There are very specific use cases, where the concern is not about entropy in the series (because duh!), but from having a small seed value that is intrinsically not cryptographically secure but <i>unpredictable</i> (not quite the same thing) even in a controlled setup like a the start up of a VM image.<p>I would agree with the article that the right way to fix the problem is to  seed each instance of the image on startup, but that will also avoid you having a problem with it blocking.<p>That&#x27;s a special case though, where you aren&#x27;t in the middle of a cryptographic handshake, you don&#x27;t have real time constraints, and the fix to the real problem will also mean there is no problem. Don&#x27;t use it for a network service&#x27;s source of randomness.