uncanny valley

This Place argues that the uncanny valley is a flawed concept, since 'human likeness' is too broad and the supporting evidence is cherry-picked. It proposes that the creepiness really comes from how animated characters and robots move.

A short Silicon Valley clip in which Jian Yang copies popular apps and launches a new Pied Piper, and Seppen listens.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

Steve Blank tells how World War II, Stanford's Frederick Terman and military and intelligence agencies shaped the rise of Silicon Valley. The talk centers on the Cold War electronic warfare and signals intelligence work that seeded the region's tech industry.

A two-minute clip from HBO's Silicon Valley season 2 in which Russ Hanneman shows off his gull-wing car doors. It is a comedic scene about startup excess.

A compilation of the best Gavin Belson moments from Silicon Valley seasons 1 to 5, showing the show's self-absorbed tech CEO.

A two-minute clip from Silicon Valley season 1, episode 7 featuring the human heater idea that is rejected in a startup competition scene.

A clip from Silicon Valley season 3 episode 2 about Pied Piper's product, satirizing startups and stock-driven companies.

Chamath Palihapitiya talks with Jason Calacanis about how he bought into the mythology of Silicon Valley, which he calls a Ponzi scheme, and about rebuilding Social Capital. He urges founders to grow slowly and build what matters.

An HBO clip from Silicon Valley season 4 in which the 'Not Hotdog' app is demoed. The app classifies food photos as hot dog or not hot dog.

A short montage from HBO's Silicon Valley of the TechCrunch Disrupt scene, in which founders repeat the phrase 'making the world a better place'.

A short clip from the show Silicon Valley in which the Pied Piper team meets a money guy who offers advice about having no revenue.

A three-minute scene from season 2, episode 4 of Silicon Valley in which Jared is excited after the company hires a woman engineer. It satirizes tokenism in tech hiring.

The 1982 novelty song "Valley Girl" by Moon Unit Zappa with Frank Zappa, a new wave track that became a cult classic. It parodies the speech of Southern California teenagers.

A scene from Silicon Valley season 4 episode 8 featuring Keenan Feldspar's VR product.

A short scene from the film Pirates of Silicon Valley where Steve Jobs confronts Bill Gates after the Macintosh announcement over Windows copying Apple's work, and Gates replies that it doesn't matter.

A short scene from Silicon Valley season 1 episode 5 satirizing scrum and agile meetings. The characters mock how process rituals turn simple things into a job.

A short clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which a focus group savages a product by calling it as bad as Apple Maps. It satirizes tech product launches.

A short clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which Gavin Belson fires the Nucleus team.

Y Combinator partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss how startups shifted from attracting outsiders to status- and money-seeking conformists. They give advice for nonconformist founders.

A one-minute clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which Gavin Belson comments on sycophants. It satirizes executives surrounded by yes-men.

RocketJump Film School argues that we only notice bad CG while great CG is invisible, so CG seems to be everywhere ruining movies when it often is not.

A WIRED Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen, covering its hardware-prototyping culture and shanzhai copycat manufacturing. It looks at how the city's ecosystem evolved and what the rest of the world can learn.

Code Rush is a 2000 PBS documentary following Netscape engineers during the year they open-sourced the browser as Mozilla. It shows the pressure and long hours of work in Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com era.

Dan Robinson, then CTO of Heap, explains how Heap runs its product analytics backend on PostgreSQL and CitusDB. It covers conversion funnels, retention and cohort queries across tens of billions of events and 50 TB of data, plus Postgres and Kafka together and the indexing strategy.

Maciej Ceglowski's talk at Web Directions argues that small teams and lone programmers can build sustainable businesses without chasing Silicon Valley's grow-or-die model. He offers alternative, more achievable definitions of success.

A short romantic comedy by Ted Nelson about the 'microcircuitry of love', with Doug Engelbart as his father and Stewart Brand as the villainous CEO.

Tom Scott explains how decades of deep coal mining sank parts of Germany's Ruhr Valley and changed its drainage. Pumps run by Emschergenossenschaft must now work permanently to keep towns and cities from flooding.

A 13-minute clip from This Week in Startups in which Chamath Palihapitiya describes venture capital as a Ponzi-like scheme driven by fees and inflated valuations among VCs.

Balaji Srinivasan's Startup School 2013 talk on Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit, arguing for building alternatives outside existing institutions. It is the primary source for a much-retold and much-distorted idea.

A CollegeHumor sketch from the Hardly Working series in which a pair of startup founders pitch a website using incomprehensible buzzwords and branding nonsense. It parodies Silicon Valley startup culture.

A short video claiming that the chat app PiperChat violated COPPA, the US children's online privacy law, because it had no parental consent form. It says this led to a very large fine. It appears to be a clip from the TV show Silicon Valley.

A one-minute clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which Gavin Belson describes the supposed persecution of billionaires in modern America by comparing it to the Holocaust. It is a satirical scene about tech-executive self-pity.

Part 3 of WIRED's Future Cities series on Shenzhen. It examines how attitudes toward patents and intellectual property differ from the West, and how shanzhai (copycat) manufacturing created an ecosystem of rapid iteration and distribution.

A two-minute clip from a 1994 interview with Steve Jobs by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. Jobs talks about failure and about how most people never ask for help, recalling that he simply called people to ask.

A short animation from Thames Valley Police that explains sexual consent by comparing it to offering someone a cup of tea.

The official trailer for the documentary General Magic, about the secretive Apple spinoff that tried to build a handheld communicator in 1990 and whose ideas shaped the smartphone era.

A short clip of Michio Kaku arguing that America's weak education system leaves a shortage of high-skilled tech workers, so H-1B visas bring in talent. It is an excerpt of a longer panel.

A 2015 CNBC Mad Money interview in which Jim Cramer gives Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes a platform to answer accusations about her company after critical press coverage. It captures her public persona at the height of the company's hype.

A short excerpt from a 1994 interview of Steve Jobs in which he says everything around us was made up by people no smarter than you, and that you can change and shape the world.