Spherical Cow

by Natfan • 7 months ago

134 20 7 months ago

The concept of a spherical cow was also part of Chris Morris’ comedy oeuvre. Possibly in the Brasseye episode “Animals”.

wolfi1• 7 months ago

I know this joke since the 90s and one has to assume it's even going way back

spopejoy• 7 months ago

- They just eat it don't they?

- But what should they do? Yeah yeah yeah yeah

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xgnuxd0tiHk

dwattttt• 7 months ago

Did not over-promise

jesse__• 7 months ago

I came for spherical cows. I left with spherical cows

gchamonlive• 7 months ago

In a world full of deception, the spherical cow is a cup of fresh milk.

pinkmuffinere• 7 months ago

The reason this library was initially written was to optimise the layout of inflatable space habitats which may one day be constructed on the Moon and Mars.

Wow, they even deliver on the “in a vacuum” bit

gradientsrneat• 7 months ago

Mars does have an atmosphere. It's much less dense than Earth's, but its enough to have weather. Pretty good joke though.

bruce511• 7 months ago

> "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum".

I get the joke, but that's not really what modeling means. There's no "only" determination here.

So sure, the researchers devised a model, in which the cows were spherical and in a vacuum. That produced a solution, but there's nothing to show that solution would work less in an air environment with regular cows [1].

I bring this up only because elsewhere here is a discussion of computer fundamentals (and their lack in juniors / self taught folk, and AI output). The quote above is logically flawed (likely on purpose to create the joke) but understanding that it is a logical joke may not be obvious to everyone.

[1] to show that they would have to build a model with air and meat to show the solution fails, at which point the original model would be discarded.

Etheryte• 7 months ago

This trail of thought is not logically sound. The whole argument is built on the notion of what modeling is and isn't, but the original quote doesn't make the assumptions you imply. Sure, they might have a model that assumes cows are spherical and etc, but it might also very well be that they have hard constraints that make it work only for spherical cows and nothing else. There isn't enough information in the quote to make the argument you're trying to make.

littlestymaar• 7 months ago

[1] to show that they would have to build a model with air and meat to show the solution fails, at which point the original model would be discarded

You only have to show that it fails for square (or any non-spherical shape) cow in vacuum or for spherical cow in air.

oh_nice_marmot• 7 months ago

Why not call it SpheriCOW?

NoiseBert69• 7 months ago

This will confuse all Copy-On-Write FS developers.

Moooow!

bell-cot2• 7 months ago

An improvement - but to get gov't funding, it has to be a straight-acronym name.

Maybe "Space Performance [something ... something] Optimization for Weightlessness"?

NBJack• 7 months ago

Space Packing Heuristic for Efficient Rearrangement of Enumerated Cattle Optimized for Weightlessness

mos87• 7 months ago

An ideal allegory for Rewrite Everything in Rust Syndrome^WDrive

ycombinatrix• 7 months ago

Could this be made no_std/no_alloc?

Spherical Cow

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