Insanely unlikely giant random number matches other insanely giant random number

console.time() jots down the current time, if you do that twice and put stuff in the middle you get two times and the difference between them is how long that stuff took to do

console.timeEnd() uses the last execution of console.time() as the starting point to work out how long the stuff took to do

const originalUUID = crypto.randomUUID() generates a Universally Unique IDentifier, which can be thought of as a very large very random number, by use of a pseudorandom number generator

while(stuff) evaluates the stuff for truthiness (1 + 2 = 5 would be false, 50 < 200 would be true, ‘my username starts with the letter k’ would be true) it’s typically followed by a ‘block’ of code, that is lines beginning with { and ending with }, but we don’t see that here, which means we can read while(stuff) as “keep checking if stuff is true in an endless loop, and only continue to the next line if one of the checks ends up being false”

the stuff here is creating another random UUID, and checking to see if it’s the same random number as the first one generated.

functions like this are so incredibly random that chancing upon two executions creating the same number should be practically impossible. staggeringly impossible. If so this code should never complete, as that while check would be endless, never finding a match

the image suggests that one such match was found in about 19 million milliseconds (a bit over 5 hours). this is probably faked, because the absurd unlikelihood of the same number being generated in so much as a single human lifetime, let alone a day, is laughable

the imagine is faked or something is terribly wrong with their pseudorandom number generator

The function first generated a random UUID. This is a long string of random characters, used in many software systems to uniquely fingerprint things, transactions for example. In theory, you can have millions of seperate systems, each generating UUIDs all the time without ever having to worry about a collision (a collision is one or more systems generating the same UUID, therefore it being not unique anymore)

The second line then runs UUID generation again, trying to generate an identical UUID to the one it already made. Tis is absurd because even a dmsupercomputer trying to generate identical UUIDs would take longer than the lifespan of the universe.

The console line shows that a matching UUID was apparently found after some amount of time, which shouldn’t be possible, implying some fuckery with the random number generator.

I wish I was a good enough coder to understand what’s going on, too. I bet it’s funny as hell.