this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2026
189 points (99.0% liked)

Programming

27803 readers
443 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I pinged every IP address that wasn't reserved. The image is 8k by 8k and is re-encoded as an AVIF to be friendlier to mobile devices. Like every other survey done, it is using a Hilbert Curve to convert the linear address space to a contiguous 2d space. The hotter the colors (blue is coolest), the denser the ping responses were.

(If you are interested the full-resolution pyramidal-tiled TIFF can be downloaded and viewed in QuPath on desktop. I've also compressed the ping response data into its own format down to about 150 MB. PM me for a link)

Non-proxied image

Here is a 2006 survey to compare.

Some observations: Big Tech (USA) is in the top left. US government allocations, for the most part, did not respond to any pings. And maybe you didn't realize this before, but Multicast (Class D) & Class E consume a whopping 12% of the IPv4 range.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Yes I do.

https://lemmy.ca/comment/24351633

Feel free to explain to them how "it's all just a representation, man. Nothing means anything. It's just electrons moving around."

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I mean - they are "numbers". Numbers are not in hex or decimal. Saying "they're really hex numbers" is not just wrong it's kinda meaningless since ff == 255.

You've explained it badly.

[–] nebeker@programming.dev 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Lie-to-children. See also “perfect is the enemy of good.”

This was very hard for me to understand, particularly when the simple answer in school that was provided for the benefit of the rest of the class didn’t come with a deeper follow-up, but I now recognize the great value in meeting people where they are.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago

This wasn't a "lie to children" - that's a simplification. This was like explaining the Pythagorean theorem by introducing imaginary numbers.

Almost nobody ever uses hex to represent IP addresses ever. There is no reason to bring up hex. It complicates things rather than simplifies.

And to say "[t]hey are actually hex numbers from 0 to FF" is just misleading to the point of wrong. Numbers are not "hex" or "base 10" or "binary". They're numbers. We only represent them as hex or base10. They aren't "different numbers".

And in this case we almost always use base10. SO WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HEX?