They will push the AI angle until maybe 1.5 years from now, when it falls out of fashion.

My knowledge of customer feedback from the spate of AI helpers from Microsoft, Google and others is that they kinda work sometimes and that mostly, customers hate it. It's like turning on FSD in the middle of a city in my Tesla. You put more effort into monitoring and checking the AI's output than you would just driving.

Similarly with writing a document, or writing code. There is no AI that can help me write the stuff I write. It's mired in company secrets that no AI is trained on and the AI can't put together cogent technical arguments that cover more than a single sentence. It's like having an illiterate child writing over your sheet of paper.

This isn't a value prop for customers and it won't turn out to be one. AI will bury itself in the fabric of the world in the form of classifiers, human language parsers and image/data enhancement but no one is going to pay for that, it'll just be an additional cost on businesses that need to have these convenience functions to feature match the competition.

Edgar Dijkstra would be spinning in his grave if he was dead.

The pre-built rackmount battery+BMS boxes from China are pretty compelling. 5KWh ish per box and they can be stacked.

The shit show that is inverter options is what I'm stuck on right now. If I'm dropping a few grand on this, I want to know it's going to work.

Variation year to year is hardly news. An energy provider gets the fun of allocating resources to generation and storage options.

I personally am looking at adding batteries to my home because my electricity provider charges by time of day and the batteries would let me shift my usage to the cheap hours. I did the sums and concluded it could pay for itself pretty quick. $200/month saving - I am a heavy user - I have computers, minisplits and two EVs. It could pay for itself in a couple of years.

Add in solar and the savings would be more, but solar ain't cheap and the payoff would take longer. With solar and batteries and a capable inverter, I could have some off-grid capability, but I don't really care - the electricity is pretty reliable around here.
 

Thank you for balancing the parentheses. Cosmic order has been restored.

The answer is that this is somewhat misleading; there are plenty of Z80 compatible chips still being manufactured. The TI-84 uses the eZ80, which is four times faster and will still be around. There are also many (many) clones that are closer to cycle-exact.

Do you try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs also?

>Have you ever coded anything in assembly?
I design the silicon on which the machine code runs.

You make a lot of assumptions.

Nope. It would be a fault if the nondeterministic instructions were in fact deterministic. The security of your communications depends on those instructions being nondeterministic. Otherwise your adversary could guess your key.

>If you think that stack size depends on the algorithm

I said stack size depends on the data. Data dependent timing and memory use are gifts to the side channel people.
Not always, but you know that.

>Besides, tail calls are not the only form of recursion that can be optimised.
Yeah yeah, I did the algorithms course 35 years ago on recursion optimization in functional languages (Pre Haskell - We had standard ML and similar stuff back then).
You are arguing for correctness of code over side channel cleanliness. Correctness can be got at many ways. Data-runtime independence is not achieved with a recursion everywhere approach. You have to consider every case. Blanket "recursion everywhere" rules makes you sound like an FP zealot.

>your for-loops end up being compiled to recursive code,
Is your compiler drunk?

I've spent the past 16 years deep in the tarpit of RNG design. The book in my sig is one of the results, along with the RNGs that are common in today's CPUs.

I can't complain - it's kept me gainfully employed. But I'd really like to work on something else for a change.

"going deeper, i would surmise that even that instruction's internal process is fully deterministic too,"

Nope. The noise source is (subject to quantum physics) nondeterministic. Data from this source goes through a cryptographic entropy extractor. For RdRand there is a DRBG that follows, to give you fast, secure random numbers and for RdSeed you get full entropy random numbers, which are limited by the speed of the source and so isn't as fast as RdRand.

Quantum physics does not answer to question as to whether or not the universe is nondeterministic. It certainly look nondeterministic but we don't know if they is actual nondeterminism or ignorance of a deeper process.

For more stuff on this, maybe check out the book in my sig.

As Avi pointed out, Von Neumann did not follow his own advice.

You are wrong. The purpose of a computer is to compute and be useful. To that purpose, computers have nondeterministic instructions. In X86 CPUs they are RdRand and RdSeed. RISC-V has equivalent instructions. ARM is a bit of a mess, but various ARM providers have various RNG solutions on chip. If your computer was deterministic, it would never be able to perform a secure Diffie Hellman key setup, or generate a secure private key.