This week’s episode of Silicon Valley saw another twist in the saga of Jian-Yang’s ill-fated “SeeFood” app, which originally had been intended as an app to share eight ways to prepare Chinese octopus, but was later frantically adapted in a pitch meeting as “Shazam for food” by Erlich. The only problem of course, was that — after securing $200,000 to adapt SeeFood — Erlich and company actually had to figure out a way to make it work.
And for a moment, it seemed as if Jian-Yang was actually going to pull through, when they tested out his app on a hotdog to find that it could in fact correctly identify a hotdog, but — in an incredible twist — the very small problem being that literally the only thing the app could do was differentiate between a hotdog and “not a hotdog.” This seemed unhelpful until Jian-Yang and the heads of Raviga realized they could use the technology for “penile imagery” detecting, which was unfortunately after Erlich traded his share in the company for a palapa and yellow Corvette, and had his actual “Shazam for food” app idea poached by Big Head’s students.
But while Dinesh was contemplating having to spend the next year of his life sorting through the Internet’s vast and wondrous catalog of dick pics, HBO quietly dropped the real “Not Hotdog” app to iTunes, which you can download here for all of your hotdog identifying needs. Although we didn’t have an actual hotdog to try it out on (The Verge claims it can even identify an image of a hotdog), we can safely say that the app can differentiate between a cat and a hotdog.
But can it tell the difference between a penis and a hotdog? There’s only one way to find out.
