I disagree that bridges are a usability disaster - they're Matrix's competitive advantage. I'm using mautrix-whatsapp, mautrix-hangouts and smsmatrix without any issues. Which bridges do you have problems with?

The article suggests a lack of ACE2 cell receptors in young people could contribute why the disease isn't as hard on them.

That's for the very young, ie children, at least from what I gathered.

Aren't most PRNs made deterministically? LCGs can have huge cycle times and can produce statistically sound random numbers.

I had to look it up and Wikipedia has this statement a bit differently. This one makes Neumann sound funny because his Mid-Square method is a terrible PRN generator.

> Aren't most PRNs made deterministically?

All pseudorandom numbers are deterministic; that’s what the ‘pseudo-‘ prefix is meant to indicate. There are other kinds of random number generator that observe physical entropy sources instead. Perhaps the most iconic is CloudFlare’s wall of lava lamps[1].

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty...

History trivia: Cloudflare stole this from SGI, who patented the idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand

Hardly stole it, literally acknowledged in blog post where we announced this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty...

We're not the first ones to do this. Our LavaRand system was inspired by a similar system first proposed[1] and built by Silicon Graphics and patented[2] in 1996 (the patent has since expired).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5732138

It has a very different connotation when you say "I'm stealing..." than it does when you say "you're stealing..." It's only jargon in first-person.

Compare saying "wow, I'm really stupid" when you make a mistake vs. saying "wow, you're really stupid" when they do.

Self-deprecation applied to others is just deprecation.

> Cloudflare stole this from SGI, who patented the idea.

Why the accusation that Cloudflare stole this? The patent expired in 2016 and Cloudflare acknowledges SGI on their page.

PRNGs are often seeded with a "true" random value, from which they generate a sequence of pseudorandom values. In that case, you actually end up with a hybrid of random and deterministic. An example of this is `/dev/urandom`.

> Pi itself is not a random number, for example, but the digits of pi are believed to be random in this way (what mathematicians describe as “normal”): Every integer from 0 to 9 appears about the same number of times.

Does this not make the digits of Pi discreetly distributed (an equal chance for each integer?)? Is the meaning of 'normal' here not referencing a normal distribution?

Normal has myriad uses in mathematics. See [1]. Somewhat annoyingly there is no common thread to their meanings (Or at least not one that I am aware of).

The article intends normal number, not normal distribution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal

> Somewhat annoyingly there is no common thread to their meanings

The common thread is the Latin word "norma" for a carpentry square. This gets taken literally in cases like "normal vector", figuratively in cases like "Euclidean norm" (i.e. to measure) then increasingly distant as the word is a root to mean usual/ordinary/average (i.e. according to standard measure) in many languages and thereby ends up in "normal number", "normalized vector", etc. "Normal distribution" inherits it doubly, Gauss used it in the orthogonality sense and later authors in the ordinary sense.

It is not. They are so-named because in any base, almost all reals have this property, i.e. reals which do not are abnormal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

I installed my homeserver with this!

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md

Thank you! Docker will do fine.

I'm a Dask evangelist. It's a remarkable tool and is one of the first I reach for when this problem arises. Maybe it's not well known?