digging through man pages makes you realize that most of the stuff that makes the modern internet consists of one-man projects glued together.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
624 points (99.1% liked)
Today I Learned
30320 readers
814 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
It's also when the scope of those projects could be accomplished by one person.
Even if projects could be solo efforts, it's probably better to avoid the bus factor.
Even worse than bus factor, it’s really easy to compromise when no one double checks your work:
What’s your BGB Plan? (Big Green Bus, I guess you could alter for the colour of buses in your city)
The original idea behind Unix was to have small tools doing very specific task and do it will.
Then you could use shell to combine them together to do more advanced stuff.
load more comments
(1 replies)
And many of those one men were Dave Plummer
I love it when the TILs read like "I discovered my toes and they're called toes".
Vasili. One ping only.
It was also backronym'd to mean Packet Internet Groper, but I get why not a lot of people would want to embrace that
I've never heard that before and I was better for it.
Well it goes along with the ethos of other commands suck as touch, finger, mount,...
time to grope me some internet real quick. Just grabbing those packets and going all in
*since 1983.
ACK
When my cousin learned about Ping at school in the 2000s he setup ping gateway -t on all the computers in his highschool class.
Took down the school network for the day. He didn't get in trouble I think. Just a laugh from the school admin (they knew each other and he volunteered there). Admin blocked ping after that.
I was in HS from 2001 to 2005, and it was the wild west. They had computer money galore, but the guys tasked with being in charge of them knew as much as we did, and they just could not compete with the teenage ingenuity. I remember using telnet to just shoot the shit with people all day, and eventually play MUDs in class. And trying to destroy the computer or the network from the inside was just a daily occurrence.
What was the rate of packets sent? Modern ping is typically setuided and has a limit of 1 per second if you're not root.
I believe it was multiple threads...
Man they really need to check for loops in the network, that sounds like a feedback loop. Although my experience only goes back to like 2012 so it might have been a older hardware thing
I mean a easier and sinister solution would be to unplug two computers and patch the two ports together. Broadcast storm.
load more comments
(1 replies)
That person was Mike Muuss, who tragically died in a car crash in 2000, only 42 years old.
Is the response back called a "pong"?
I believe it's technically called an "echo response", but "pong" is a very common unofficial name for it.
load more comments
(1 replies)
That name was already taken in the software world ;)
I could have written it, too.
But today it has a lot more features.
I learned about pings in college, because apparently my torrent client was constantly sending them, but the university network did not allow pings and they sent an email threatening to shut off my internet if I didn't stop pinging.
First thing you do to debug connectivity to a remote host problem is the ol' ping.
This reminded me of a funny story in a party years ago. There was a Mac playing music on YouTube but after a couple of minutes the connection were lost and the music stop until someone clicked on something and the connection wake up and the music continue for a couple of more minutes just to go down again. I asked if I could try to fix it and the first thing I did was a ping, the first couple of packages got lost but then it connected and the music continued. Every couple of minutes some packages got lost but then it back again and the music didn't had any more problems for the night. The host of the party was all over me thanking me for saving the party and other people were asking me if I was a hacker or something.
At work we say "i pung it"
Because pinged doesn't sound right. And pung is more fun.
Another one we haven't named yet is when an address goes through translation. Is it NATted? "Its been NATted"
Doesn't feel right.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Fun fact, most military ships and submarines use fmcw sonar, that doesn't really ping in the same way.
I thought it was called that because of pingpong where you shoot a ball and the other person shoots it back.
Pong
horrible ping latency though
view more: next ›