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.
Agreed. There are plenty of people who work hard their entire career and don't get any kind of windfall. Of course there's a lifetime of choices and circumstances spicing up the mix so who can say how much is one vs the other, but the point is they are out there.
I think the underlying point trying to be made though can be summed up by this quote from a movie clip I saw channel surfing in a hotel the other day: "You want the job after this job, but you need this job first."
I think this is the problem: People expecting windfalls: "a large amount of money that is won or received unexpectedly."
There exists a reasonably reliable path to success for most people:
- Look at the people whom you consider to be successful who got there mostly through hard work.
- Do what they did, think about the things they think about, obsess over it. Let it consume you. You won't be good at first, but keep doing it. It will take time.
- Don't think you know better.
- Try not to spend too much time or too many brain cycles on recreation or non-work-focused friendships/relationships. (If you choose to do this, that's fine, but recognize that it is a choice that will define your future.)
That might work, assuming you grew up with a decent education, a stable home, in a safe environment with a supporting network of friends/family. Unfortunately, this does not apply for most people.
I agree with idea that one should not focus on what is holding them back, but I was responding to the claim that there is a reasonably reliable path to success for most people, in the sense that success conveys "a windfall" or otherwise making you financially secure and independent.
However, there is no reliable path for a woman in Saudi Arabia, or poor child with drug addict parents, or the family of the lowest caste in India who have no assets. Surely they can help little by little and better their future generations, but they will by and large be gone before anyone gets a "windfall".
The term "Windfall" comes from Apples which are knocked from the tree by wind, so you can just go and pick them off the ground and sell them without having to go to all the trouble of picking them.
So strictly speaking, that value was always coming your way you just received it early for less effort than otherwise. Unless you're scrumping that is ;-)
Not sure how this ties in to our metaphor here but it kind of feels poignant.
This is exactly the same mistake of Survivorship Bias.
I can't believe you responded in a thread about not looking at one guy who worked hard and succeeded by telling people to "copy one guy, work hard, and you'll succeed".
> Agreed. There are plenty of people who work hard their entire career and don't get any kind of windfall.
There's a lot of talk about survivorship bias, but I have to admit, in 10 years that I've worked in game development, I've never seen anyone like that.
Either people change careers, industries or you can see that they're already burned out. I've never seen a good performer with a lot of experience in the same field and career, and ambition for more, who would be stuck.
No. Most of the people just don't really have high ambitions and are quite content as regular developers, designers and artists. They know that becoming a studio head or something like that means working 80 hours a week and no social life, for a long time, and they chose not to pursue this.
I love these aphorisms - but strictly speaking chance doesn't favour anything. Things just happen. With preparation you can set yourself to better exploit your luck and circumstances, you can even do things to increase the possibility of good fortune coming your way. But believing you will be lucky if you do the right things is little different from cargo cult philosophy - and is a footnote to the gamblers fallacy.
> 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.
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.
But of course, you need an expert "systems architect" like Gilfoyle on your team ;)
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.
Umm, it was explained well in the story. Hooli was supposedly a major customer of all cloud providers and Gavin had pressured them to not sell VMs to Pied Piper. So they had no other option.
The only hole in that story is that there's always too many hosting providers, you can't pressure all of them. But hey, it's a TV show.
Yeah, we built our own servers, it's not that hard, and you can save a huge amount of money. At the time, you couldn't get big SSD RAIDs and lots of RAM without paying a huge premium on AWS/Softlayer/etc. The payback period was like 6 months. Hosting them in your garage on a home internet connection... maybe not so much.
> But of course, you need an expert "systems architect" like Gilfoyle on your team ;)
Indeed. I took this another showcase for Gilfoyle's supreme skill. Indeed to this day, the guy that no-one never questions is Gilfoyle. Even in the last episode, Jared pitched Gilfoyle, not Dinesh for example.
Likewise. Given the current political climate, net neutrality and common carrier roll backs, etc., it is very fertile ground for further discourse and parody of pressing concerns in the industry at large.
So without hitting real-world politics too much...
The idea is that Gregory was based on Thiel. Peter Thiel did in fact join the Trump campaign and administration as an advisor. The Trump campaign was, in fact, far-right -- which is part of why it took the Republican Party by surprise in the primaries.
However, Gregory died when his actor did (of blessed memory).
I think that a good Silicon Valley storyline on this subject would have been a great use of the character they had. I don't want them to introduce a replacement character to hit a plot-point, after going through the trouble of mourning Peter Gregory and replacing him with Laurie Bream. For me it would cross the line from affectionate parody into, in a sense, appropriation of Thiel's life.
The other issue would be that the show has no plans of actually giving us hard-biting political satire. That's not its thing in the first place.
Maybe if they picked it up with Laurie delving into far-libertarian and far-right politics as a part of inheriting Raviga Capital from Gregory? Maybe he left some will saying whoever runs the company has to get involved somehow under certain conditions? Then they can at least make the comedy of this all-business-all-the-time character Laurie seeing how Gregory's weird hobbies play out. Hmmm... and it could turn out Russ Henneman was involved in it, too, so she'd have to swallow her hatred for the guy and do weird stuff alongside him, lest other Raviga partners accuse her of failing to carry out Gregory's wishes.
Ah, okay I figured you were making the leap from financially backing Trump's presidential campaign over Clinton to being far right ideologue. Thiel was quite bold by staying quiet following his choice to do that, then being vague and non-commital in the only interview he did with NYTimes (the only real response he made regarding a Trump policy is flatly rejecting supporting a muslim registry and that he thought Trump was good on gay rights), people filled in the blanks otherwise.
HN's not the right place for these discussions, so I'd rather not dig into it more, I was just curious why you said that.
>The winning candidate in at least a semi-functional democracy cannot be far-anything
The Weimar Republic in 1933 seems like a pretty good counterexample to that. Incidentally, it shortly stopped being the Weimar Republic and became known instead as the Third Reich.
Having read a number of books on WW2 era Germany, attempting to compare the politically chaotic post-WW1 Germany, including the economic crisis, deep nationalist tensions, and the daily murders and gang fights in the streets of the capitals of Germany between the fringe nationalist socialists vs communist parties compared to America in 2016/17 is incredibly dubious.
And even ignoring the numerous lack of comparisons to the political environments before the elections and the differences of the subsequent assent to power that Hitler took compared to Trump, the differences after the elections are countless. Most notably how the courts (via a republican judge) quickly shut down the dubious middle east immigration ban - probably the only far-right policy Trump managed to push into reality - which demonstrated that checks and balances are far from being sequestered. An essential 101 indicator of proto-fascism.
This type of fear mongering is becoming less and less persuasive. Even though there are real and significant problems with the current administration it's not helping anyone to blow them out of context and pretend you're this vanguard against some modern version of Nazi germany. That's more likely to lose you support than help you achieve anything.
If anything the anyone-who-supports-Trump-is-a-Nazi brigade did more to help elect him than prevent it. I've read a number of profiles of people who voted for Trump and who now regret it who said they voted for him merely as an affront to what the opposition represents, rather than actually supporting him. Peter Thiel seems to fit into this category.
I wasn't making that comparison. I was pointing out that getting elected doesn't make a candidate centrist, especially when that candidate doesn't win a majority. Hitler's NSDAP got about a third of the seats in the Reichstag to put him at the head of government in 1933. Trump got about 46% of the votes in the US Presidential election of 2016. Neither of these needed to be mainstream to win, even though Hitler is a great deal further right than Trump.
The error is to claim that Hitler became "center-right" or "middle of the road" upon becoming Reichskanzler. The center didn't move ultra-rightward (remember: the Communists also did well in that election), an ultra-rightist happened to win the plurality in a heavily polarized election.
What policy has Trump enacted that demonstrates the current administration is (functionally) far right? The difference being of course that it went beyond rhetoric of a political (marketing) campaign and beyond the checks-and-balances of the US government?
If it is purely a matter of some random emotional tweet Trump made or some journalist filling in the gaps between what Steve Bannon may or may have not meant when he said x, then I will remain unconvinced that the US government is at any risk of being comparable to 1930-40s era fascist regimes.
>What policy has Trump enacted that demonstrates the current administration is (functionally) far right?
There's Betsy DeVos' new move to eliminate Income-Based Repayment plans for student loans, and many state-level bills to criminalize any protests that interfere with economically significant business (including labor pickets). And of course Jeff Sessions trying to restart the Drug War when basically everyone else just wants it ended. Remember, "far-right" doesn't just mean "fascist". It also just means "extremely capitalist" or "authoritarian in a conservative or capitalist cause".
The American Right has actually spent a lot of political capital treating Trump as outside movement conservatism, as an aberrant far-right movement hijacking the Republican Party. They still have some of the William Buckley spirit to them, in which the John Birch Society or the Ku Klux Klan get purged rather than integrated.
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.
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.
That's the pain we all feel on more accessible topics and their treatment in mainstream entertainment. It's just more acute for you because you're an expert.
Did you enjoy the Sneaker's "can decrypt anything" plot line? How about that stupid TV show with a magical button that turned on and off electricity? I couldn't be in the same room when my wife watched that crap. Happens to everyone. I'm not dismissing what you say, more like welcome to the club. :-)
"Revolution" proved to me that Lindelof was the more interesting one from the "Lost" duo. Case in point: Lindelof's "The Leftovers" is one of the best shows airing right now.
I classify horror movies and post-apocalyptic shows like The Walking Dead as "bad things happen to good people for no reason other than plotline." I can only watch so much of that before it wears me out because there are no surprises and nothing beyond temporary respite for the characters. As you say, it requires viewers be really invested to watch everyone die, but if anyone can do it George R.R. Martin can.
The old joke is if people bother him enough about the next Game of Thrones book it'll just be 1,000 pages of snow blowing across graves. When he's done with the series I'm not sure how many characters, readers or viewers will be left. Even so he's the only author I can point to who can create compelling enough content that people may stay to the end. I'll never watch another Walking Dead or Leftovers because I just don't care enough about the characters, but George will probably manage to drag me to the end of GoT. Damn you, George.
I've seen probably a half dozen things JJ has worked on, but none of them end up being any good. He normally starts out with a pretty good premise, but it rapidly becomes apparent that he doesn't know what to do with it. Besides Star Trek (at least the first one, the second one is a different story) and Star Wars, Fringe and Super 8 jump to mind.
Fortunately Stranger Things got to be what Super 8 could have been.
Interestingly enough, they sort of save the hard sci-fi plot of revolution ; they just take a number of seasons to pull the origin of the nano-tech scourge out of the hat (yes, it was well intentioned, yes self-replicating nano-tech turned out to be a bad idea, yes there was a command and control feature built in).
Not just for topics that you're knowledgeable on, but also if you pick up on the patterns that writers use or read tvtropes it also ruins the watch-ability. I can't watch anything made by broadcast TV or TBS/TNT/USA or that Marvel stuff, it's just so boring and repetitive. Although, I do wonder what it says about people that the most popular movies involve creating a fantasy where the main character has some type of calamity during childhood then goes on to save the world with superpowers.
>Although, I do wonder what it says about people that the most popular movies involve creating a fantasy where the main character has some type of calamity during childhood then goes on to save the world with superpowers.
Lots of folks carrying childhood angst and wishing they could make things right, I guess.
> Not just for topics that you're knowledgeable on, but also if you pick up on the patterns that writers use or read tvtropes it also ruins the watch-ability.
This is true of story telling in general, though. There's really only so many story elements. That doesn't mean you can't write a new, great story with them today (just like there's still great music being made despite us only having 12 notes in Western music).
>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.
Jhumpa Lahiri managed to do this! See http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/07/teach-yourself-....
So my feeling was similar, but I had a slightly different issue with it: Even if you had a breakthrough compression algorithm, it's highly unlikely you'd build a startup with it and sell it as a proprietary tech.
There are plenty of better compression techs out there for various use cases (zstd, brotli, opus, ...), and pretty much all of them today are thrown out by some major corp as open source. Even giving the better compression tech out for free it's incredibly hard to get people to adopt it. I mean github still uses gzip for their source downloads for whatever unclear reason.
Exactly my problem. Moreover, technical aspects aside, it seems a very poor choice for a satire on silicon valley: data compression is hard science, more likely to come from university maths departments than from garage startups; it doesn't require much marketing either, or hype, or social networking, or even fancy websites. Given that the real SV offers endless examples of silly products and enterprises (just the first that come to mind: the app to send "YO" to your friends; the completely useless $400 juice squeezer with wifi connection) putting such a no-nonsense innovation like a novel data compression algorithm at the center of the show is already completely off target.
> As someone with PhD studies in Information Theory
In order for them to come up with a business plan that made 100% logical sense to anyone with expertise on the topic, they'd have had to come up with a legitimate business plan, and at that point, they could have just launched a startup instead of making a sitcom.
"Well, we wanted to write this show that was a satire of the culture in Silicon Valley, but in the process we revolutionized the field of information theory."
While I agree that the compression breakthrough doesn't make much sense realistically, I think it makes a great premise for the show.
The plot needs Richard to actually invent something revolutionary (and thus fail to get it off the ground time and time again), that is also simple enough for the audience to understand. Any algorithmic breakthrough that is real-world feasible would either need too much vague handwaving from the writing ("A brand new way to compute data!"). Or be close enough to reality that neither the layman nor the expert is happy (imagine the show having to explain why the big-O of Richard's new magic sorting algorithm matters).
Compression is the logical choice because it's:
1) easier to explain why fitting more data into less space is significant (laymen already have some rough visualization of compression),
2) lends itself to being "black boxed" in the plot ("Look at all the companies we can build with this one breakthrough"),
3) just barely feasible enough that if some SV nerd actually did make the discovery, then events would play out roughly the same as the show depicts (winning techcrunch, getting funding)
And I'd add that most compressors make a lot of assumptions about the general case that reduce that real world compression ratio when compared to theoretical maximums. That's why stuff like kkrunchy can't be beat in their domains (first and last rule of optimization, "know your data inside and out!").
If someone was to stumble upon a heuristic that gives you noticeable gains for general compression as well, it could be close to as game changing as Richard's stuff is. Obviously we have a good handle on "theoretical maximums" thanks to information theory and so that end of the plot is BS, but looking past that embellishment the show isn't outside the realm of possibility.
It's perfect, because there is one impossible plot device in the real world. The attention to detail used to accomplish that is very appealing to me. It's my very favorite aspect of the show.
I once sat on a plane next to someone who was an expert in glass. It ruined every action movie for him, because the glass always shattered all wrong. And sometimes they would cut holes in glass that you couldn't do that with.
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
It takes zero effort in IntelliJ (pictured above).
I remember reading a suggestion about proportional fonts in a discussion on HN about code editor preferences. Switched to them several years ago and never looked back.
That is indeed cringe-worthy, all except the proportional font. I read and write all my code in a proportional font and have for many years.
In fact, I think proportional fonts are something every developer should try for a while, even if you end up preferring a monospaced font. In particular, if you're in the habit of using column alignment, a proportional font will quickly teach you to stop doing that and use indentation instead.
“Some Valley big shots have no idea how to react to the show,” Miller told me. “They can’t decide whether to be offended or flattered. And they’re mystified by the fact that actors have a kind of celebrity that they will never have—there’s no rhyme or reason to it, but that’s the way it is, and it kills them.” Miller met Musk at the after-party in Redwood City. “I think he was thrown by the fact that I wasn’t being sycophantic—which I couldn’t be, because I didn’t realize who he was at the time. He said, ‘I have some advice for your show,’ and I went, ‘No thanks, we don’t need any advice,’ which threw him even more. And then, while we’re talking, some woman comes up and says ‘Can I have a picture?’ and he starts to pose—it was kinda sad, honestly—and instead she hands the camera to him and starts to pose with me. It was, like, Sorry, dude, I know you’re a big deal—and, in his case, he actually is a big deal—but I’m the guy from ‘Yogi Bear 3-D,’ and apparently that’s who she wants a picture with.”
This scenario cracked me up. It's difficult for me to mentally separate TJ Miller from his character, Erlich. I'm imagining this playing out on the show, with Erlich Bachman paying a woman to pretend that she didn't know who Musk was, all so he could somehow build up hype for Pied Piper.
I love TJ Miller and particularly liked what he did at the Techcrunch awards. But that's a silly anecdote.
If you didn't know who Elon Musk was years before 2014, and your proud of being in some mindless film, I can't take you serious as a critic of culture. What do people pay attention too?
It's fine to be dismissive and sarcastic to people who deserve it but you can't just wantonly dismiss everyone without facts when you apparently spend most of your time mesmerized by pop culture, sports etc.
I interpreted the anecdote a little differently. It seemed like TJ Miller was acknowledging that the woman definitely should have preferred to have a picture with Elon Musk, but for some reason there are many people who are more interested in entertainment than in anything Elon Musk is working on. I think he name dropped Yogi Bear 3D to highlight how ridiculous the celebrity worship is, not because he was proud of being in the mindless film.
As for him not immediately recognizing Musk at the party, I was thinking Musk might have looked a bit different from his photos when seen in real life. By the time the woman handed Musk the camera, Miller had already figured out that the person he was talking to was a very big deal.
"It's kind of weird--the values. Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine. I'm probably worth a lot more than Jonas Salk. That's pretty weird. I didn't cure polio; this guy did. I walk into a bar and a whole bunch of people know who I am. Jonas Salk probably can't even get laid. Now, figure that out."
i wouldn't take everything he says so literally. i'm sure he was aware of what a tesla is. so what if he wasn't intimately familiar with who elon musk was? he was the star of 'yogi bear 3-d' after all
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.
In the immortal words of Joe Rogan during his podcast, "pretend your eating the microphone."
> Perhaps their was noone listening to audio, but he got pretty soft ~15:00 and on.
In case Craig or the person responsible for the audio sees this, you can help ameliorate this by tuning the dynamic range compression. Because the signal-to-noise ratio decreases the further you get from the mic, the recording may also benefit from some de-verbing and noise reduction first. (If you don't have good tools for this, ping me and I'll be glad to help.)
> In the immortal words of Joe Rogan during his podcast, "pretend your eating the microphone."
Plosives become a problem if you get too close. If this inspires anyone to get on the mic, good general guidance is "put your lips one to two fists away from the mic".
A television first was McManus's use of a real GitHub account/repo on the show, which also accepted pull requests after it aired: https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadBut you sound like you're falling for Survivorship bias.
I think the underlying point trying to be made though can be summed up by this quote from a movie clip I saw channel surfing in a hotel the other day: "You want the job after this job, but you need this job first."
There exists a reasonably reliable path to success for most people:
- Look at the people whom you consider to be successful who got there mostly through hard work.
- Do what they did, think about the things they think about, obsess over it. Let it consume you. You won't be good at first, but keep doing it. It will take time.
- Don't think you know better.
- Try not to spend too much time or too many brain cycles on recreation or non-work-focused friendships/relationships. (If you choose to do this, that's fine, but recognize that it is a choice that will define your future.)
That's about it.
However, there is no reliable path for a woman in Saudi Arabia, or poor child with drug addict parents, or the family of the lowest caste in India who have no assets. Surely they can help little by little and better their future generations, but they will by and large be gone before anyone gets a "windfall".
So strictly speaking, that value was always coming your way you just received it early for less effort than otherwise. Unless you're scrumping that is ;-)
Not sure how this ties in to our metaphor here but it kind of feels poignant.
I can't believe you responded in a thread about not looking at one guy who worked hard and succeeded by telling people to "copy one guy, work hard, and you'll succeed".
I love your spin on it though. Have no friends!
There's a lot of talk about survivorship bias, but I have to admit, in 10 years that I've worked in game development, I've never seen anyone like that.
Either people change careers, industries or you can see that they're already burned out. I've never seen a good performer with a lot of experience in the same field and career, and ambition for more, who would be stuck.
That's almost the definition of survivorship bias.
Hard work pays off quite often. Hard work opens you up to opportunities quite often too, especially in an information-related career.
You made a bunch of typos in "tremendous amount of luck" :)
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.
But of course, you need an expert "systems architect" like Gilfoyle on your team ;)
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.
The only hole in that story is that there's always too many hosting providers, you can't pressure all of them. But hey, it's a TV show.
Indeed. I took this another showcase for Gilfoyle's supreme skill. Indeed to this day, the guy that no-one never questions is Gilfoyle. Even in the last episode, Jared pitched Gilfoyle, not Dinesh for example.
Unless I'm missing something about Peter's character that indicated he was far right?
The idea is that Gregory was based on Thiel. Peter Thiel did in fact join the Trump campaign and administration as an advisor. The Trump campaign was, in fact, far-right -- which is part of why it took the Republican Party by surprise in the primaries.
However, Gregory died when his actor did (of blessed memory).
I think that a good Silicon Valley storyline on this subject would have been a great use of the character they had. I don't want them to introduce a replacement character to hit a plot-point, after going through the trouble of mourning Peter Gregory and replacing him with Laurie Bream. For me it would cross the line from affectionate parody into, in a sense, appropriation of Thiel's life.
The other issue would be that the show has no plans of actually giving us hard-biting political satire. That's not its thing in the first place.
Maybe if they picked it up with Laurie delving into far-libertarian and far-right politics as a part of inheriting Raviga Capital from Gregory? Maybe he left some will saying whoever runs the company has to get involved somehow under certain conditions? Then they can at least make the comedy of this all-business-all-the-time character Laurie seeing how Gregory's weird hobbies play out. Hmmm... and it could turn out Russ Henneman was involved in it, too, so she'd have to swallow her hatred for the guy and do weird stuff alongside him, lest other Raviga partners accuse her of failing to carry out Gregory's wishes.
HN's not the right place for these discussions, so I'd rather not dig into it more, I was just curious why you said that.
The winning candidate in at least a semi-functional democracy cannot be far-anything. Trump's a mainstream American politician by definition.
The Weimar Republic in 1933 seems like a pretty good counterexample to that. Incidentally, it shortly stopped being the Weimar Republic and became known instead as the Third Reich.
Having read a number of books on WW2 era Germany, attempting to compare the politically chaotic post-WW1 Germany, including the economic crisis, deep nationalist tensions, and the daily murders and gang fights in the streets of the capitals of Germany between the fringe nationalist socialists vs communist parties compared to America in 2016/17 is incredibly dubious.
And even ignoring the numerous lack of comparisons to the political environments before the elections and the differences of the subsequent assent to power that Hitler took compared to Trump, the differences after the elections are countless. Most notably how the courts (via a republican judge) quickly shut down the dubious middle east immigration ban - probably the only far-right policy Trump managed to push into reality - which demonstrated that checks and balances are far from being sequestered. An essential 101 indicator of proto-fascism.
This type of fear mongering is becoming less and less persuasive. Even though there are real and significant problems with the current administration it's not helping anyone to blow them out of context and pretend you're this vanguard against some modern version of Nazi germany. That's more likely to lose you support than help you achieve anything.
If anything the anyone-who-supports-Trump-is-a-Nazi brigade did more to help elect him than prevent it. I've read a number of profiles of people who voted for Trump and who now regret it who said they voted for him merely as an affront to what the opposition represents, rather than actually supporting him. Peter Thiel seems to fit into this category.
The error is to claim that Hitler became "center-right" or "middle of the road" upon becoming Reichskanzler. The center didn't move ultra-rightward (remember: the Communists also did well in that election), an ultra-rightist happened to win the plurality in a heavily polarized election.
If it is purely a matter of some random emotional tweet Trump made or some journalist filling in the gaps between what Steve Bannon may or may have not meant when he said x, then I will remain unconvinced that the US government is at any risk of being comparable to 1930-40s era fascist regimes.
There's Betsy DeVos' new move to eliminate Income-Based Repayment plans for student loans, and many state-level bills to criminalize any protests that interfere with economically significant business (including labor pickets). And of course Jeff Sessions trying to restart the Drug War when basically everyone else just wants it ended. Remember, "far-right" doesn't just mean "fascist". It also just means "extremely capitalist" or "authoritarian in a conservative or capitalist cause".
The American Right has actually spent a lot of political capital treating Trump as outside movement conservatism, as an aberrant far-right movement hijacking the Republican Party. They still have some of the William Buckley spirit to them, in which the John Birch Society or the Ku Klux Klan get purged rather than integrated.
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.
Did you enjoy the Sneaker's "can decrypt anything" plot line? How about that stupid TV show with a magical button that turned on and off electricity? I couldn't be in the same room when my wife watched that crap. Happens to everyone. I'm not dismissing what you say, more like welcome to the club. :-)
I think you're talking about "Revolution" which had JJ Abrams splattered all over the adverts.
I watched one episode and thought, after Lost, "I'm not falling for this again."
Another gem I discovered this year is Amazon's "Patriot". Coincidentally, it features one of the main actors from "Lost" :P
The old joke is if people bother him enough about the next Game of Thrones book it'll just be 1,000 pages of snow blowing across graves. When he's done with the series I'm not sure how many characters, readers or viewers will be left. Even so he's the only author I can point to who can create compelling enough content that people may stay to the end. I'll never watch another Walking Dead or Leftovers because I just don't care enough about the characters, but George will probably manage to drag me to the end of GoT. Damn you, George.
I was a little surprised JJ did such a poor job for backstory but then again don't get me started on his Star Trek reboots. :grumble:
Fortunately Stranger Things got to be what Super 8 could have been.
Lots of folks carrying childhood angst and wishing they could make things right, I guess.
This is true of story telling in general, though. There's really only so many story elements. That doesn't mean you can't write a new, great story with them today (just like there's still great music being made despite us only having 12 notes in Western music).
There are plenty of better compression techs out there for various use cases (zstd, brotli, opus, ...), and pretty much all of them today are thrown out by some major corp as open source. Even giving the better compression tech out for free it's incredibly hard to get people to adopt it. I mean github still uses gzip for their source downloads for whatever unclear reason.
Abandon disbelief my friend, and immerse yourself in the theatre. Focus on the message, not the lettering.
In order for them to come up with a business plan that made 100% logical sense to anyone with expertise on the topic, they'd have had to come up with a legitimate business plan, and at that point, they could have just launched a startup instead of making a sitcom.
"Well, we wanted to write this show that was a satire of the culture in Silicon Valley, but in the process we revolutionized the field of information theory."
The plot needs Richard to actually invent something revolutionary (and thus fail to get it off the ground time and time again), that is also simple enough for the audience to understand. Any algorithmic breakthrough that is real-world feasible would either need too much vague handwaving from the writing ("A brand new way to compute data!"). Or be close enough to reality that neither the layman nor the expert is happy (imagine the show having to explain why the big-O of Richard's new magic sorting algorithm matters).
Compression is the logical choice because it's:
1) easier to explain why fitting more data into less space is significant (laymen already have some rough visualization of compression),
2) lends itself to being "black boxed" in the plot ("Look at all the companies we can build with this one breakthrough"),
3) just barely feasible enough that if some SV nerd actually did make the discovery, then events would play out roughly the same as the show depicts (winning techcrunch, getting funding)
If someone was to stumble upon a heuristic that gives you noticeable gains for general compression as well, it could be close to as game changing as Richard's stuff is. Obviously we have a good handle on "theoretical maximums" thanks to information theory and so that end of the plot is BS, but looking past that embellishment the show isn't outside the realm of possibility.
I'd try to suspend the disbelief :-)
https://i.redd.it/qr65kfjahpty.jpg
I remember reading a suggestion about proportional fonts in a discussion on HN about code editor preferences. Switched to them several years ago and never looked back.
In fact, I think proportional fonts are something every developer should try for a while, even if you end up preferring a monospaced font. In particular, if you're in the habit of using column alignment, a proportional font will quickly teach you to stop doing that and use indentation instead.
Even if I use tab key for indentation, my editor can use either spaces or tabs when saving. It's configurable.
This scenario cracked me up. It's difficult for me to mentally separate TJ Miller from his character, Erlich. I'm imagining this playing out on the show, with Erlich Bachman paying a woman to pretend that she didn't know who Musk was, all so he could somehow build up hype for Pied Piper.
If you didn't know who Elon Musk was years before 2014, and your proud of being in some mindless film, I can't take you serious as a critic of culture. What do people pay attention too?
It's fine to be dismissive and sarcastic to people who deserve it but you can't just wantonly dismiss everyone without facts when you apparently spend most of your time mesmerized by pop culture, sports etc.
As for him not immediately recognizing Musk at the party, I was thinking Musk might have looked a bit different from his photos when seen in real life. By the time the woman handed Musk the camera, Miller had already figured out that the person he was talking to was a very big deal.
- Billy Joel
I wouldn't be so quick to not take a person seriously because she recognized an actor from a film you didn't like or see.
I personally preferred the SXSW talk [0], it has the writers with them too.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE9Dvd_NEBg
In the immortal words of Joe Rogan during his podcast, "pretend your eating the microphone."
In case Craig or the person responsible for the audio sees this, you can help ameliorate this by tuning the dynamic range compression. Because the signal-to-noise ratio decreases the further you get from the mic, the recording may also benefit from some de-verbing and noise reduction first. (If you don't have good tools for this, ping me and I'll be glad to help.)
> In the immortal words of Joe Rogan during his podcast, "pretend your eating the microphone."
Plosives become a problem if you get too close. If this inspires anyone to get on the mic, good general guidance is "put your lips one to two fists away from the mic".