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Thank you for holding my duck (2021)
ere’s a story I like to tell, which I vaguely remembered as originating at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. A researcher had a rubber duck in his office.
Years ago, Tamar Shinar and I agreed that the “Thank you for holding my duck” expression is better if it is understood to not mean the colleague didn’t contribute, as then it can be used in boundary cases without slight. This may work, but misses the social aspect: explaining the problem to a person uses a different part of the speaker’s brain. I did learn from the inventor of the Burrows-Wheeler transform that rubber duck debugging is sometimes called “brickwalling” in the UK, but again that’s the worse version.
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