Twenty people are standing on a retail pavement with cameras around their necks. Behind them, a shopfront. To the right, a landscaped strip and a railing. They arrived because somebody posted a meeting point and a time, they will follow a route somebody else chose, and over the next three hours they will produce several hundred photographs of whatever that route passes. Nobody paid for that. Which is the entire reason photo walks keep getting sponsored.

Near the end of the first season of Silicon Valley, the Pied Piper guys get ready to go to TechCrunch Disrupt, and Monica gives them a heads up that plays as a throwaway line. The tech world is about two percent women, she says. For the next three days it’ll be fifteen. Then the show goes back to jokes about dongles. It’s a five second bit. It also happens to be the most accurate thing anyone on that show ever said about conferences, and not for the reason the writers meant.