alt Hacker NewsI don't remember their initial post about the lava lamps, but I had assumed that was a marketing gimmick more than anything... a neat visual way to convey what entropy is in a way normal humans can comprehend.
It's certainly not a scalable solution for entropy, and there are so many ways for it to fail as a sole source, as well.
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dheera • yesterday at 10:50 PM
I'm dead sure they aren't using them for anything.
This is SF. If they were really used for anything, a random dude in a black hoodie and white SUV can just smash the glass and take down the internet, and the SF police wouldn't do a thing.
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If you want entropy ot is trivial to construct a white noise source that gives you flat white noise over a range of a few MHz using the reverse avalanche breakdown of a zener diode. The harder part is then reading that out in a way that doesn't introduce bias and makes use of the bandwidth, but if tou want random it is right there in electronic quantum processes.