It did seem like there were too many stories crammed into the season. I would like to have seen more about Laurie’s new VC firm, or Kenan Feldspar’s douchebaggery, or Big Head’s teaching job.
In the end, the only winner in the Valley is Jian Yang.
Feldspar is a fun character. I hope they expand his role to fill the gaping void left by Bachman’s exit.
It is a well-defined character, what with the ‘things always work out for me’ theme. Keeping that going would require some fancy plotting, though.
They never did wink at the actor’s past (seeing dead people and all), did they? If not that showed admirable restraint.
Wow, I hadn’t realized he was played by Haley Joel Osment. That makes me feel old…
Yeah, he has changed (as have we all). 
You just blew my mind
It is weird. They are redoing Richard’s character as if they wanted to humiliate him before dumping him from the show. But they are dumping Erlich who they treated fairly well up to the opium den thing.
Another trait: he keeps burbling out random offensive things to people.
A “blind item” I saw before the announcement of T.J. going away indicated that someone new was going to buy a certain important house.
So I was surprised that the season ended without Gavin or someone buying the house from Erlich. It’ll be hard to make such an on-screen transition happen next season.
I didn’t realize until this thread that Erlich was leaving the show. In hindsight I don’t think they handled his leaving very well.
I’m starting over from Season 1 and I’m already seeing signs of Richard having his head too far up his ass. First, there’s his pedantry—he can barely control his urge to correct people. He even did it in a whoever/whomever situation in which Richard’s pedantry was totally wrong for a pedant.
Then, he completely lost his nerve over having the Carver come in to do a job for them, to the point that he let the Carver do too much and lose control.
Then, at TechCrunch Disrupt, he completely lost his focus and became obsessed with the idea that some girl thought he was obsessed with her.
Yes, in the first episode, Erlich told Richard that he needed to be an asshole, but the issue isn’t that Richard is an asshole. It’s that he’s completely without self control and obsessive, and not in a good way. When Dinesh or Gilfoyle act stupid over something, it’s kind of endearing. But when Richard gets stupid, he’s repulsive.
My understanding was they offered him a reduced role and he said no so they didn’t plan for him to be gone permanently
The issue, of course, is that a truly decentralized Internet has no possible revenue stream for them.
They own the software and the patents that it needs. That’s a big revenue stream.
Their insurance company customer bought into a distributed file system, and not just a decentralized Internet. The storage services definitely can be monetized. (I’ve often thought that a distributed file system was a valid business model; many of us have gigabytes or terabytes free on our devices, and might be willing to give up some of that in exchange for knowing that our files are securely stored on multiple other systems.)
It sounds about as good a money-making scheme as owning the patents on Bitcoin or Onion routing - the people who are attracted to the technology are opposed to paying for anything and the existing interests will fight it like rabid wolverines.
Are you saying that the algorithims that run bitcoin are worthless to anyone but non-paying criminals?
I agree with those that say that Richard being an ass is deliberate on the part of the show. The entire Pied Piper team are a bunch of assholes (with the exception of Jared). Gilfoyle and Dinesh are just terrible people. On some level this is akin to a tech version of Seinfeld - you root for them even while they are being the most terrible people you’ve ever seen.
I’m saying that the person who invented Bitcoin is apparently a pseudonym and as far as I know has not been able to monitize it, and according to Wikipedia has not even spent any of the Bitcoin he mined. Richard Hendrix’s totally decentralized Internet doesn’t have Bitcoin’s economic factor either.
I’ll toss the ball back in your court; how would you make money - Hooli size money - from a totally decentralized Internet? How do you keep it from becoming Dark Web 2.0?
Well monetizing the current internet is the question of our time that not every sector has solved. So I doubt little old me is going to come up with a plan. Checking now I see that bitcoin uses public domain algorithms that were developed by NSA and it’s decentralized nature means no one is going to vigorously defend copyrights regardless.
So the fridge miracle is a little silly but I didn’t mind too much. Better than starting the next season with the guys having to build from nothing again. It’s kind of in keeping with the running theme of the show. Pied piper started as a music app that really was a compression algorithm. “See Food” becomes a dick detector.
Surely not more terrible than Russ Hanneman?
The other characters might be bad people but they’re entertaining. Richard’s obsessiveness and poor impulse control makes him seem mentally ill. The other characters seem to be able to make decisions that benefit their self-interest. Richard loses his mind and sabotages himself repeatedly for no reason. He’s not as vulgar as Russ Hanneman but he is similarly a mental case. He really is unfit to be a CEO.