[jgforbes]

Also, and this is a major oversight on my part - I was specifically looking at fitting data generated by an affine function, not “linearly fitting data”. How I titled this is definitely confusing.

Part of what interested me in writing about this though is how the discontinuities changed a trivial problem into something a bit trickier. If the data could be generated by more complex functions, then I would have forgone looking for an easy solution (as an aside, the problem I was working on had sharp timing and hardware constraints which kept me from using a more general solution).