08:39 <Candle> SeanTAllen: Yes, you get the idea; I can believe a case where there's a problem when you don't have a prng and are reading from /dev/random.

08:40 <Candle> vaninwagen: https://playground.ponylang.io/?gist=862d3b46332feeeb1b3893b459a5894d Note the first nibble of the U128.

08:44 <vaninwagen> Candle it is unable to fetch the gist :(

09:04 <freza> hmm, initializing xoroshiro state with the seed words directly doesn't protect against the pathological all-zeros state..? Perhaps such protection should be in place by default?

09:06 <freza> Candle: not sure what gurantees you can expect from random streams based on different seeds. you can however split a single random stream into disjoint (in practice) subsequences using the .jump() or .long_jump() functions, perhaps that's closer to what you want? (note these don't seem to be offered by Pony stdlib, but you can find them in reference C code)

09:16 <freza> Candle: so I do see the behaviour you describe, I'm just not sure I'd expect it not to happen, esp. since subsequent seeds only seem to differ by one or two bits typically

10:00 <Candle> The point is that the Genes class should be immutable; and to create one, I wanted to pass the RNG instance into it to encapsulate their creation. But you can't as the constructor has the option to store the Random ref instance; which would create an alias to a mutable structure in an immutable structure.

10:01 <Candle> vaninwagen: works for me after restarting my browser.

10:05 <Candle> In the end, I went for a factory method to create them; then there is *some* encapsulation.

10:07 <vaninwagen> Github seems broken herr

10:07 <vaninwagen> *here

13:56 <Candle> It's probably an artifact of using the time to seed it; given that the 'seconds' element does not change (much)

13:56 <Candle> vaninwagen: github had an issue or two earlier....