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At the end of season 4 of Silicon Valley, the guys find out that the pied piper add has been uploaded to the network of smart fridges. It is explained briefly that this happened while Gilfoyle hacked Jin Yang’s smart fridge to show a video of a chinese guy sucking someone off. My question is:

  1. how does uploading a compressed video to a smart fridge’s memory also install the whole software for the new internet they are designing?
  2. How did installing an app on a single smart fridge allow it to spread to all other fridges?
  3. The numbers seem weird - they claimed the whole of Milcher’s data was stored on 30000 smart fridges, which was previously stored on a network of +160000 hooli phones? The volume we are talking about are petabytes as that is what Richard said to BigHead it would take on the stanford servers in the same episode.
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  • news.northeastern.edu/2017/06/30/…
    – BCdotWEB
    Commented May 19, 2020 at 22:52
  • Look, the point of the show isn't to be "realistic", the point is the jokes. It's a comedy. tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfFunny
    – BCdotWEB
    Commented May 19, 2020 at 22:54
  • Not the kind of answer I was expecting. Just asking because everything so far made perfect sense to me. No nagging whatsoever :P
    – Momchill
    Commented May 19, 2020 at 23:42
  • Just to give my two cents on the whole thing - I expected that since action Jack was going to get the boot and Gavin re-instated as head of Hooli, he would call off the Hooli phone take back, started by Jack, thus leaving the whole thing running on people's phones, as per the hack of the previous episode. Seems more plausible to me...
    – Momchill
    Commented May 19, 2020 at 23:48

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  1. How does uploading a compressed video to a smart fridge’s memory also install the whole software for the new internet they are designing?

  2. How did installing an app on a single smart fridge allow it to spread to all other fridges?

In order to upload Suck it Jin Yang video to smart fridge Gilfoyle had to add Pied Piper libraries to it's firmware. Other smart fridges detected these libraries as an update and updated themselves with same since they are smart fridges.

Update in response to comment:

So it wasn't just compressing the video and uploading it, but rather the whole library was put there, compiled and ready to go. Isn't that a bit weird? To upload and play a compressed video, you have to upload and compile the whole code? How does that fit in with the whole idea of PP being super optimized and whatnot? – Momchill

Only explanation I can come up with is that Smart Fridge's firmware was not equipped with code to play compressed videos. Hence Gilfoyle had to add some/all Pied Piper libraries to enable it play.

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  • So it wasn't just compressing the video and uploading it, but rather the whole library was put there, compiled and ready to go. Isn't that a bit weird? To upload and play a compressed video, you have to upload and compile the whole code? How does that fit in with the whole idea of PP being super optimized and whatnot?
    – Momchill
    Commented May 20, 2020 at 13:42
  • @Momchill: Updated answer.
    – Rahul
    Commented May 20, 2020 at 18:43
  • I guess it would be something along those lines. Thanks for the discussion!
    – Momchill
    Commented May 20, 2020 at 22:53

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