You are heading down the right path.

A book that made things more clear for me is "Non uniform random variate generation" by Luc Devroye (https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~mascagni/Devroye.pdf).

The generation of different distributions can be done algorithmically, but the algorithms get to the core of the processes making the noise. E.G. 1/f noise can be made from summing many exponential decaying functions. Electrons falling in holes in silicon - same thing. So we have 1/f noise in silicon. The type of process determines the type of noise whether quantum electron events or rain or insects chirping.

While noise does emerge from quantum things, it also can emerge from higher level processes.

Claims of perfect randomness from quantum physicists are always wrong.

1) The claims rely on some detector being 50/50 (they never are), always detecting individual events (they often see multiple or none) .
2) Randomness amplification is a subfield of entropy extraction and it cannot give you full entropy (aka perfect randomness).

Agreed. Deliberate adding of surface roughness (and even multiple surfaces) have been used in racing yachts for many decades. I think they started doing this in the 90s.

This ideal state sounds good but it is prohibitively expensive for all but deep pockets.

Ultimately the stock market trades pieces of companies. You might be "gambling" with your finances, but if the value of your 1 share of a company drops to zero, you still have 1 share of the company. Not gambling. Prediction markets are much closer to, say, fantasy sports. Educated guessing, but still guessing. If you get it right, your wager pays. Wrong, and the wager is lost.

Saying these markets aren't gambling is weasel-language. It's not even as honest as casinos. Imagine you had to play roulette but instead of playing against the house, you played against your table mates, and some of them already know the outcome before the marbles is tossed.

When the pace of bug discovery overwhelms the capacity to patch, and the discovery tools are available to... well, everybody... doing any business online is fraught with peril. You can't even triage trust by the integrity of the company. You might trust that "Valerie's Dog Treats" is legit, but their payment dependancy might be using compromised packages.

How in hell are we going to hold this thing together?

In unemployment figures don't show actual unemployment, but deliberately excludes groups for the purpose of keeping the figure low (and the UK was very explicit that this was the purpose when Thatcher's government sliced several million off the official figures, less sure if the US was as honest) then it's hard to call it anything else.

A good example, and why I used the adjective "often". There are exceptions. It depends on what you negotiate into your union terms.

Smokers are deprioritised on lung transplant lists. Foreigners have to pay. So we've already got differential service. We just say that sportsfolk who knowingly and deliberately inflict damage on themselves in such contests get lower priority on medical procedure lists as well.

Not removed - they've paid national insurance - but all procedures are on a prioritised queue already, just given them a low priority. (No, not in the UNIX sense.)

They'll get seen to, when service permits. Of course, there'd be more service if the rich paid more taxes, but that's between the sports stars and the rich. They can take care of that dispute between themselves.

Yours is a far more eloquent way of saying what I had intended to: why is this on Slashdot? Is there any relevance at all? I fail to see it.

If these athletes were coached by AI, well... maybe, but that's a stretch. But they're not; they are just taking more extreme measures to performance enhancement than other athletes. And while I know (and employ) some smart jocks, I had the same experience as you in secondary school, because I, too, was not a jock.

The International Olympic Committee said the games are a "betrayal of everything that we stand for."

They can't betray something they never subscribed to in the first place. What you stand for isn't really important here. And you are not being asked to stand for what they do.

Well, technically that is the entire point of some of the major sports in the world, and it would be problematic to say that deliberately causing brain damage for competition is ok in one sport but not in another.

On the other hand, I am not altogether convinced it should be openly encouraged in any sport.

This is a tricky one, because I would also argue that I should have no say in what a person does to their own body for their own reasons, that my firm belief that people should have bodily autonomy when it causes no actual harm to others does not permit me to condemn others for doing stuff to their own body for their own reasons when it does no actual harm to others even if it's a context I don't agree with.

Given that (ethically) I cannot condone wilful irreversable damage but (ethically) cannot condemn personal choises that harm nobody else, the obvious conclusion is that I don't believe such sports should be actively promoted or encouraged, but that what individuals do in the privacy of a private sporting event should not concern those outside until or unless actual harm outside of those events occurs.

If it includes salaries, that's where it'll trip up. The difference between mediocrity and excellence is so pronounced that it's almost impossible to agree. The best won't agree, and will move on if it is implemented in any of the usual tiered structures.

You need to be able to pay for talent, and often that's antithetical to union philosophy.

Treadmill? That can be optimistic.

One place I worked for, I was hired to do DB and coding. Sped their database up by a factor of 60, and resolved tickets efficiently.

Another place I worked for, I was hired to do QA. Found numerous performance issues and dangerous security holes.

Didn't last in either, because politics are more important than people, and revenue is more important than wages. Once all the factors that seriously impacted profit were removed, keeping me would merely have meant a better product, not more cash. The market is only so big, and once you've taken all the share you're going to, being better won't increase it. Companies don't think beyond the next quarter.

Two other places I worked for, the CEO was using it to scam money off investors and get cheaper healthcare. They never intended to produce a product.

If you're forced to treat employees well, these things will still happen but they'll happen less often. Because the risks are higher, the payoff is lower, and penalties for getting caught are a whole lot worse.