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75% of what AI does can be achieved with a magic 8 ball, rubber duck, Wikipedia, and a good notes app
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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Fuck AI
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I read through all the comments hoping someone would explain the rubber duck part. Your comment’s at the bottom of the page, and yet it’s the first one I’ve seen to question it.
Does anyone know what the rubber duck is supposed to add? Inquiring minds want to know!
It's about talking to something (anything, but a rubber duck is common) outloud just to voice your questions and talk through things.
Effectively, you're just conversing with yourself.
Actually no. It can be that but the idea is that you should talk to someone who isn't involved with what you are doing and one of two things happen, you have a lightbulb moment like you are talking about which you can be talking with the wall at that point, or the person you are talking to is supposed to see the blatantly obvious thing you are missing and then they tell you about it. It is called Rubber Ducking because one of the guys carried around a rubber duck when developing stuff and he couldn't easily get another person to stand there and listen to him whinge on about what he was doing. It is still better to have a thinking person there but you can't always have what you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
The joke is that "talking to a rubber duck" is probably just as effective as talking to a chatbot