this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
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Is there actually a downside to just, typing a random string of numbers manually over a number generator?
Yes, typing randomly isn't actually as random as it could be, so a generator will do a better job.
However mashing the keyboard is absolutely better than literally just "4" lol
What if the generator rolled a 4 though?
Then go buy a scratcher
first, what if i have my cat do it. second, why does it matter if a string is maximally random? is there a certain level that is random enough?
Generators aren't intrinsically random either, the project that's closest to random is the lava light room at cloud flare. But a wall of lamalamps aren't random enough, so they add in a few parameters from the moon.
But ultimately, it's not truly random.
Most generators are magnitudes simpler than that and honestly mashing everything at random yourself does a pretty good job at it. Especially if you smash too many characters and then scrambles it before picking a sequence without thought. As the biggest issue with manual button smashing, is the same character either won't appear twice in a row ever or will always appear multiple in a row. Not to talk about special letters, which you likely wouldn't hit - although we could make larger keyboards for the lulz
Ultimately random generators is just a simpler/faster solution, but there's ways of doing something as randomly by hand
You are not random enough, that's why we have this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_security_module
I'm not random enough? But I was holding up a spork! From my Invader Zim bag!
This is why Hot Topic girlies are not in charge of crypto standards. They're "OMG so random", but not mathematically so random.
Those are all technically words in some dictionary somewhere, arranged in a sensible grammatical order. The entropy is not as high as you may think
It is not random enough to not be guessed by a state sponsored bot
Aside from humans being terrible random number generators, not as such.
It's better to seed a CSPRNG with a source of entropy though. E.g. there are tools that let you enter the result of many dice rolls and use it to generate a key.