Tag: Random

This Day on Slashdot – March 23

2011 Apple Removes Gay Cure App From App Store 917
2010 US Lawmakers Eyeing National ID Card 826
2008 Network Solutions Suspends Site of Anti-Islam Film 874
2005 When Would You Accept DRM? 1288
2004 The Unhappy World of IT Professionals 981

Re: The Unhappy World of IT Professionals

npistentis writes
“According to an article on ZDNet.com, only 1 in 7 IT professionals rate themselves as “very happy” with their chosen profession- which stands in stark contrast to one in three hairdressers, plumbers and chefs, and one in four florists. But then again, very few plumbers have to deal with users who consistently download BonziBuddy, blindly click on suspicious email attachments and use their cd trays as cupholders.”
Of course, it should be noted that by and large IT professionals earn more money then most other jobs – which I suppose is once again a warning of money != happiness.

Desultory Blue Sky Posts – Movie Within Movie Double Feature – Online Dooming – Pot Dealer’s Movie Preferences

Y’know when the characters in a movie go to see a movie and it feels really meta? Well, with an “Ultimate Double Feature,” we play the first movie up until the point when they enter a cinema to watch a different film… then we play that film… then we go back to the first film to finish that story.

— The Brattle Theatre (@brattletheatre.bsky.social) February 18, 2026 at 4:03 PM

If you are anxious and sad about the state of the world, that’s fine, and there are plenty of strategies for dealing with that. But I think you already know that drive-by online dooming isn’t a strategy. It’s selfish and adolescent. It’s a contagion that only spreads the worst of you, not the best.

— Ken Jennings (@kenjennings.bsky.social) January 7, 2026 at 8:51 PM

BOONDOCK SAINTS was voted movie of the year by the American Association Of Pot Dealers Who Want You To Stay And Hang Out After You Buy Pot From Them seven years in a row

[image or embed]

— mtsw (@mtsw.bsky.social) January 16, 2026 at 11:22 PM

Random Website Generator / Discovery Tool / StumbleUpon alternatives

What is the equivalent of Netscape’s random site button now?
Google AI:
The spiritual successor to the Netscape “What’s Cool” or random site button—most famously embodied in the 2000s by StumbleUpon—is found today in a variety of “random website generators” and serendipity-driven discovery tools.

Here are the best equivalents to the random site button in 2026;
Top Random Website Tools (Closest to “Netscape” Feel)
  • Cloudhiker (cloudhiker.net): Curates interesting, weird, and awesome websites, providing a high-quality, hand-picked alternative to purely random generators.
  • Random Web Button (randomweb.click): Inspired by “The Useless Web,” this site provides a simple button to land on weird, delightful, or absurd websites.
  • Random Website Machine (whatsmyip.org/random-website-machine): A classic, simple tool that sends you to a random website from a database of millions.
  • The Useless Web (theuselessweb.com): While not purely “random” in the sense of finding any site, it brings you to the best, weirdest corners of the internet in a similar spirit of discovery.

Three – Alternative / Niche / Lesser Known / Specialized – Search Engines

https://marginalia-search.com/
Explore the Web
Prioritizes non-commercial content
Tools for both search and discovery
Find lost old websites

https://www.mojeek.com/
Looking for different results?
Value your right to privacy?
Trying to escape big tech?

https://wiby.me/
Why Wiby?
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn’t great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn’t know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today’s web.

Denver – How Cool Are We?

Move over New York City, Chicago and Miami — it turns out Denver is cooler than them all.

Denver was named the sixth coolest city in the United States in a new ranking from Betway. The online gambling company analyzed the fifty most populated cities in North America based on “key factors associated with being cool.”

What makes a city cool? Apparently, vegan restaurants, record stores and tattoo parlors, among other factors.

Boston earned the number one spot on the list, followed by Las Vegas, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle from second to fifth place. Rounding out the top ten after sixth-place Denver are Nashville, Washington D.C., Detroit and Los Angeles.

Denver Named One of the Coolest U.S. Cities. Here’s Why.
What makes a city cool? Apparently, vegan restaurants, record stores and tattoo parlors, among other factors.

The Sound of the Void – Quantum Randomness

If you’re being random on a budget, the Australian National University has you covered. They have set up their own quantum random-number generator by listening to the sound of nothing. Even in a vacuum of nothingness, there is something going on. Thanks to the quirks of quantum mechanics, it is possible for a particle and its antiparticle mate to spontaneously appear from literally nowhere and then annihilate each other faster than the universe can notice that they shouldn’t be there. This means empty space is actually a writhing foam of particles popping in and out of reality.

In the Department of Quantum Sciences at ANU, they have a detector listening to a vacuum, converting the quantum foam into random numbers, and then streaming them live at https://qrng.anu.edu.au, around the clock. For tech people, they have a great range of secure delivery systems (never use the built-in random.random() function in the Python programming language again!). And if you are a background-noise hipster, they have an audio version so you can listen in to the sounds of random.

Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World
Matt Parker

This website offers true random numbers to anyone on the internet. The random numbers are generated in real-time in our lab by measuring the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum. The vacuum is described very differently in the quantum physics and classical physics. In classical physics, a vacuum is considered as a space that is empty of matter or photons. Quantum physics however says that that same space resembles a sea of virtual particles appearing and disappearing all the time. This is because the vacuum still possesses a zero-point energy. Consequently, the electromagnetic field of the vacuum exhibits random fluctuations in phase and amplitude at all frequencies. By carefully measuring these fluctuations, we are able to generate ultra-high bandwidth random numbers.

https://qrng.anu.edu.au/
https://qrng.anu.edu.au/random-bernoulli-noise/

Desultory bsky Posts – Origins, Buskers, Note on Collaboration

“so where are you from originally?” a random chemical reaction on some rock 4 billion years ago

— the hyperspace (@thehyyyype.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 6:51 PM

Had an extremely “everyone on the bus clapped” moment in NYC. A busker was playing “every little thing is gonna be alright” and everyone on the platform started singing along. It was really surreal but also great.

— aysha u. farah (@ayshaufarah.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 8:44 AM

“If everyone had just gotten on board with my way of doing things, we’d be doing great now!” – someone who could be right or wrong (who can know?), but who isn’t really helping

— Andy Richter (@andyrichter.co) February 9, 2025 at 8:54 AM

User Names – Programming Snags with

tonyHawkandthetaleofFeaturenotabug
byu/GoldenBaby2 inProgrammerHumor

Classy_Mouse
I know some people that only have a given name. No family name. So when they came over to Canada, they had a lot of issues with official forms. Some of them split their name into 2 names, some just repeated their given name twice

Toloran
True story, I went to middle school with a kid whose entire name was ‘Rainbow’. I initially assumed his parents were hippies or something, but it turned out they were hippies and indecisive: They both had different last names, but couldn’t decide which to give him. So they just didn’t give him one.

EODdoUbleU
My first name is a single letter. The amount of shit I can’t do without creating some bastardization to fulfill the mUSt cONTaIn a miNImUM Of tWO ChAraCTeRS bullshit is annoying as fuck.

Airport kiosks are absolutely the fucking worst because their system won’t let me put my legal name in, but I have to use my legal name to pass security.

FormerGameDev
aye, like Metallica’s longest lasting bass player, Roberto Agustín Miguel Santiago Samuel Trujillo Veracruz

thrye333
I like the point near the end about names being consistent across systems, because when I was getting ready to go apply to colleges, I found out that most of them had my last name misspelled. I have a common English first name as my last name. I have never seen it spelled how 75% of those colleges spelled it.

I have no idea how they got that spelling. I don’t even know how they had my info. But that’s college mailing lists, I guess.

Dalimyr
I used to work in a hospital, sharing an office with another team who told a story about how people testing in their system (in prod, because you’re lucky to have a proper test environment in the public sector) would use Simpsons characters for their tests. People who knew this got accustomed to filtering out “Bart Simpson”, “Lisa Simpson” and all that…until one day this instinctive behaviour impacted a patient (I can’t remember what happened – if it was an appointment being deleted or something like that) because their name was Margaret Simpson and someone had erroneously thought this was just test data.

I don’t think this incident actually stopped the person from continuing to create Simpsons test data, but yeah, that shit happens from time to time.

AaronTheElite007
I wonder if someone has the last name ‘null’?

IMightBeErnest
I heard a story about a guy who made his license plate “null” and ended up getting assigned all of the tickets where a license number wasn’t known (or bugged, or something). Point is, he got like a bajillion fines he had to contest.

Idiotic Questions – Shitty Ask Reddit

Does drinking Bud Light make you gay?
What if the Bud Light I currently possess was purchased before the ad? Can I still drink it without becoming gay?

Why does everyone type “r/woooosh” whenever I correct their stupidity?

Do I need to watch Covid 1-18 in order to understand Covid-19?

People with usernames like “PM_ME_UR_TITS_OR_SOMETHING” does that ever work?

This sub has 57,831 members, so why don’t my posts get 57,831 upvotes, and 57,831 comments saying “well done, good post”

Does Ke$ha go by K€sha in Europe?

https://www.reddit.com/r/shittyaskreddit/top/?t=all

Fun Facts According to Reddit

What’s a “fun fact” that no one asked for?
byu/69Owiredu inAskReddit

hockeynoticehockey
Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined.

NoRecognition2527
“Louie Louie” was a #2 hit in 1963 for The Kingsmen. The vocals were so garbled and slurred, rumors spread that the lyrics were dirty. The FBI investigated the song on suspicion of violating obscenity laws. After two years, they decided the lyrics were “unintelligible at any speed.”

Somehow, they missed the drummer yelling “Fuck!” at 0:54
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKt75jUuKJY

Ok-Masterpiece7377
The reason UK Pubs had stupid names, was so the illiterate patrons could find them with the artwork.

66Troup
El Paso, Texas is closer to San Diego, California than it is to Houston, Texas.

jmara9
Kurt Cobain wrote ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, according to his own words, trying to rip off the Pixies and their sound.
Black Francis, singer and songwriter of the Pixies, said he wrote ‘Dig for Fire’ as an attempt of writing a Talking Heads song.
The song ‘The Overload’ by Talking Heads was written trying to make a Joy Division song without any of the members of the band ever hearing a song by Joy Division, only reading about them in the press.

Dysan27
There are Ancient Egyptian Archaeologists that study Ancient Egyptian Archaeologists that studied Ancient Egypt.

As in the Egyptian Empire lasted for so long that there are records from the time to Ramses II of archaeologist studying monuments that where already 1000’s of years old.

ScottOld
Nintendo was founded in 1889