My Mathematical Regression

Nobody forces you to use AI.

It has become sort of junk food for the brain. Temptations and ads for it everywhere.

There’s a bit of hand-waving in the jump to 2n choose n solution, which I suppose is fine, and my ex–math teacher brain really wants to have a proper proof or at least solid reasoning rather than “it follows the pattern” based on three observations.

But I am reminded of how during my engagement 24 years ago, my future father-in-law raised an issue of being able to determine whether they were getting the full amount of sandpaper on large rolls that they were paying for. I was able to simplify the question a bit to one that treated the rolls as if they were simple concentric rolls of a specified thickness and from there could turn it into the good old Gaussian sum formula times 2π to get the length. The engineers working for the company came up with the same solution, but instead of using n(n-1)/2 they did the summation with multiple rows in excel.

Comment as a song https://mariedavidson.bandcamp.com/album/work-it-soulwax-rem...

There is no easy way out, you have to rest but you simply can't stop. Your body will rot, your mind too.

PS: song isn't an ode to the grind culture or how to slave away in an office, as lyrics say "you’ve got to work for yourself - Love yourself, feed yourself".

I think BC's features are equivalent to:

- Python's native integer handling, which already has no size limit.

- PLUS part of the Decimal module in Python's stdlib: BC's floats are DECIMAL by default, not binary.

- PLUS an implementation of Bessel's J function, while neglecting Bessel's K.

- Some features for base conversion using `ibase` and `obase`. So, I suppose you can output numbers to base 60. [EDIT: Correction from earlier: ibase is allowed to be at most 16, while POSIX allows for the maximum value of obase to be at least 99, which therefore does allow for formatting output to base 60.]

That was in the first calendar quarter this year. In the second calendar quarter CEOs started saying AI is too fucking expensive and let's stop doing it.