<story><title>Magic Numbers</title><url>https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/04/24/magic-numbers/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thayne</author><text>At least there was a technical reason, even if it no longer makes sense. The ATM[1] protocol has a packet size of 48 bytes. Why? Because the US wanted 64 and france wanted 32. So a compromise was made that pleased no one and the standard used the average of the two, which of course isn&amp;#x27;t a power of 2.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Magic Numbers</title><url>https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/04/24/magic-numbers/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>parhamn</author><text>Interesting!&lt;p&gt;Semi-related problem I dealt with recently: Google Cloud seems to choose a different magic number of 1460 for their VPCs default MTU, which is annoying if you don&amp;#x27;t know because its different than the default of everything else (such as docker) will cause random packet drops if you do a standard install of those tools.&lt;p&gt;Took me a few hours to figure this out.</text></comment>