[zeroxfe]

> usual "true random number" bullshit

What's bullshit about it? This is how TRNGs in security enclaves work. They collect entropy from the environment, and use that to continuously reseed a PRNG, which generates bits.

If you're talking "true" in the philosophical sense, that doesn't exist -- the whole concept of randomness relies on an oracle.

[wavemode]

What PRNGs lack compared to TRNGs is security (i.e. preventing someone from being able to use past values to predict future values). It's not that they somehow produce statistically invalid results (e.g. they generate 3s more often than 2s or something). Unless they're very poorly constructed.

[refsys]

Maybe people have bad memories from linear congruential generators, these could go really bad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsaglia%27s_theorem)

[wtallis]

I don't think hardware random number generators are bullshit, but it's easy to overstate their importance. Outside of cryptography, there aren't a whole lot of cases that truly require that much care in how random numbers are generated. For the kind of examples the article opens with (web page A/B testing, clinical trials, etc.) you'll never have sample sizes large enough to justify worrying about the difference between a half-decent PRNG and a "true" random number generator.

[zeroxfe]

Yes, agreed. In many cases, the determinism is a feature, particularly being able to store the seed for reproducibility.