Which matters, because Doctor Yellow inspection trains can be put into the schedule with the regular trains. There's no need to shut down traffic while a slow inspection car chugs along.
BART recently got a full-speed inspection car.[1] They needed a specially built one because BART has a non-standard track gauge.
The Federal Railroad Administration has track inspection cars, but only six of them for the whole country. One was seen on CALTRAIN track.[2]
A rubber ducky demands that you think about your own questions, rather than taking a mental back seat as you get pummeled with information that may or may not be relevant.
I assure you that if you rubber duck at another engineer that doesn't understand what you're doing, you will also be pummeled with information that may or may not be relevant. ;)
I don't think that's right. When you explain a technical problem to someone who isn't intimately familiar with it you're forced to think through the individual steps in quite a bit of detail. Of course that itself is an acquired skill but never mind that.
The point or rubber duck debugging then is to realize the benefit of verbally describing the problem without needing to interrupt your colleague and waste his time in order to do so. It's born of the recognition that often, midway through wasting your colleague's time, you'll trail off with an "oh ..." and exit the conversation. You've ended up figuring out the problem before ever actually receiving any feedback.
To that end an LLM works perfectly well as long as you still need to walk through a full explanation of the problem (ie minimal relevant context). An added bonus being that the LLM offers at least some of the benefits of a live person who can point out errors or alert you to new information as you go.
Basically my quibble is that to me the entire point of rubber duck debugging is "doesn't waste a real person's time" but it comes with the noticeable drawback of "plastic duck is incapable of contributing any useful insights".
> When you explain a technical problem to someone who isn't intimately familiar with it you're forced to think through the individual steps in quite a bit of detail.
The point of Rubber Ducking (or talking/praying to the Wooden Indian, to use an older phrase that is steeped in somewhat racist undertones so no longer generally used) is that it is an inanimate object that doesn't talk back. You still talk to it as if you were explaining to another person, so are forcing yourself to get your thoughts in order in a way that would make that possible, but actually talking to another person who is actively listening and actually asking questions is the next level.
I guess I can see where others are coming from (the LLM is different than a literal rubber duck) but I feel like the "can't reply" part was never more than an incidental consequence. To me the "why" of it was always that I need to solve my problem and I don't want to disturb my colleagues (or am unable to contact anyone in the first place for some reason).
So where others see "rubber ducking" as explaining to an object that is incapable of response, I've always seen it as explaining something without turning to others who are steeped in the problem. For example I would consider explaining something to a nontechnical friend to qualify as rubber ducking. The "WTF" interjections definitely make it more effective (the rubber duck consistently fails to notify me if I leave out key details).
nothing makes me more wary of a company than one that doesn't let me use my 20 year old VoIP number for SMS. Twitter, instagram (probably FB, if they ever do a "SMS 2fa" or whatever for me i imagine i'll lose my account forever), and a few others i can't think of offhand right now.
i've had the same phone numbers via this same VoIP company for ~20 years (2007ish). for these data hoovering companies to not understand that i'm not a scammer presents to me like it's all smoke and mirrors, held together with bailing wire, and i sure do hope they enjoy their yachts.
I am glad to see these efforts are now under an independent firm rather than being directed by Microsoft.
What is the ownership structure like? Where/who have you received funding from, and what is the plan for ongoing monetization of your work?
Would you ever sell the company to Microsoft, Google, or Amazon?
Thanks.
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