[erlkonig]

I keep telling the dev teams I'm on that with enough data points, all those random numbers will (probably) eventually collide, and *then* we'll see how robust their software really is. At least your database flagged it, and hopefully nothing major exploded.

And yet, plenty of experienced devs, including team leads and CIOs, are convinced it's impossible. As in, they absolutely don't write code to deal with the condition. So a bad RNG can randomly destroy the system far sooner than expected at any time, and it won't be noticed, caught, re-genned, or anything, with concurrent corruption being entirely possible. They're fine with it. I feel like these are the same guys who don't check to see if malloc() succeeds.

I like to ask them, "If it's impossible, you're using too many bits, right?". I haven't talked any of them into hedging with a brownian motion detector, or a lava lamp or something for better randomness yet, but I'm still trying.