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In video gamer parlance any non human predictable output or action gets called "RNG". Anything from true random loot drops to deterministic but chaotic systems

In video gamer parlance any non human predictable output or action gets called "RNG". Anything from true random loot drops to deterministic but chaotic systems can be called "RNG". This the blog title they describe the exact resulting git hash as having the quality of being RNG because you can't really predict if your git rev hash will have a certain characters. They got unlucky and triggered a bug from the chaotic git hash.

keybored 2y ago
Sloppy technical writing. Or clickbait since the title sounds more interesting than “oh YAML is dumb”.
- tmendez 2y ago
  sorry, I work in game development so whenever we hit something that doesn't happen every time we call it RNG for fun
- NobodyNada 2y ago
  I don't think it's fair to characterize it as "sloppy" or "clickbait" at all. The author is a game developer, and they use terminology in a way that is common and accepted within their field -- sure, it's nonstandard and "wrong" outside of the game industry...but I'd say it's a little hypocritical for software developers to complain about jargon. As a supporting example: the game Super Metroid alternates every frame between checking collisions from left-to-right or right-to-left. The direction of collision checks can make a difference for speedrunning tricks, and there's no (practical) way to control for it, so it's referred to as "RNG". From a player's perspective, the fact that it's just a frame counter rather than an LCG or something is irrelevant -- it's a luck-based factor that's outside of the player's control. And the same frame counter is used as a source of entropy elsewhere in the game, so there's an argument that it's not even wrong to call it RNG. Similarly, a Git hash is a SHA-1 of the repo contents commit message, commit date, etc., and a cryptographic hash and pseudo-random generator are very similar constructions...so calling it RNG is a little cute but not exactly inaccurate.
aulin 2y ago
Not a gamer so first time I heard this. For some reason it bothers me so much. It's not random, it's perfectly reproducible and has a crystal clear explanation. They are using short hashes for version numbers which is looking for problems in the first place.

keybored 2y ago

Sloppy technical writing. Or clickbait since the title sounds more interesting than “oh YAML is dumb”.

tmendez 2y ago
sorry, I work in game development so whenever we hit something that doesn't happen every time we call it RNG for fun
NobodyNada 2y ago
I don't think it's fair to characterize it as "sloppy" or "clickbait" at all. The author is a game developer, and they use terminology in a way that is common and accepted within their field -- sure, it's nonstandard and "wrong" outside of the game industry...but I'd say it's a little hypocritical for software developers to complain about jargon. As a supporting example: the game Super Metroid alternates every frame between checking collisions from left-to-right or right-to-left. The direction of collision checks can make a difference for speedrunning tricks, and there's no (practical) way to control for it, so it's referred to as "RNG". From a player's perspective, the fact that it's just a frame counter rather than an LCG or something is irrelevant -- it's a luck-based factor that's outside of the player's control. And the same frame counter is used as a source of entropy elsewhere in the game, so there's an argument that it's not even wrong to call it RNG. Similarly, a Git hash is a SHA-1 of the repo contents commit message, commit date, etc., and a cryptographic hash and pseudo-random generator are very similar constructions...so calling it RNG is a little cute but not exactly inaccurate.

aulin 2y ago

Not a gamer so first time I heard this. For some reason it bothers me so much. It's not random, it's perfectly reproducible and has a crystal clear explanation. They are using short hashes for version numbers which is looking for problems in the first place.