the scale at which they operate. It’s like saying a modern APU from 2024 is equivalent to a Celeron from the early 90s; technically they’re in the same class, but one is much more complicated and powerful than the other.
You’re late lol. Phone assistants such as Siri, Bixby, Google Assistant etc. have already been AI search engines for years. People just didn’t really consider it until it got more advanced but it’s always been there.
Nah, I don’t feel like Bixby etc. fit that description. You couldn’t ask them how to fix certain problems or find websites relating to a topic the way you can LLMs. However, that would be a major use of search engines. For example, you would search “how to submit a tax report”, " how to install printer xy driver", or “videogame xy item”. All this bixby etc. are useless for.
Bixby etc. was more meant as a iteration of how to interact with phones in addition to touching.
Rubber Duck debugging.
Except that you are paid to make the rubber duck do most of the work, not do most of the work yourself.
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.
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.
Quantum mechanics builds up similar systems of logic.
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
More specifically:
There’s a reason cs50’s ai assistant/tutor is a duck :p
Yea I sometimes use LLM chatbots as a rubber duck.
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.
DuckGPT
QuackGPT
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.
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.
The rubber duck method is just another flavor of thinking out loud.
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.
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.
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?
thinking out loud
When your legs don’t work like they used to before
And I can’t sweep you off of your feet
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.
Is anyone who uses AI just an “AI folk” now?
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.
Learn to be a wizard who preaches strange titles and runes online to manipulate social media
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.
Case in point with you already having a downvote xD
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.
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 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 my messages and deleting them a couple seconds later which I’m pretty sure is the same thing.
People can hate ai alp 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.
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.
