The way I've understood it is Shannon showed that it's possible to reliably send a signal even if you know the signal will get corrupted before arriving at the other end.

Shannon's theory is foundational to modern communication systems. You can expect to have WiFi remain functional even as other devices use the same medium. Up to a point, the Shannon limit in other words.

I've added an explanation to the toptext which is taken from a comment by DonHopkins, who recorded (but did not submit) the video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622607.

Hopefully Don won't mind!

My favorite part was how Alan's exhuberant "I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing" got distorted by YouTube's speech to text transcription replacing "fuck" with "[__]", adding another layer of censorship noise and interpretation to the mix.

And how the conference's real time speech to text transcription honored Alan's "fuck", but would occasionally lapse into Danish, and say things like "We will eat your hands".

dang> Hopefully Don won't mind!

Of course not, and I hope Alan won't either, since in the recording he laughed and said "Yeah, this will be this will be fun."