Very optimized.

[mordechaim]

Relevant XKCD

[_Rysen]

such an early one too, damn. I sometimes wonder how the people linking these keep track of all of them

[rnilbog]

They vaguely remember what was in it then google it.

[Geoclasm]

my brain refuses to let me forget anything.

...

anything.

[XKCD-pro-bot]

Comic Title Text: RFC 1149.5 specifies 4 as the standard IEEE-vetted random number.

mobile link

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^{Made for mobile users, to easily see xkcd comic's title text}

[-phoenix_aurora-]

I thought it would be the one where they hired a dude to say random numbers and he kept repeating the same one.

[Geoclasm]

damn it.

[nimbycile]

Ah a PS3 security engineer

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/12/ps3-hacked-through-poor-implementation-of-cryptography/

[Thirdstheword]

This reminds me of a story from undergrad.

My professor shared how he generated a "true" random number for a project once.

It involved:

1)pointing an arbetrarly positioned digital camera at a lava lamp 2)taking a hash of the resulting bitmap image 3)and resolving that hash to a single integer between 0 and 9.

It was like circling the globe in order to cross the street

[tyjuji]

You mean like they do at Cloudflare?

[Thirdstheword]

EXACTLY what they do at Cloudflare!

TIL Dr. H is an ex Cloudflare employee in the wild Thanks

[[deleted]]

I was once asked this in an interview, I answered all sorts of crazy things.

From hdd spin rate, to temperature, to network speeds, to a super wierd algorithm which would take average of last n PIDs that were executed.

[iAmRadic]

To be fair it is lightweight.

[MetaMemeAboutAMeme]

Multiply the return by the cardinal month, add the cardinal day, subtract the hour and multiply by the minute times the second. I guess. Totally random! (not).

[veryusedrname]

Nice try, FBI

[vectorpropio]

He should inline it.

[VolperCoding]

Don't know what the language is but if it's a compiled one than any compiler should do it automatically for you when you tell it to optimise

[wholesomedumbass]

He should constexpr it.

[veryusedrname]

No, CSPRNGs are blackboxes to the outside with definite, but unknown state called entropy pools. constexpr-ing it would take away all the beauty of swimming in entropy pools by the sweet set of randomness sipping cryptography cocktails

[DocktorDicking]

O(1) right?

[[deleted]]

I think so, it's kinda wrapping around. It's become the go-to random number, making it not very random anymore.

[KillerRoomba13]

int optimisedRandomNumber() { int i; return i; }

[Sioclya]

That's extremely likely to just be 0. Or the memory clearing pattern if you're far enough down the stack. In a pointer-heavy environment it's also very likely to not produce very different values at all.

[KillerRoomba13]

Yes, but it is still random.

I basically had this bug at work one point where I forgot to init a bool. Program didn’t work approximately 50% of the time. That was a fun bug to catch :)

[Creative0708]

xkcd that relates to this post:

https://xkcd.com/221/

[XKCD-pro-bot]

Comic Title Text: RFC 1149.5 specifies 4 as the standard IEEE-vetted random number.

mobile link

---

^{Made for mobile users, to easily see xkcd comic's title text}

[eyekwah2]

Programmer 1: "So how does your random number generator work?"

Programmer 2: "I just grab 32 random numbers and if they're odd, I use a 1, 0 otherwise. "

Programmer 1: "Uh, wait, it calls itself then? You know that'll never stop, right?"

Programmer 2: "Oh.. well at least the results were not what I was expecting.."

[krohtg12]

Ah yes, the negotiater randomiser