I was thrilled to see him. I loved him in Party Down.
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Silicon Valley - a new Mike Judge comedy series - HBO Sundays (S2 full trailer is up)
- Thread starter Cornballer
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-COOLIO-
The Everyman
i don't think that's as far fetched. i suppose the implication is that he already had their app installed.
...but doesn't the compression algorithm HAVE to be somewhat far-fetched for the story to work? I mean, if you want to make it believable that Silicon Valley is about to go into a large-scale bidding war over his idea, the idea can't be something completely obvious. There HAS to be a certain level of perceived implausibility, that's what makes the idea valuable.
Frustrated_me
Member
Ehh.. Didn't find it particularly funny, was it supposed to be?
nah bro, it's a drama
As serious as they come these days.
-COOLIO-
The Everyman
coming up with a revolutionary compression algorithm while coding a music search site is like concocting the cure for aids while cooking.
realistically, i would think that the people who come up with such algorithms barely program, if at all, and spend their time writing on white boards.
Wait, people are complaining about the realism?
Either way, the show was surprisingly good. It had enough tech humor to give it a charm, but for the most part it was a standard comedy. I really hope the show takes off.
Who's to say someone won't accidentally add too much paprika to a dish and then start feeling less AIDS-y???
Either way, the show was surprisingly good. It had enough tech humor to give it a charm, but for the most part it was a standard comedy. I really hope the show takes off.
Who's to say someone won't accidentally add too much paprika to a dish and then start feeling less AIDS-y???
SlowRevolution
Member
Pretty good. Hopefully Martin Starr gets more to do later on.
Watch that bit again:
http://youtu.be/VvkmsI54ss4?t=22m40s
the tech is farfetched and the idea that an angel investor would bypass all the user privacy protections, at the company making that tech, to use it for his own private petty needs is mind-boggling. But I'm not an investor or founder so what do I know *shrug* thanks for proving my point about where concerns lie though
SlipperyMoose
Member
I'm not sure how I feel about this show yet. I watched the pilot and it was ok but I usually like Mike Judge's sense of humor a lot more. I'll watch a few more episodes and see if it starts to grow on me.
Hari Seldon
Member
Lol so true. That is PhD mathematics level stuff. Or some CS PhD that has no clue how to code at all and is basically 100% applied math anyway.
RatskyWatsky
Hunky Nostradamus
2 mil viewers for Silicon Valley premiere. Looks like premiering it behind GoT was the right move!
Cornballer
Member
Very good number and definitely helped by the lead in.
Adalian said:
Just_myles
Member
Chairhome said:
Understandable. For me, they're not really relatable, and that is in regards to both shows. I mean, at least with the big bang theory they're nerds and they play video games, read comics, kinda awkward etc... but that is where it stops. That's tv though.
Battersea Power Station
Member
For some reason I cracked up at, "Let's just think different." I like Richard's sincerity.
I guess that slogan bit foreshadows how his innocence will morph into the company becoming like every other tech giant out west.
Anyway, I don't care if it's realistic, or out of date, or whatever. I'll watch it because it's the first major attempt at a satire since... MASH? I have no idea, but satire and parody is a difficult thing to pull off in today's society.
I guess that slogan bit foreshadows how his innocence will morph into the company becoming like every other tech giant out west.
Anyway, I don't care if it's realistic, or out of date, or whatever. I'll watch it because it's the first major attempt at a satire since... MASH? I have no idea, but satire and parody is a difficult thing to pull off in today's society.
I was pretty disappointed in this especially being a Tech Startup fan. The references were there, I can see it developing into a good story but this is HBO - it has to be much better than this.
It's only the pilot, I know. I'm keeping tuned but I hope it gets much better in writing and acting.
It's only the pilot, I know. I'm keeping tuned but I hope it gets much better in writing and acting.
BlueTsunami
there is joy in sucking dick
Hr plays his role perfectly, awkward straight guy riffing off all the other characters
A character I presumed would be a part of the core group is missing from this poster. Is that a spoiler? And maybe a hint for me to get out of this threadThe font makes me suspicious.
It's the Wedding Crashers font. Or Scary Movie font. That font seems cursed. It pops up all the time and it's almost always bad news. Was thinking of making a thread about this.
The problem isn't the existence of a substantially better compression algorithm per se. It's the existence of one that satisfies the following criteria:
(1) Works on all sorts of different media types (video and music compression are very different--among other things, lossless video is not something you would use over the internet). This is the big one. Even ignoring the rest of this list, if his algorithm only works on music, no matter how major the advance is, he is starting from scratch on every other media type. So his startup has zero advantage in this area unless he is confident in lightning striking not once, not twice, but multiple times ("lightning" being the accidental discovery of such new incredible compression algorithms for each medium type).
(2) Can be compressed and decompressed quickly. In most cases, you can trade off CPU time (and power) for better compression ratios. Network latency means that you can afford to give up quite a bit of CPU time for better compression, but again it depends on the medium--for streaming media too long of a delay due to decompression would be unacceptable. Parallelism helps somewhat, but only for some algorithms (and that would be placing even more constraints on the algorithm, since parallel compression algorithms tend to have to satisfy strict properties that limit how effective they can be).
(3) Is faster than algorithms with native hardware support. This may be less true for music than video codecs, but as mentioned in the webm thread there is often specialized logic in modern GPUs to support popular codecs, without which many of the format's advantages are mitigated. There's a reason such research often takes many years to go mainstream. This new format would be starting at a disadvantage even if it were theoretically better, and people probably wouldn't be able to determine the full scope of the improvements for years (until the hardware manufacturers and driver writers supported it). The show did get one important detail right--the client had to be downloaded. The show's writers (correctly) realized that clients would not be able to decompress the content in the browser (yet another restriction that would take a significant amount of time to work around).
(4) Hasn't been discovered yet. Not to put too fine a point on it, but lossless compression algorithms are pretty far along at this point. In specific problem domains (DNA encoding, trigrams, etc.) it is still often possible to see impressive wins by taking advantage of common patterns in those domains that don't exist in the general case (in general compression of random data is, of course, not possible, so all compression algorithms take advantage of this to some extent). But in lossless audio? Advantages at this point would likely be incremental, and proving that there was an advantage would probably require a pretty thorough sample of the web's audio (since individual files could be much more compressible than others, even the scene from the movie where the programmers marveled at how efficient it was was kind of weird).
This is ultimately all nitpicking--it doesn't really matter to the show that the premise is unrealistic. Like I said, overall I thought the show was pretty good about getting the technology right. If anything, the only reason this sticks out is because of how good the rest of it was. And anyway, I'm sure Mike Judge and the people who put together the show knew that. It certainly isn't going to stop me from enjoying the show
That's already possible in some domains. But it again depends very specifically on what's interesting to you and how the data are laid out, and it usually involves lossy compression. For example, git uses SHA1 hashes to detect whether two files have changed without actually comparing each file byte by byte, accepting a very small false positive rate for a massive practical speedup. That technique doesn't work when you want to match parts of the file, though.
FantasticMrFoxdie
Mumber
Great first episode. Really liking it already. I was skeptical through about the first half then the last half just clicked instantly.
Had that same thought. HBO Viral marketing genius right there. lol
Had that same thought. HBO Viral marketing genius right there. lol
dave is ok
aztek is ok
Who cares if the inciting event for the show is technically feasible. Guys, stop
They're geeks, how can they stop? : )
I like how his life gets so complicated so fast, he showed me what I would probably be like in that situation.
Good story so far, decent acting. The guy who ran the "incubator" was a bit overblown.
WarrenMax007
Member
Is that just me or ad in a shuttle was poking fun at Apple ads? Like where nice music is playing and execs are talking about innovations etc?
File matching is different from being able to get random data which is basically what they did while they were seeking in the music file.
It's like those high res image viewers that only load the zoomed in file on demand. Except they're not requesting new data.
Feel free to quote me, but it probably has to do with quantum storage by the season finale.
I don't think it was specifically targeting Apple, but rather the whole ultra-eco-social-justice-friendly image that these tech companies portray. I don't remember exactly what tech the ad was referencing, but from what I remember it boiled down to "Oh we developed some new technique to do X on our server back end, so we just saved some seals."
The problem isn't the existence of a substantially better compression algorithm per se. It's the existence of one that satisfies the following criteria:
(1) Works on all sorts of different media types (video and music compression are very different--among other things, lossless video is not something you would use over the internet). This is the big one. Even ignoring the rest of this list, if his algorithm only works on music, no matter how major the advance is, he is starting from scratch on every other media type. So his startup has zero advantage in this area unless he is confident in lightning striking not once, not twice, but multiple times ("lightning" being the accidental discovery of such new incredible compression algorithms for each medium type).
(2) Can be compressed and decompressed quickly. In most cases, you can trade off CPU time (and power) for better compression ratios. Network latency means that you can afford to give up quite a bit of CPU time for better compression, but again it depends on the medium--for streaming media too long of a delay due to decompression would be unacceptable. Parallelism helps somewhat, but only for some algorithms (and that would be placing even more constraints on the algorithm, since parallel compression algorithms tend to have to satisfy strict properties that limit how effective they can be).
(3) Is faster than algorithms with native hardware support. This may be less true for music than video codecs, but as mentioned in the webm thread there is often specialized logic in modern GPUs to support popular codecs, without which many of the format's advantages are mitigated. There's a reason such research often takes many years to go mainstream. This new format would be starting at a disadvantage even if it were theoretically better, and people probably wouldn't be able to determine the full scope of the improvements for years (until the hardware manufacturers and driver writers supported it). The show did get one important detail right--the client had to be downloaded. The show's writers (correctly) realized that clients would not be able to decompress the content in the browser (yet another restriction that would take a significant amount of time to work around).
(4) Hasn't been discovered yet. Not to put too fine a point on it, but lossless compression algorithms are pretty far along at this point. In specific problem domains (DNA encoding, trigrams, etc.) it is still often possible to see impressive wins by taking advantage of common patterns in those domains that don't exist in the general case (in general compression of random data is, of course, not possible, so all compression algorithms take advantage of this to some extent). But in lossless audio? Advantages at this point would likely be incremental, and proving that there was an advantage would probably require a pretty thorough sample of the web's audio (since individual files could be much more compressible than others, even the scene from the movie where the programmers marveled at how efficient it was was kind of weird).
This is ultimately all nitpicking--it doesn't really matter to the show that the premise is unrealistic. Like I said, overall I thought the show was pretty good about getting the technology right. If anything, the only reason this sticks out is because of how good the rest of it was. And anyway, I'm sure Mike Judge and the people who put together the show knew that. It certainly isn't going to stop me from enjoying the show
You just disappeared up your own asshole.
Ehhhhhh
Some funny moments for sure, but many jokes fell flat. Some characters altogether just did nothing for me. The main character doesn't really seem to have any redeeming qualities.
I have little interest in continuing, but I'll probably watch a couple more to see if the writing can find its mark with some time. The supporting cast also need more opportunity to shine. That's probably where the actual comedy will come from. The 'leader' friend isn't funny at all to me, though.
Some funny moments for sure, but many jokes fell flat. Some characters altogether just did nothing for me. The main character doesn't really seem to have any redeeming qualities.
I have little interest in continuing, but I'll probably watch a couple more to see if the writing can find its mark with some time. The supporting cast also need more opportunity to shine. That's probably where the actual comedy will come from. The 'leader' friend isn't funny at all to me, though.
out0v0rder
Member
Kid rock is the poorest person here. Loooll
God damn.
I fucking loled hard at this. Bravo.
Bomber Bob
Banned
lol perfect
I'll give it a bit more time, but not feeling it so far. Also the concept behind his software (or more specifically, why these people want to buy it/him) doesn't ring true to me. I don't buy that this guy came up with such a brilliant new way to compress things and seems to have no idea the broader implications it could have until it's pointed out to him, nor that he could come up with it when we've had countless brilliant people working on such things for decades.
Whatever. I'll watch for a while longer. But mainly because it's on right after GoT and that's some must watch TV for me.
Whatever. I'll watch for a while longer. But mainly because it's on right after GoT and that's some must watch TV for me.
Well, the thing for me is that I'm not a coder or a programmer, but I'm familiar enough with the tech business in an outsider way that I understand the jokes. I have a friend that I put onto this show who worked with some startups (box, survey monkey) and she said that it hits way too close to home that she doesn't want to watch anymore.
The problem with BBT to me is that while I am more in that culture, those characters are written as caricatures and my interests are close enough to theirs that it seems just stereotypical or unrealistic enough that it kind of offends me. Maybe I just haven't given it much of a chance, but I'm just not interested.
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