A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet

My lesson from my personal experiments with Lavarand: you must have more than one lamp, not necessarily for more entropy, but for fail-over and uptime. At approximately ~30 hours, my vintage 70's lamp 'gives up' - the fluid temperature becomes pretty even between the bottom and the top. It's all essentially superheated as far as the wax is concerned and it simply stays in one place as a dome at the bottom, barely moving. This isn't good for creating random…

I remember using lava lamps for SSH random number generation from the 90's. However, they may have yielded this entire area of security: So-called "physically unclonable functions" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_function I am immensely skeptical of these, but they have some academic and other obscure traction.

> colorful wall of lava lamps [...] might be what’s generating the random code > which converts the randomness into a virtually unhackable code > Why use lava lamps for encryption instead of computer-generated code? Pet peeve: Non-technical people using the term "code" overly broadly. Binary numbers are a code. Morse code is a code. Encryption is a code. Machine instructions are a code. Passwords are codes. One-time nonces delivered over SMS are authentication codes. And so on and so…

Whenever I walk by cloudflare HQ, I like to wave in random directions, as I like to imagine that every worldwide spy agency has a camera somehow trained on those lava lamps.