“Silicon Valley,” a show about computer nerds, has a fan base that is particularly attuned to minutiae, and particularly apt to argue about them on the Internet. If a Post-it, URL, or line of code is legible on the show, it will be screengrabbed and scrutinized. Last year, a few hours after an episode aired, a Reddit user with the handle HeIsMyPossum started a thread called “Why did the writers just obliterate all the good karma they had built up with their core audience?” He made an impassioned argument that a plot point—the accidental deletion of data from Pied Piper’s servers—was implausible. “So the files were being converted live while coming through an FTP? And that affects disk deletion speed?… Come the fuck on guys.” Rob Fuller, a software engineer and a consultant on the show, logged on to Reddit to defend his work, mostly by displaying his own nerd plumage. “Stuff like this happens,” he wrote. “I think even Amazon had an outage because one of the admins fat fingered a DNS or ACL change at one point.” Another user responded to Fuller: “Thanks for engaging us here, we really appreciate it.” The thread amassed nearly three hundred comments. “Sorry for being a dick,” HeIsMyPossum wrote.
Edit: well, it's weirdly anticlimactic sitting here. But it was hilarious in the New Yorker.