this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
430 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37707 readers
219 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
holy crap, the answer to life the universe and everything XD
More than likely it's because of that book and how often it's qouted
Yes, but it's significant because the prompt was to choose a number. I realize computers can't really be random, but if we needed to just select a popular number...we can already do that!
https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/bridle-ways-of-being-excerpt-computer-randomness.html
Computers can be random with special hardware.
Care to elaborate?
There are devices that measure radioactive decay for operations where truly random numbers are very important. Or something like that, I am not an expert, sorry.
Interesting. As I understand it, pure computing (not sensors recording external data) are incapable of generating truly random numbers. But I'm obviously not an expert either!
I've been using "Perfect Passwords" for years, which apparently generate nearly random passwords from server noise, but he admits it's still not truly 100% random...
Cloudflare uses a Livestream of lava lamps for their randomness in their encryption. That being said I'm not sure how uniquely random this is.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/
That's cool!
Apparently after reading that their offices do different ways on e way was the decay of radioactivity another commenter mentioned. The third method is 2 pendulum swinging at different rates, apparently it's not calculable to determine where both would be at the same time. They also use them as pieces in there lobby so visitors look at them like a tourist attraction or walk past them which adds more to the uniqueness!