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My Mathematical Regression

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Re: My Mathematical Regression

#51

Post by throwaw12 »

abhaynayar wrote: post #35
jp57 wrote: post #7

I think one of the saddest thing is that the kind of person who would recognize, "we can solve this seemingly complicated problem by just applying this formula", would often have trouble even getting recognized in many corporate environments. I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form…

If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money. Money would matter even more than the interpersonal stuff in most cases but on top of it even the managers treasured him so there should've been even less of an issue of communicating value. Getting bored is totally understandable…

> If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter

Here is why: I turned off a feature flag in our feature flagging service which saved company 10% infra cost, do you think I can be promoted to Staff+ and lead 50 engineers?

Promotions and/or recognitions in corporate environments works differently.

I don't agree with it, but this is how it works: If what you did feels simple, anyone else can do it as well, why should we promote you for finding such silly mistake or improvement.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#52

Post by doctorpangloss »

jp57 wrote: post #7

I think one of the saddest thing is that the kind of person who would recognize, "we can solve this seemingly complicated problem by just applying this formula", would often have trouble even getting recognized in many corporate environments. I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form…

okay, another POV is that hardly any real problems are math problems, but we seem to call solving math problems "problem solving" when that's really not true at all. like the easy part is the math. the hard part is persuading other people.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#53

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

I am currently just going to college after high school and I was preparing for the JEE exam and I remember such a question was within the textbooks of maths itself.

At first glance of the question, I had imagined it to be hard but then I read through the solution and other comments to recognize that I had in fact done such a question previously and I had solved it independently during the class if I remember correctly or such classes of problems.

I also agree with the AI and spreadsheets part of thing for what its worth but I can only tell more when I get into job but I have heard such things from my senior brothers.

I feel like there has to be a right balance of complexity though, and for what its worth I think that there are so many other things that one optimizes later on in life with tangential benefits as well with real knowledge about real life use-cases and edge-cases and so much more! I feel like it would be hard to replace with AI as much as (some) people (mostly Marketing) want it to feel so.

I do hope that people don't atrophy their skills though and to solve some coding questions or make projects perhaps as well without LLM by hand if given/having the time. Not everything probably has to be done by the fastest or the most accelerated way as you wouldn't know the destination as it would be found along the way itself. I suppose just like life, so stay safe and have a nice day.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#54

Post by blmarket »

I think it's due to calibration - practical work related problems are never that simple & easy so naturally people might start from DP formula.

D[A,B] := number of ways to navigate from grid sized AxB = D[A-1,B]+D[A,B-1]

and the aha moment is realising this is just a binomial coefficient.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#55

Post by boothby »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #52
jp57 wrote: post #7

I think one of the saddest thing is that the kind of person who would recognize, "we can solve this seemingly complicated problem by just applying this formula", would often have trouble even getting recognized in many corporate environments. I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form…

okay, another POV is that hardly any real problems are math problems, but we seem to call solving math problems "problem solving" when that's really not true at all. like the easy part is the math. the hard part is persuading other people.

A great many real world problems have, at their crux, a mathematical problem. A mathematician paired with a subject matter expert can be powerful indeed when each sees deeply into the others' blind spots. But, I've heard statements like yours a lot over the years: assuming mathematicians aren't fully aware of the limitations of what you think math is.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#56

Post by vermilingua »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #25
d_silin wrote: post #22

Nobody forces you to use AI. It has become sort of junk food for the brain. Temptations and ads for it everywhere.

If you have performance based metrics about your AI usage then you are essentially being forced to use AI (or become unemployed) Plenty of people are experiencing this nowadays The idea that no one is being forced to use AI is nonsense

I’m currently in the middle of this process. I’m finding refusing to be working remarkably well, though I am also in a country with worker protections. Join a union.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#58

Post by chatmasta »

pocksuppet wrote: post #30
bluefirebrand wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have performance based metrics about your AI usage then you are essentially being forced to use AI (or become unemployed) Plenty of people are experiencing this nowadays The idea that no one is being forced to use AI is nonsense

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.

You’re now being forced to optimize your AI cost usage and produce the same results as before you cared about it.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#59

Post by chatmasta »

andredurao wrote: post #32

That Project Euler problem was my first encounter with memoization. At the time, it felt like a magical solution, so I ended up solving it using the central column of Pascal's triangle, which was easier for me to understand back then. I also tried a weird idea involving popcount, but it didn't scale. My approach was to represent each possible path with 0s (don't turn) and 1s (turn), testing the same number of 0s and…

The binomial coefficient is derived from Pascal’s triangle, which is a fact I remember but cannot explain, based on some hazy memories of 10th grade math class.

Re: My Mathematical Regression

#60

Post by ForOldHack »

boothby wrote: post #55
doctorpangloss wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

okay, another POV is that hardly any real problems are math problems, but we seem to call solving math problems "problem solving" when that's really not true at all. like the easy part is the math. the hard part is persuading other people.

A great many real world problems have, at their crux, a mathematical problem. A mathematician paired with a subject matter expert can be powerful indeed when each sees deeply into the others' blind spots. But, I've heard statements like yours a lot over the years: assuming mathematicians aren't fully aware of the limitations of what you think math is.

Its all a math problem, and if it isn't a math problem, its a database problem. I come across a lot of problems, and since I always try to reduce it to a math problem... I intuitively come up with both the solution to the problem, but solutions to other problems. But, if it's not a math problem, of course, its a database problem.

I would safely assume that there are no limitations of what mathematicians can do, with one important exception: Andrew, for whom I argued about the mis-uses of Infinity. Andrew is, well, rather famous.

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