A fascinating 9-minute video from PawelCodeStuff about randomness in the context of computing:

It explains those weird moments where sometimes the computer asks you to wiggle your mouse – to generate unpredictable numbers – although the specifics of what exactly was random in my wiggling was a surprise to me.

There is something poetic about computers yearning for that one thing they can never get – complete unpredictability – and collecting it in a little pool like you would something very precious. Also fascinating that in modern CPUs, there now exist hardware components that gather truly random data from the real world.

While I have never needed true randomness in my design career, knowing how to control pseudorandomness (specifically, how to replay it) has been helpful.

Here’s an example. In my essay about Gorton, there is this interactive bit where you can drag a slider for “messiness.” With regular pseudorandomness, the experience is wiggly and gross:

But when you always restart the prng from the same seed (“the Groundhog Day maneuver”), it feels much better: