Silicon Valley, episode 8: Larping, mogging and losing its way The first season of HBO's sharp, satirical Silicon Valley had just eight episodes. By the measure of last night's show, they should have stuck to that for season two rather than try to punch in an extra two episodes. White Hat/Black Hat felt like the episode pulled together from rejected ideas. And there weren't that many, so …
I don't know about gags. I only made it about halfway through the first episode; then the wild technical inaccuracies became too much to bear.
I know, I know. Murray Gell-Man Amnesia Effect. I can watch police procedurals with my wife because I don't know much about police procedure. I can watch Game of Thrones because I've never played the game.1 I can watch Top Gear because I don't know much about idiots.
But shows about IT are largely unbearable. (I do keep meaning to give The IT Crowd a try, though. The key is not to pretend IT is serious or interesting.) Sure, what I saw of Silicon Valley was a frickin' documentary compared to, say, the unmitigated horror of CSI: Cyber, which must be cleansed with fire. That show's so bad that even normally decent actors are rendered terrible just by being in it.
The simple fact of the matter, though, is that there's a lot of TV available, and I don't watch much of it, so I'm not particularly inclined to watch something that's going to abuse subject matter I'm familiar with.
1And don't even get me started on the Game of Stools.
Maybe not strictly a typo, but this stood out:
" This messy thinking is unsurprisingly lazy for a show that has shone by being acutely observed"
It's surprisingly lazy, surely?
Sorry, didn't come to nitpick, crapmonster started it!
I agree with the review, very disappointing episode. Even more so as last week's was so good.
I didn't mind the Erlich/Smokation bit so much, it seemed plausible that he'd pitch the idea and then worry about the actual practicalities later. And just about plausible that the VC anti-smoker woman would go for it just because it was anti-smoking. I could live with that...
The porn deletion and subsequent meeting with porn boss-lady though was excruciatingly bad. I read some discussions just last week about how tech-accurate the show was. People were saying that all the tech stuff was inaccurate and that it was better to watch the show without knowing what they were talking about as it just spoils it. I think it just goes to show what a good job they actually have been doing until now that everything about this episode just stood out as wrong and stunk the place out.
It really did feel like the usual writers and consultants had taken the week off.
I really hope it picks back up next week!
I thought this episode was fine until the massive technical errors in the final two scenes, which ruined it for me. Here's the list:
* Since when does anyone have a laptop lying around with a prompt saying "Delete 9,000 hours of premium 4K porn, press Delete to confirm"? Delete (or Backspace) is used to delete characters, not to confirm a prompt (which would typically be y, n or Enter), never mind that actually having that prompt up in the first place is utterly ludicrous.
* They were downloading the porn, so there's no need for remote write or delete access at all - anyone competent would have made the files read-only and undeleteable on the remote server.
* Er, backups? *Surely* the downloaded porn wasn't the only copy the porn company they had? Porn companies are IT trailblazers and they most *definitely* would have backups since the files are their lifeblood.
* The final scene where Richard claims files were deleted faster because of the compression algorithm literally makes no sense whatsoever. They were accessing uncompressed original video files, so the deletion of such files has absolutely nothing to do with the compression algorithm.
Yes, I understand that the whole tequila bottle thing was purely for comic effect, but to make so many major technical errors around it really spoiled the joke for me.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
