Cathy Young
mccBut if the rubber ducks can find the problems in the code by themselves then why do we need to pay the programmers
gaytabase@mcc but who will squeak and take baths?
king toot uncommon@dysfun @mcc clearly programmers
Chris [list of emoji]...and *that's* how you get AI booms.
revenant@mcc something about labor laws, i think
Mux2000 (exfoliating)
Kristian Sivonen@mcc To manage the ducks. You need a programmer to come in, identify issues and think out loud every now and then to get the self-reinforcing feedquack loop going again for a few hours.
jn (big endian energy)@mcc Save 80% of operating expenses with this One Simple Trick!
aburka 🫣@mcc take this down immediately before a CTO sees it
Andrew L@mcc I once worked at a place where we thought about buying an enormous rubber duck and placing it in the middle of the dev's room. We couldn't afford the huge bill though. 🦆
Chris Bohn
John Robinson@johnelalamo @mcc :D not an uncommon response.
DJ🌞
@mcc try not to pay to quickly find out why~~
j5v@mcc If you have more rubber ducks, does that increase the probability of solving the problem?
RyanParsley@mcc why not make the whole airplane out of rubber ducks!?
Andreas K@mcc Sure.
I lived like a small king for a decade, fixing under time pressure the worst f%ckups human developers at my customers have produced. Harsh is the existence of an IT consultant.
Bring them on, the LLM AIs that have problems to count, I'm sure there will be absolutely no flood of subtle one-off bugs, in code that no one at the customer even understands because it was generated by a magic LLM.
The number of experts won't raise, the size of code that stinks OTOH.
@mcc And that's at the moment when a significant jurisdiction is introducing more or less unlimited liability for software bugs.
Good idea to downgrade the code monkeys from badly trained humans to stochastic automatons.
urig@mcc speaking for programmers, we can type 10 times faster!
Indiealexh@mcc the ducks can't read and AI is unaware how to provide the contextually relevant info for the ducks.
The ducks also don't have fingers and so can't type the solution, and again, AI is unaware of the context.
We can have the team start of a duck to pc interface. It should only case $1.2T USD
acb@mcc They need the programmers as a medium. Attempts to find a cheaper substitute have, so far, been fruitless.
Cosmic LibrarianI get it. Why can't we just debug using a can of Raid.😁
Sesame Street - Rubber Duckie (1970 version)
AlgoCompSynth by znmeb 🇺🇦@mcc But who does a better job of debugging - a rubber duck or a teddy bear?
Cybarbie@AlgoCompSynth @mcc A *very* long time ago, a certain beautiful young thing worked at a Dutch software company, which is alas no more, had instead a pink panther. Not only did he do the usual debugging but he was also responsible for version control, i.e. whomever screen he sat on had 'control' of the trunk.
Nicole ParsonsPrecisely. AI investors are insisting on mass layoffs at the corporations they invest in.
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/billionaire-hohn-more-google-layoffs-17736530.php
It's normally considered poor investment philosophy to put all your eggs in one basket.
Abandoning real revenue-generating successful products in favor of a maybe. It's odd. AI is supposed to replace programmers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/technology/saudi-arabia-ai.html
Tamandua@mcc the problems in the code aren’t going to get there by themselves.
AndroidDreamer@mcc Ergonomics! Ever seen a duck type on a keyboard?
dzamie 
@mcc Programmers implement fixes faster than the ducks; without hands, ducks have to rely on the "hunt and peck" typing method.
Lonnon Foster@mcc Truly a galaxy manager brain way of thinking.
floogy@mcc pls tell me this is tongue-in-cheek?
llewelly@mcc
clearly, any bug capable of duck-typing will mimic the rubber ducks and thrive amongst them like an ant-mimicking spider in an ant colony, feasting happily on its prey ...
clearly, any bug capable of duck-typing will mimic the rubber ducks and thrive amongst them like an ant-mimicking spider in an ant colony, feasting happily on its prey ...
1.3.6.1.4.1.61513@mcc programmers are just scrum masters for rubber ducks
McKinsey here. Would you like a job?
@mcc so the rubber ducks don't get bored(stiff)
Irenes (many)@mcc the compiler doesn't yet understand duck squeaks
WildEnte@mcc I'm disappointed by the clear underappreciation of rubber ducks throughout this thread.
Oblomov
Ingvar
LR@mcc famous last words
Antoine Alberti@mcc
Rubber ducks consume less energy than AI
Rubber ducks consume less energy than AI
@antoinealberti when you get to the gigaduck or even teraduck scale the petroleum expenditure to make all that plastic can become significant
@mcc
Thank Gold, McKinsey's "circular economy" still works. Instead of Nvidia, it's just the oil industry benefitting from white collar unemployment... Wait a minute, reminds me of something
Thank Gold, McKinsey's "circular economy" still works. Instead of Nvidia, it's just the oil industry benefitting from white collar unemployment... Wait a minute, reminds me of something
Tacitus 🇮🇪 
If you get rid of the programmers then where exactly do you expect the problems to come from then? Huh? Didn't think it through did you? What use are your precious ducks now?
@tacitus *me, not responding, laying in a giant pile of rubber ducks, happy*
Jay Hannah@mcc I was taught this phrase only a month ago, so for anyone confused: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
