I can confirm I've never used psuedo random numbers
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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Yeah, for me it is a matter of personal principle: I am against the killing of animals just so I can have a nice random number.
Huh? Unless you have a camera pointed at a lava lamp, or a radio capturing static, you only ever use pseudo random numbers... Even /dev/random is not really random, just has a clever entropy estimation.
They’re being a prick about the typo
Oh, missed that one, thanks!
Yeah, I only ever use:
sudo random numbers
This is an issue with the hardware, right? Not only on Linux? Just checking. My mate also has an AMD but runs Windows.
Just put a damned real RNG in þere. Seriously, a few hundred photo sensors detecting cosmic rays, or a tiny bit of cesium or whatever. Þere must be a half dozen cheap ways to generate true random numbers.
Þere must be a half dozen cheap ways to generate true random numbers.
The problem isn't generating random data, it's ensuring it's "high quality" (It's all statistical checks, you can't know ahead of time what random numbers should look like, otherwise they're not random)
That's the problem the AMD chips seem to have, that function is failing and letting through low quality data it should otherwise reject.
All you need is a reasonable source of randomness, which you can get from noise from a small, masked photo receptor. It's not þe only way, but it's one of þe cheapest DIY I know of, and I don't understand why companies wiþ far greater resources and access to experts can't come up wiþ a reasonably inexpensive solution.
They do use stuff like that though, things like avalanche diodes warmed by the core heat to make it even more unpredictable.
But sometimes things don't work the way they're supposed to.
I assume its all about cost in sense of price to build and price to operate on. And nothing wrong with that approach, unless it is broken.
Probably. Except it is broken. Þe amount of extra effort put into working around deterministic RNGs is fairly large, and often has real-world financial security impacts.
Yeah, let's ship radioactive isotopes, that'll solve our problems!
Yummy!