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Interview with Ed McManus, Technical Advisor for HBO’s Silicon Valley [audio]
- gibbiv 9y agoI 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.
- mattmanser 9y agoJudging by the outcome, he's done a really great job on Silicon Valley. But you sound like you're falling for Survivorship bias.
- mysterydip 9y agoAgreed. 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."
- golergka 9y ago> 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.
- alistairSH 9y agoSo, other than the ones that quit or burn-out, the success rate is high? That's almost the definition of survivorship bias.
- golergka 9y agoNo. 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.
- trevyn 9y agoI 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's about it.
- lotsofpulp 9y agoThat 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.
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- trevyn 9y agoI disagree. The thought that you have unique roadblocks is, in itself, disempowering.
- lotsofpulp 9y agoI 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".
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- lettersdigits 9y agoSurvivorship bias is by far my favorite bias
- noway421 9y agoNot all could agree
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- thomastjeffery 9y agoSounds like you're falling for the fallacy fallacy. Hard work pays off quite often. Hard work opens you up to opportunities quite often too, especially in an information-related career.
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- elmigranto 9y ago> naturally having cool things come your way as a payoff You made a bunch of typos in "tremendous amount of luck" :)
- imron 9y agoLuck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
- rusk 9y agoThis sounds like an "operational" definition. A popular alternative is that luck is opportunity.
- eddiecalzone 9y agoChance favors the prepared mind.
- rusk 9y agoI 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.
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- imron 9y agoAnd many opportunities only arise after years of hard work in a given area.
- j_s 9y agoJason Roberts of TechZing coined the phrase "luck surface area".
- apeace 9y ago> 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.
- skrebbel 9y agoUmm, 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.
- eanzenberg 9y agoAlso.. why would you place your proprietary "winning" algorithm on a machine owned by your biggest competitor?
- j_s 9y agoThis is a real concern for FPGA programmers considering Amazon EC2 F1.
- ericd 9y agoYeah, 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.
- SippinLean 9y agoI was hoping they would speak to the inspiration for Richard's "decentralized internet" plot this season; if it was Ethereum or something similar.
- Deinos 9y agoLikewise. 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.
- adamnemecek 9y agoMore like urbit.
- laretluval 9y agoAgreed. I'm wondering if Richard will get mixed up in far right politics in this season.
- tmccrmck 9y agoUrbit is one of the few things that I think may be too nutty for the show.
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoThey can't do that after Peter Gregory died ;-).
- dmix 9y agoLibertarian != far right Unless I'm missing something about Peter's character that indicated he was far right?
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoSo 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.
- systemtest 9y agoI really hope they bring back HBO in my country so I can start watching this show. I hear it's awesome.
- resoluti0n 9y agoI can understand. DRMs and geo restrcited contents are a bad thing for most people.
- thomastjeffery 9y agoThis is how fighting piracy is illegitimate. They should put their efforts (funding) into competing with piracy, not litigating it.
- svantana 9y agoAs 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.
- technofiend 9y agoThat'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. :-)
- philbarr 9y ago> How about that stupid TV show with a magical button that turned on and off electricity? 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."
- bko 9y agoWish 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 https://i.redd.it/qr65kfjahpty.jpg https://i.redd.it/qr65kfjahpty.jpg
- jbverschoor 9y agoI bet he's using tabs ;)
- molly0 9y agoHaha, and Richard hating on spaces seems strange for a python developer.
- jrcii 9y agoIt may not be a Sony computer, that partial bezel looks like a MacBook. Sony may have paid for the placement of their logo there.
- cfj 9y agoI found that funny as hell and it was probably 100% intentional.
- bengoodger 9y agoIt takes special effort to configure a variable width font in a code editor. I have to wonder if they do this to troll observant people like you :p
- henrik_w 9y agoInteresting story on the making of Silicon Valley (the show) from the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-va...
- novia 9y ago“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.
- ithought 9y agoI 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.
- novia 9y ago
- 11thEarlOfMar 9y agoTrue story: My HR manager came in and said he finally understood what Scrum was after watching Silicon Valley.
- rusk 9y agoThat's "Cynical Scrum" i.e. "Scrum in the real world" - it's not supposed to be like this but as presented in SV is a common degenerate pattern.
- thomastjeffery 9y agoA degenerate pattern can still be a great reference if you have already heard the theory. It's like reading bad code to understand a paradigm.
- lllllll 9y agoReally funny "interview" of the actress/actors @GoogleHQ https://youtu.be/QOXup8chEoY https://youtu.be/QOXup8chEoY
- icc97 9y agoAh does that mean you spent as much time searching YouTube for Silicon Valley as I did after watching the post here? I personally preferred the SXSW talk [0], it has the writers with them too. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE9Dvd_NEBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE9Dvd_NEBg
- Geee 9y agoDo you honestly find that funny? I thought that was quite the opposite. In fact, the interview could be the definition of "not funny".
- salemh 9y agoFun 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."
- CharlesW 9y ago> 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".
- minimaxir 9y agoA 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 https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai