Pied Piper

And it's making the world a better place.

I had the exact same experience. I was expecting it to be another 'Big Bang Theory.' But I genuinely enjoy it. It's not the dumb kids making fun of the smart kids. It's the smart kids making fun of themselves.

Yea, it's (so far) perfectly straddled the line of parody and hitting almost uncomfortably close to home for me. I've really enjoyed it.

It's definitely gotten me to laugh a few times. Check out this scene, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-OQhot_ml0 and if you like it, you'll like the show. If not then it's probably not for you. Also Silicon Valley has got by far the most accurate technical jargon of any show I've ever seen. Now it's not perfect, but I'm glad to see a show about developers that doesn't have random text scrolling down screens and bullshit 'hacking' going on while EDM plays in the background.

My biggest complaint with the show is that it still presents all software developers as socially awkward imbeciles who can't talk to a girl or stand up for themselves. But there is some truth in that statement.

It was funnier until I realized that it was created by HBO

This site had me going until I recognized that guy from Maron.

I'm into the fields talked about in "the Big Bang Theory" and don't find it funny, but I'm also into the fields depicted in "Silicon Valley" and find it funny. I think the humor is better in this show. One of my friends is a doctor, and couldn't watch "Scrubs" because it was a little too close to home... maybe that's the case here ? Anyways, I'm embracing the poking fun of our culture!

As someone who watches it, I actually kinda like it. Its pretty funny.

The show has received great ratings, both in critical reviews and in viewership. (although a lead-in from Game of Thrones might contribute to the latter).

> but I just don't find it funny at all.

that's because you're who they're making fun of. this entire show is satire.

I second your feeling about Big Bang Theory, but I don't think SV is that bad. Personally, I liked the competing show "Betas" a lot better because it had subjectively more soul and better dramaturgical timing, but other than that Silicon Valley is mildly entertaining. Compared to BBT there is not a lot of pretentiously presented flavor text with at best a tenuous connection to real science, so I think Silicon Valley might at least have better expert consultants than most professional-themed drama and comedy shows. That still doesn't mean one can or should expect total factual accuracy from a TV show, it's still just entertainment - it just has to be enough to make you believe for a few minutes.

I love this show. Not only does it accurately portray the SV startup scene, but it has a well-written story line. You can't really compare this to Big Bang Theory. I've seen nearly every episode of Big Bang and that is way, way more sitcom-style than Silicon Valley. Big Bang has a lot of nickle jokes related to science fields, with situational comedy surrounding the characters thrown in. Silicon Valley is not a sitcom, and the episodes follow a well-researched story line.

The first two episodes had their funny moments, but the sum of a few laughs and some "present day nostalgia" moments still didn't make for a great show. However the third episode that aired Sunday was pretty good, several laugh out loud moments (most of which weren't actually related to technology in any way, just good comedy).

I feel now that the basic premise of the show has been established (which may be pretty obvious to us, but probably not to the average Joe) and you have an idea of who the characters are Mike Judge's true strengths can start to shine.

I do agree that there are more than a few cringe moments if you have some knowledge of the tech and startup scene (the more you have, the worse it gets), but if you can see past that and they keep the momentum from the last episode I think we're in for a pretty nice show that is treating a topic that hasn't gotten all that much attention from main stream media so far and to be perfectly honest, could use a little bit of poking fun at.

I have mixed feelings. There are some laughs that I really enjoy, but the main character is just so awkward. I realize it's meant to represent the programmers out there who are exactly that awkward, but I just can't stand it in real life or on the big screen.

I find the supporting characters much more funny and enjoyable.

You can't. To watch legally you have to have cable TV.

No idea, probably just a mock-up.

I've seen other networks do it for shows in the past. Most notably http://www.bettercallsaul.com/ was created a while ago in reference to Breaking Bad.

Edit: and http://www.savewalterwhite.com/

Now...

The show has mostly made sense technically. The only thing they got wrong is the code is clearly proprietary but Richard tells the assistant that it's up on github in the first episode.

I actually watched the first season of Betas after someone recommended it in a Silicon Valley thread, and thought it was pretty good. Beta's seems to use the silicon valley theme as more of a backdrop for character development whereas Silicon Valley does seem to poke more fun of the SV culture. I like them both.

If you think the feasibility of the algorithm is the most unrealistic thing here, I'd say Mike Judge is doing his job well. :P

That's pretty much the only thing in the show that doesn't "make sense" though. They clearly made a real effort to use real world terminology and archetypes so that developers wouldn't be too distracted by inaccuracies and concentrate on the comedy. Even the way they discovered the algorithm was pretty on-point technical wise.

The premise that people are interested in the underlying technology of a product rather than the product itself is also a common theme in the valley. I personally am impressed with the show thus far.

Maybe that's why it's a TV show.

Killed it for me too, just like the lightsabers in Star Wars.

Yes, similar to why I flog my children for liking Toy Story : toys cannot move or talk, fools!

At one point these complaints stop being "this is too much to suspend my disbelief" and become "yes an opportunity to thinly veil my desire to seem smarter than everyone by pointing out every single insignificant mistake!".

> And there are theoretical limits to what you can do with lossless compression and I suspect that the algorithm in the show breaks those.

Compression schemes achieve better results the more they're tailored to the data you're compressing. The theoretical limits are not the issue.

For example, here's my compression algorithm for popular movies: You take the most popular 255 movies of all time as of a particular date and include an uncompressed copy of all of them within the compression algorithm itself. Then the compression scheme works as follows: If the first byte is not a zero, the decompression code will emit one of the 255 most popular movies, and the 255 possible non-zero values for the first byte identify which one. If the first byte is a zero, what follows is an uncompressed copy of a movie that is not one of the 255 most popular movies, and the decompression code merely strips the first byte.

Using that algorithm I can compress each of the 255 most popular movies into a single byte. That's basically the theoretical limit. You could create a compression algorithm that could compress every film ever released into maybe three or four bytes. The problem is naturally that such an algorithm is a) completely useless for all the films that haven't been released before the algorithm is created, and b) completely impractical because the compression algorithm itself is far too large to be distributed or stored efficiently. Because it's a trade off, and achieving the theoretical limit for data size takes the trade off too far in the direction of specializing the algorithm to the data.

But that doesn't mean there can't exist algorithms that make a more interesting trade-off than the existing ones do. Suppose you specifically design a compression algorithm for music. It's pre-programmed with the sounds made by common musical instruments and that are common in human singing. If the recording contains a guitar playing a G#, the algorithm identifies it as a guitar playing a G# and calculates the difference in pitch, volume, tempo, etc. between the recording and the idealized note built into the algorithm. That would be a significantly more complicated compression algorithm than most of those currently used, and it probably wouldn't get very good compression ratios for recordings of things other than music, but you would have something that could conceivably compress most music better than existing compression algorithms.