Erlich. Turns out he's a pretty bad bloke in real life.

He was accused of assaulting his then-girlfriend in college. There's also a bunch of stories from various people (including the creator of Silicon Vallet, Mike Judge) about how he was just a nightmare to work with.

TBF, none of that is proven... but he was DEFINITELY in Transformers, and I just can't forgive shit like that.

I mean, yeah, product placement can be annoying, particularly when it's incredibly in-your-face (looking at you, episode 2 of the Lost in Space reboot). Here though, 2-D was certainly going to be wearing some sort of headphones, so I can't fault them too much for making a bit of extra money off of drawing a little "b" on them.

I see Beats in a crap-ton of media, this site appears to document them pretty comprehensively and amongst things I've enjoyed there's Silicon Valley, Parks and Rec, and Avengers: Ultron. Also a fuck-ton of other music videos of, let's say, questionable artistic merit.

That same site also has the following products noted in this video: Puma sneakers, Casio watch, Adidas sneakers, and a Gibson guitar. There's also the blatant promotion of Pazuzu, but I think we can all forgive that.

Lyrics from https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/perfectcircle/disillusioned.html :

(Dopamine, on dopamine...)

We have been overrun by our animal desire
Addicts of the immediate keep us obedient and unaware
Feeding this mutation, this Pavlovian despair

We've become disillusioned
So we run towards anything glimmering

Time to put the silicon obsession down
Take a look around, find a way in the silence
Lie supine away with your back to the ground
Dis- and re-connect to the resonance now
You were never an island

Unique voice among the many in this choir
Tuning into each other, lift all higher

(Dopamine, on dopamine...)

Willingly been re-wired by clever agents within
Looping our reflections, our obsessions draw us in
Fix and fixation, no sentience beyond

We've become disillusioned
So we dive like crows towards anything glittering

Time to put the silicon obsession down
Take a look around, find a way in the silence
Lie supine away with your back to the ground
Dis- and re-connect to the resonance now
You were never an island

Unique voice among the many in this choir
Tuning into each other, lift all higher

LA rain is deeply polluted, agreed? Whereas, they source their water form up North at the Hetch Hetchy (near Silicon Valley)...so he DOES carefully manicure/pamper his little plot of grass. freak!

After the recent production numbers of the Model 3 and the reports of horrible working conditions at the Fremont plant, Tesla lost a lot of its shine for me.

Elon Musk seems to be convinced that being a Silicon Valley bigshot of his calibre is enough to run this operation, or that industrialism of the sort that, say, Toyota is engaged in is outdated. Those pitiful production numbers and the issues with the workforce indicate to me that management at Tesla (read: Musk) is not capable of industrial manufacture of cars at scale. Not at this time, at least.

I flew from Silicon Valley back to Providence and had to spend the night in Chicago O'hare due to the weather. My "Staring Sullenly All Night Long" video wasn't half as good as this.

Article in the local paper: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/26/crowdfunding-disaster-silicon-valley-startup-takes-customers-money-shuts-down/

I understand where you're coming from, but I stand by my previous posts.

Full disclosure, I never got professionally employed as a programmer / coder / software engineer. However, my Bachelors Degree was in CS, and I have many friends working in the field.

In the show Silicon Valley, Richard Hendriks is working for a large corporate entity but has an idea / personal project that he ends up spinning into a new company. He is trained as a software engineer (CS), NOT with any business or management background (MIS), yet he becomes sort of the de-facto boss / CEO (at least early in the show). He hires a small team to help him develop his product.

Given that scenario, I think the show portrays things very accurately or at least completely plausibly. He's a coder, not a manager. Programmers may understand the importance of formatting and style standards, but at least tend to not have the correct personality type to be comfortable with formally dictating those standards to a team (an activity which would generally be more in line with an MIS background).

Also, his company is small -- just a few other programmers. They are all specializing on different components of the product. So they generally aren't working on each other's code. Standards for function arguments / helper functions / etc. would have to be agreed upon to get their individual components to interact, but that is a separate issue from tabs vs spaces. It would be wise to set a style and naming convention standard and have everyone conform to it, I agree completely. But Richard isn't built for the manager / CEO position, so he either fails to recognize that or doesn't feel comfortable dictating standards to his team.

One more thing to consider is that he (Richard) essentially is the product. He's the keystone piece, the central figure. He's John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, or Steve Wozniak. Even in a very large team / corporate environment, I'd wager that more often than not the style standards that end up getting set tend to fall in line with whatever those key guys want them to be. Don't touch an id Software graphics engine without conforming to Carmack's way, or the Linux kernel without conforming to Torvald's standards. Especially if they are building something new from scratch -- which is again true in the Silicon Valley show scenario.

The show isn't a documentary on how to properly run a startup company in the real Silicon Valley, but it is generally accurate enough that it has a lot of nuances that people with a programming background can pick up on and be entertained by (even people that don't actually work professionally in the field like me). And more important, the general feel of the show can be entertaining even for people that know absolutely nothing about programming.

Your video, Tabs v(ersu)s Spaces from Silicon Valley S3E6, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 136 Badge!

(**EDIT** hmm, code HTML tag doesn't seem to allow whitespace to show at the beginning of lines, so I'm replacing spaces with _underscores_ in the pseudocode below)

Code uses spaces or tabs to visually distinguish the flow of the program, what code belongs to what functions / loops / whatever.

Here's some C-style "pseudocode" that should get the idea across:

void function fizzbuzz {
__for (i = 1; i <= 100; i++) {
____set print_number to true;
____If i is divisible by 3
______print "Fizz";
______set print_number to false;
____If i is divisible by 5
______print "Buzz";
______set print_number to false;
____If print_number, print i;
____print a newline;
__}
}

The braces { } show the beginning and ending of a "function" (essentially one of potentially many self-contained algorithms in a program) and the beginning and ending of a "for loop" (that will repeat the code inside it some number of times). And the "if" statements will only perform the stuff after them IF the test they perform evaluates to true.

So in that pseudocode, there's sort of 4 tiers or things going on. First is the function (named "fizzbuzz"). Since functions are kind of the most basic structural unit of the code, they are on the far left -- not indented at all. Sorta like Roman Numerals in an outline.

Then, the actual content of that function (the code that makes up its algorithm) is set a consistent amount of space to the right to make it clear that it is contained inside the function. That can be done with *1* tab, or some consistent amount of spaces so that it lines up. The only thing in that tier is the "for loop" and the braces that show its beginning and end.

Then the content of the for loop is set a bit further to the right (with another space or another set number of spaces). All of the "if" statements are at that 3rd tier level, along with a bit more code at the beginning and end. Then, the actual content of the if statements is set one more tier to the right to help distinguish that it will only run IF the conditions are met.

That pseudocode uses spaces for all of the tiering -- 2 spaces per tier. I'm a tab person like the guy Richard in the video, because it seems easier to press tab once per tier than hitting the spacebar 2/3/4 times per tier. But it really is just a personal preference issue, because as he said in the video, by the time the code is compiled (turned into an executable file that the computer can run) the final result will be the same whether the programmer used spaces or tabs.

But like with many things, Silicon Valley really hits the nail on the head here. Programmers tend to be very set in their ways and anal about their style preferences for code. If we have to go through someone else's code that doesn't follow our style conventions exactly, it kinda tends to throw us out of whack. To make an analogy with something less nerdy, consider how annoying it can be when someone borrows your car and you have to adjust the seat / mirrors / radio stations etc. when you get back in.

Educated younger people want to be where the action is, meaning places where they can advance quickly in a career they are passionate about while having a high take-home pay. They also want what their parent's generation had, which was often a home in the suburbs or at least a condo or townhouse they owned outright, to comfortably start a family.

The two things are mostly incompatible, because the work they are passionate about is typically around the cities and their parent's generation is still occupying any and all affordable dwellings in the area, including the surrounding suburbs. This wouldn't be a problem except property owners feel an incentive to actively prevent new developments which might lower their home price plus make the area more crowded/disrupted. This is partly a result of the sprawl in areas like Silicon Valley reaching its physical boundaries, so the price of land just keeps increasing to these crazy numbers like '$2mil median home sale in 2016'.

These young people can afford to rent in these areas, so they see how comfortable it is, but don't see how they could own there without a windfall of money. So they are kind of stuck hoping to make it big, but in reality just putting off either buying property where they can't follow the career they want or choosing to follow their career but watching their rent increase. This isn't a new problem, its just become more exaggerated in the last decade, and is pushing a lot of younger people to not have kids and to carry a lot of anxiety about their place in the world.

There are a lot of potential ways forward, like massively increasing government investment in transportation infrastructure to move people more efficiently by bus/train/etc., and massively scaling up internet speeds to make telecommuting more commonplace.

Anyhow, its really just younger people wanting what their parent's had, struggling really hard towards it, settling for much less, and complaining a bit to each other about it. Its just a newer problem for Americans (and places like Australia as well), where there very recently was all this space, and now its all old people's investment properties, available for rent at 400% what their mortgage is.

I picked out this singular point of yours, because it seems like a very common issue getting worse over time.

The professional class has been rather successful at pushing a definition of "progressive" that is in line with their own interests. It's now mostly restricted to social issues, with SJW being the fringe element of it. Economic issues? Gone. Welfare issues? Gone. Foreign policy issues? Gone.

If you look at it that way, Obama has been good to the managerial class, the credentialed class, the professional class, the Silicon Valley types, the affluent liberals, everyone who was already profitting from the neoliberal status-quo. The rest, not so much. The opiod epidemic in the US, born out of mass despair, combined with your excuse of a healthcare system, is class warfare, plain and simple. "Die faster" is the message coming from not just the establishment, but also the professional class, aimed at the plebs, the servant class, the deplorables, the white trash, everyone not inside their bubble.

I've had more success in discussions by making it clear from the get-go that social victories mean very little when you are too poor to enjoy any of them. Your progressive issues mean nothing to me if you still insist on neoliberal economic policies that are a tool of class warfare against the poor.

It's as clear as day in France this days. The liberal intelligentsia calls you scum if you don't support Macron, the darling of the elite, who is liberal on social issues, but a hardcore neoliberal on economic issues. A spokesperson of the Melenchon campaign described his policies as "the Uberization of society", something in clear opposition of what the left stands for.

Describing my views as left rather than progressive or liberal has also helped in these discussions.

Matt Stoller had a good piece on the destruction of Silicon Valley, with this horseshit as a prime example. Without antitrust enforcement, this is what you end up with: playtoys for the oligarchs.

I feel like this is the equivalent of people who live in their car in America. People who's work is enough to feed them but not to house them. I live in the heart of Silicon valley when I go out at night I inevitably see car after car with someone sleeping in it, and the back seat filled with what I can only imagine is their only earthly possessions.

There are so many people living like this even in one of the richest places in the US, I can only imagine what it's like in areas with a lower concentration of wealth.

I'm not sure why it took off the way it did, but the University of Utah had a huge influence on the history of computer graphics. The founders of Silicon Graphics, Adobe and Pixar all came from there. And if you're into computer graphics you have probably heard of algorithms named after Gouraud, Phong, and Blinn, all of them were Ph.D students in the 70s at the school. It just seems like a crazy amount of foundational work took place there over the course of 20 years.

http://www.cs.utah.edu/about/history/