would be in real life,” Dotan said.
“We don’t think of it in terms of, ‘How little can we get away with
showing on camera?’ It’s more, like, ‘Let’s go through the process of
making the world as complete as possible and see if that process leads
us to better stuff.’ Which it usually does.” He is now one of the show’s
producers, weighing in on the plot and tone as well as on abstruse
technical matters.
The first
season ended with a climactic competition: Pied Piper’s compression
algorithm pitted against that of its rival. “The writers wanted Richard
to have an epiphany that would suddenly make his tech an order of
magnitude better,” Dotan said. “So we had to invent a
breakthrough—something that would be huge, but realistic.” Dotan called
his compression expert, Tsachy Weissman, an engineering professor at
Stanford. “He spent hours walking me through the very dense history of
lossless compression,” Dotan said. “The way I understood it, basically,
was that Claude Shannon, in 1948, worked on compressing files from the
top down, using coding trees, whereas David Huffman, a few years later,
approached it from the bottom up.” He made a PowerPoint presentation
about this and delivered it to Judge and Berg. “They thought about it
for a while, and then they said, ‘You mentioned top-down and bottom-up.
What about starting in the middle of the data set and working from the
middle out?’ So I asked Tsachy, ‘What about middle-out? Is that a
thing?’ He didn’t say, ‘That’s ridiculous.’ He said, ‘That’s intriguing,
actually. It might work.’”
The show is shot on a Sony lot in Los Angeles.Credit 3 Arts Entertainment/Judgemental Films Inc/The Kobal Collection
In
the show, Richard’s “middle-out” epiphany is inspired not by a Stanford
professor but by the most elaborate dick joke in TV history. To
distract themselves from work, the Pied Piper engineers debate the
quickest way to “jerk off every guy” in a crowd. (It’s a long story.)
They belabor the point, drawing diagrams on a whiteboard. Eventually,
one of them suggests that it might be maximally efficient if he “jerks
off four guys at a time,” by aligning “two guys on either side, with
their dicks tip to tip”—in other words, “from the middle out.” Richard’s
eyes light up, buoyant strings begin to play in the background, and he
walks to his computer and starts to code.
In
2015, Weissman convened the Stanford Compression Forum, which resulted
in a forty-page white paper outlining what middle-out compression might
mean. One of his graduate students, Vinith Misra, worked out the math
more explicitly
in another paper. “Clearly, middle-out compression doesn’t work as well
as it does on the show,” Dotan told me. “If it did, we’d all be
trillionaires. But we do have an arrangement where, if Tsachy and Vinith
ever perfect it, Mike and Alec will share the Nobel Prize with them.”
Dotan
now oversees more than two hundred consultants. Some work on set with
him; a majority are available on an ad-hoc basis. Most are unpaid and
uncredited. They include academics, investors, entrepreneurs, and
employees at Google, Amazon, Netflix, and several other tech firms. “I
might ask a quick, specific question, or we might just riff for a few
hours,” Dotan said. Many of the show’s best jokes, if not most, emerge
from this ongoing collaborative process. “I send links, tip them off to
things I’ve heard, list the mockable buzzwords of the month,” Aileen
Lee, a venture capitalist in Palo Alto, told me. “And I’m hardly the
only one. For all I know, they have eyes and ears all over the Valley.”
“Silicon
Valley” is larded with brief appearances by tech-world mini celebrities
that most viewers will miss, or will notice only by the incongruously
stiff acting. But even careful viewers might not understand the
complexity of the invisible web of communication between Silicon Valley
and “Silicon Valley.” In addition to Dotan’s roster of consultants,
Judge and Berg maintain informal conversations, both on and off the
record, with several Silicon Valley bigwigs, including a few
billionaires with either a sense of humor or an axe to grind. This kind
of back-channel relationship—satirists texting casually with the
satirized—is a departure from much of comedic history. Juvenal, whose
“Satires” were published in the second century A.D., did not seem to be
chummy with the Roman empero
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