Interview with Ed McManus, Technical Advisor for HBO’s Silicon Valley [audio]
As someone with PhD studies in Information Theory, I always found the whole "compression breakthrough" very far-fetched, I wish they had chosen another technical basis for the show. Never mind that compression of any and all files is impossible (see pigeon hole principle) -- while it could theoretically be done for "normal" files (video etc), it's extremely unlikely that a black-box method such as theirs (as in, they don't have any prior knowledge of the files' structures) would beat out white-box methods (such as video compression) by such a large margin.<p>It's a bit like writing a best selling novel in a language you don't speak: theoretically possible, but just so far from normal reality that it's hard to suspend disbelief.