You're missing the same point that the blog post is missing. What they're doing is much less like replacing rand() with 4 and much more like setting seed(4) bef

You're missing the same point that the blog post is missing. What they're doing is much less like replacing rand() with 4 and much more like setting seed(4) before generating any numbers. There is no "loss of quality" unless you're already using a temperature of 0.