Interesting story on the making of Silicon Valley (the show) from the New Yorker: <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-va...</a>
I think this is a story about working really fucking hard and then naturally having cool things come your way as a payoff. What you want might be 4 years away, but opportunities you don't think a lot about like this can be yet another motivator.
I was hoping they would speak to the inspiration for Richard's "decentralized internet" plot this season; if it was Ethereum or something similar.
Really funny "interview" of the actress/actors @GoogleHQ <a href="https://youtu.be/QOXup8chEoY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/QOXup8chEoY</a>
A television first was McManus's use of a real GitHub account/repo on the show, which also accepted pull requests after it aired: <a href="https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai</a>
> I remember watching Season 1 and Season 2, and thinking, why are these guys building their own servers? It doesn’t make sense. No one in this sort of world does this.<p>I didn't react that way. I imagined that their workload was extremely CPU-intensive, and (due to their incredible compression) did not require a datacenter-grade network connection. So it makes financial sense to invest in your own hardware. Amortizing the cost of that hardware, a company like that could be saving tens of thousands per month versus AWS.<p>But of course, you need an expert "systems architect" like Gilfoyle on your team ;)<p>Also, the scene at the end of season 2 where all the servers catch on fire was an incredibly memorable moment. I got emotional, being so invested in the characters and having my own memories of "putting out fires", and it was cathartic to see that team succeed and win the day.
Fun interview! Remember in the future to ask your guests to get closer to the mic. Perhaps their was noone listening to audio, but he got pretty soft ~15:00 and on.<p>In the immortal words of Joe Rogan during his podcast, "pretend your eating the microphone."
Wish he was in charge of some of the on screen code. One of the most cringe worthy screenshots from the show: Richard using a Sony running osx writing Python in a Java file with in a variable with font<p><a href="https://i.redd.it/qr65kfjahpty.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/qr65kfjahpty.jpg</a>
As someone with PhD studies in Information Theory, I always found the whole "compression breakthrough" very far-fetched, I wish they had chosen another technical basis for the show. Never mind that compression of any and all files is impossible (see pigeon hole principle) -- while it could theoretically be done for "normal" files (video etc), it's extremely unlikely that a black-box method such as theirs (as in, they don't have any prior knowledge of the files' structures) would beat out white-box methods (such as video compression) by such a large margin.<p>It's a bit like writing a best selling novel in a language you don't speak: theoretically possible, but just so far from normal reality that it's hard to suspend disbelief.