piccolo [any]

I can’t imagine that that’d happen, they need to maintain some level of “we’re trying here” in order to effectively rile up their base to vote. Not appointing someone to the NLRB is much less noticable than Supreme Court justices stepping down. I think that the optics are best for both parties if the Supreme Court is basically always a 5-4 split one way or the other, or it is always 5-4 ®. That way the line is that it’s always this close to {getting the Supreme Court back,the other team getting the Supreme Court} to mobilize voters.

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I think CloudFlare uses lava lamps because it’s a cool story, but there are ways you can get truly random bits from other things, like this. Generally, you want to have some sort of physical process going on that provides random entropy, because CPUs by themselves can only produce pseudorandom numbers. For example, random.org uses atmospheric noise, which is random and unpredictable when you look at very tiny variances. You can also use, e.g. a super sensitive Geiger counter to measure random bits of radiation, or if you shoot photons at a semi-reflective surface, sometimes they go through and sometimes they reflect. For the type shown here, though, the most common kind of noise they use is from quantum effects relating to transistors, as far as I know. This is an actual source of randomness, so if it’s done right it can be just as good as lava lamps or Geiger counters or whatever.

I might be wrong about this but my understanding is that on Linux you’d pipe the output of this in somewhere and tell the kernel to use it for entropy, and if it gets insufficient entropy it realizes this and starts producing random bits slower. So like normally the Linux kernel samples mouse movements for randomness, and so it makes more random bits the more you jiggle your mouse. These hardware RNGs are best used for headless servers that don’t have as reliable entropy at their disposal.

PDFs are hard because you need a big e-reader screen. Text only formats like Epub or Mobi are much easier. If you think you can find epubs for all the PDFs you want to read, I’d recommend getting an old Kindle. I’m partial to the Kindle Touch (which can be jailbroken easily). You can often find them for around 20 USD on eBay, which is the cheapest you can get something like this.

Intel laid off 1 out of every 5 people in the division I worked for about 8 months ago, myself included. I’m sure this will fix the morale problem they have!