• brokenlcd@feddit.it
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    3 months ago

    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.

      • Phineaz@feddit.org
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        3 months ago

        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.

      • HamsterRage@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        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.

      • kwomp2@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        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

        • snooggums@midwest.social
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          3 months ago

          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

        • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          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.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • AeonFelis@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        She didn’t actually submit it though, so it shouldn’t have needed to process it and use up that electricity.

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

    • cman6@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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

      • voracitude@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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.

    • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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      3 months ago

      Except that you are paid to make the rubber duck do most of the work, not do most of the work yourself.

  • DrFuggles@feddit.org
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    3 months ago

    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

    • Contravariant@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • sharkbelly@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        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.

        • EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 months ago

          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.

      • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      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

    • redisdead@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      You needed a duck. You used one. It didn’t really look like a duck but it served the same purpose.

      • DrFuggles@feddit.org
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        3 months ago

        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

  • Maiq@lemy.lol
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • MeDuViNoX@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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.

        • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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          3 months ago

          Good on you for going back to update your posts with the solution you found. The internet needs more of that.

          • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            My tag line is “I am from the internet. I’m here to help.” It comes with certain responsibilities.