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If you can't afford that many lava lamps, NIST provides an alternative, free service:

https://beacon.nist.gov/home

WARNING: DO NOT USE BEACON GENERATED VALUES AS SECRET CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEYS.

So probably not a good idea.

Using the values directly is not the same thing as feeding the values into a RNG.

No, the reason you aren't supposed to use it to generate cryptographic keys is because it's public: so it effectively provides no (or nearly no) entropy. It's the same reason you shouldn't use the current time as a seed for a PRNG.

NIST Beacon is more intended for things like lottery drawings, where you want to prove that you're generating the random numbers in an unbiased manner.

For a few seconds I was thinking...Bacon.

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