Tag: san francisco

Categories
AI Technology

The Bathwater Problem

Gary Kamiya was writing about the Tenderloin when he said it, but the line has been following me around: “The problem is that by saving the baby, you also save the bathwater.”

The pattern is remarkably consistent across every major information technology. Each one arrives promising to liberate the deserving — the faithful, the learned, the civic-minded — and each one immediately, inevitably, arms everyone else too. Gutenberg’s press was understood by its champions as a device for spreading the true Word; within decades it was the primary infrastructure for Protestant schism, Catholic counter-propaganda, astrological almanacs, and pornography. The reformers got their Bible. They also got their pamphlet wars.

The telegraph was greeted as a force for peace — shared information would make war irrational, commerce would bind nations. It also became the nervous system of commodity speculation, financial manipulation, and the first truly industrial-scale news hoaxes. The telephone: connection and the crank call, the crisis line and the threatening voice in the dark. Radio: FDR’s fireside chats and Father Coughlin. Television: Murrow taking down McCarthy, and also fifty years of manufactured consent. The internet: the largest library ever assembled and the largest sewer.

The pattern isn’t coincidental. It’s structural. Each technology expands what’s possible for human expression and coordination — and human expression and coordination contain both the noblest and the worst of us in roughly fixed proportion. The tool doesn’t change the ratio. It scales both sides of it.

What’s interesting historically is how each generation believes their technology will be different — that this time the architecture can be designed to select for the good. The internet era produced the most elaborate version of this belief: algorithmic curation would surface truth, network effects would reward quality, the wisdom of crowds would outcompete misinformation. Instead it turned out that engagement was the attractor, and outrage was the highest-engagement content. The bath got hotter.

The AI moment is the same belief system, restated with more technical sophistication. But the Kamiya line stands. You are saving a baby, and you are saving bathwater, and no one has yet designed a tub that can tell the difference.

The question isn’t whether the bathwater comes with the baby. It always does. The question is whether you turn on the tap.

Categories
AI New York City San Francisco/California Work

The Paradox of the Pulse

The skyline has always been a silhouette of our collective ambition. For a century, the steel and glass towers of our major cities functioned as the secular cathedrals of the modern age. But as Andrew Yang observes in his reflection on the shifting urban landscape, the pews are emptying. The “doom loop”—a self-reinforcing cycle of vacant offices, declining tax revenue, and diminishing services—is a mathematical ghost haunting our city planners.

Yet, if you walk the streets of Manhattan today, the sidewalks are often busier than ever. In San Francisco, the “Cerebral Valley” AI boom is sparking a gold rush of intellect that rivals the original tech explosion. We are witnessing a strange paradox: the Death of the Office occurring simultaneously with a Rebirth of the Urban Pulse.

The crisis Yang describes is real, but it may be a crisis of form rather than function. We tolerated the friction of urban life for the sake of career “flow.” Now that the flow is digital, the city is being forced to justify its existence through something more primal: energy.

“We are looking at a fundamental restructuring of the American city. The office was the sun around which everything else revolved. Now, that sun is dimming.”

The AI boom isn’t happening over Zoom; it’s happening in “hacker houses” and shared spaces where the speed of a conversation over coffee outpaces a fiber-optic connection. This suggests that the “doom loop” might only apply to the traditional, sterile corporate cubicle. The city is shedding its skin. It is moving away from being a place where we must be, toward a place where we want to be.

Yang’s warning serves as a necessary guardrail. We cannot ignore the fiscal cliff of empty high-rises. However, the vibrancy of NYC and the reinvigoration of SF suggest that the city isn’t dying—it’s just no longer a captive audience. We are standing in the ruins of an old habit, watching a new, more intentional way of living together take root in the cracks.

Five Questions to Ponder

  • The Pull of Proximity: If we no longer have to be in the city for a paycheck, what is the specific “energy” that keeps you coming back to the sidewalk?
  • The AI Renaissance: Is the AI boom in SF proof that high-innovation industries require physical density, or is it just the last gasp of the old model?
  • Form vs. Function: If a skyscraper can no longer be an office, what is the most radical thing it could become to serve a “busy” city?
  • The Captive Audience: For decades, cities were built for people who had to be there. How does a city change when it has to “woo” its citizens every single day?
  • Digital Nomads vs. Urban Anchors: Are we moving toward a world of “temporary density,” where cities are vibrant hubs for projects but no longer long-term homes?
Categories
AI Living Productivity

The Reality Gap

“I follow AI adoption pretty closely, and I have never seen such a yawning inside/outside gap. People in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives… people elsewhere are still trying to get approval to use Copilot in Teams.” — Kevin Roose

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes from scrolling through the “Inside” of the AI bubble while the rest of the world simply goes to work. It is the dizziness of watching a new species of behavior emerge—”wireheading” and “claudeswarms”—while the vast majority of the economy is still asking for permission to use a spellchecker.

The future isn’t just unevenly distributed; it is becoming mutually unintelligible.

Roose notes a “yawning inside/outside gap” that feels distinct from previous tech cycles. In one reality—geographically centered in San Francisco and digitally centered in specific discords—people are operating with a level of agency only sci-fi writers dared to imagine. They are deploying multi-agent swarms to manage their lives and consulting large language models for existential guidance.

In the other reality—the one inhabited by the vast majority of the global workforce—people are still waiting for an IT ticket to clear so they can use a basic productivity assistant.

It is tempting to look at this divide solely through the lens of technical access, but Roose hits on a deeper truth: “there seems to be a cultural takeoff happening in addition to the technical one.”

This is the friction of our current moment. It is not just that the tools are different; the permissions we give ourselves to use them are different. The “Inside” is operating with a mindset of radical experimentation and integration. The “Outside” is operating within legacy frameworks of risk mitigation and bureaucratic approval.

The danger of this gap isn’t just economic inequality, though that is a guaranteed downstream effect. The immediate danger is a loss of shared context. When the creators of technology live in a reality where “claudeswarms” run the day, they risk losing the ability to design for, or even empathize with, a world that is still fighting for permission to use the tools at all.

We are living in the same year, but we are no longer inhabiting the same time. The challenge for those of us on the “Inside” is to resist the intoxication of the bubble long enough to build bridges, rather than just building faster escape pods.

Meanwhile, in China (from the Financial Times)…

“I’ve witnessed first hand how China has grown from having zero AI talent 20 years ago to mass producing them,” he said. “Some of our most cutting-edge work is now done by fresh graduates. The real geniuses to change the world soon could well be among them.”

Categories
Living San Francisco/California Weather

Fall has arrived…

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we often have our best weather in the fall – September and October in particular. That’s after the summer fog is mostly gone and temperatures warm up – especially if there’s a high pressure area inland that causes warm offshore winds that push higher temperatures into the Bay.

The downside is those winds and higher temperatures are also what bring with them the greatly elevated risks of wildfires – with most of the worst files in California occuring in these fall months.

This year it feels like we may escape some of those wildfire risks following the first real rainfall of the season which arrived on Tuesday with an offshore low pressure system gradually moving down the coast from Oregon to Southern California. As it moved, it picked up moisture from the Pacific Ocean and dumped it onshore – in particular, Southern California seemed to get the worst of it. With the rain came much colder temperatures – the first time I’ve needed to wear my heavier coat with a hood this fall.

With that weather system now moving across the rest of the U.S., we’re looking at a week or ten days of nicer fall weather with daytime temperatures mostly in the 70’s and overnight lows in the low 50’s – just about ideal for this time or year.

Let’s hope this week’s rain put an end to the risk of wildfires this year – but it may be too early to count on the just yet.

Categories
Aviation Living

Pan Am Flight 843

Yesterday I came across a random tweet on X about an incident involving a Pan American Boeing 707 departing from San Francisco International Airport back in 1965.

The incident is seared into my foggy memory banks because the incident occurred one afternoon when I was walking home from high school (we lived in Daly City, California at the time).

I vividly remember seeing that 707 with its wing in flames juxtaposed against the hillside of San Bruno Mountain. It was trailing black smoke and didn’t seem like it was going to make it. I stood there an just stared, feeling totally helpless as there obviously wasn’t anything I could do to help.

I watched as it crossed over and out of my view. I didn’t know what to expect but fortunately there wasn’t any signs of a crash, no column of black smoke coming over the horizon etc.

As the Wikipedia entry describes, the pilots were able to turn the 707 out over the Pacific Ocean, across the Golden Gate and eventually landed at Travis Air Force Base. Fortunately the fire on the wing was extinguished and the landing was without incident.

Funny how these memories come back to you – triggered by serendipity having randomly seen that tweet about this incident which happened sixty years this month!

Categories
Books San Francisco/California

Remembering Stacey’s – San Francisco’s Downtown Bookstore

During my college years and after, I worked in the downtown San Francisco financial district. It was a busy place with lots of folks commuting into town.

One of my favorite places during those years (1970-1974) was Stacey’s Bookstore on Market Street. It was such a wonderful bookstore – deep in technical books, an upstairs and a downstairs area, and a great staff who was welcoming and helpful.

Unfortunately, Stacey’s eventually closed – wrapping things up in 2009. Stacey’s was independent, not part of any of the larger bookstore chains. It became one of many independent bookstores that closed during that era – a combination of the effects of Amazon and the larger chains with their bookstores located in suburban shopping malls. It seems like we may be through that “bookstore winter” as we’ve got a couple of thriving local independent bookstores and there seem to me many more now around the country.

I’m not sure what brought Stacey’s into my mind this morning – one of those fleeting thoughts that managed to stick. But those are good memories – a place where I enjoyed endless browsing and made many purchases of business and technical/computer-related books over the years.

Here’s a good article on the final chapter for Stacey’s.

Categories
Friends iPhone 15 Pro Max Living San Francisco/California

Catching Up with Friends in Sausalito

San Francisco skyline from Sausalito

Yesterday we drove to Sausalito to have lunch with good friends visiting from Sydney Australia. We met at The Spinnaker for lunch and had a delightful time catching up. It’s always fun to catch up with friends and hear what’s been happening in their lives.

Among the many things we talked about was the difference between how real estate sales happen in Sydney versus in the U.S. It turns out that broker commissions are substantially less there than they are here. There’s been recent litigation in this country that might affect the relatively high commission rates we pay when buying or selling a home. It will take some time for the effects of recent settlements to work their way through the system. But it was interesting to hear how a viable real estate market can function with a different and substantially lower commission burden paid by buyers and sellers.

The Spinnaker sits out on a piece of land that provides a spectacular view across the Bay from Sausalito to the San Francisco skyline. The image above was taken with my iPhone 15 Pro Max using the 5X telephoto in Live View and then smoothed with the Long Exposure adjustment. The toning is from the Silvertone effect in the Photos app.

Categories
Photography San Francisco/California

The Bittersweet Beauty of “Turning the Page” at Pier 24

My good friend Doug and I got together yesterday to visit the latest photography exhibition – “Turning the Page” – at the wonderful Pier 24 on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, a venue that’s an old friend of ours.

From the exhibition description: “Turning the Page…celebrates the photobook, a medium that has undergone its own renaissance parallel to our years in operation. Each of the galleries presents works from a distinct photobook, whether an iconic volume or a recent monograph. The content, sequence, and design of each selected book guided our approach to that particular installation, aiming for a thoughtful translation of its overall tone and intent.”

In this exhibition, the works of several photographers I know are combined with many works from photographers I haven’t known, making for a very varied but interesting exhibition. One, in particular, I enjoyed was Donavon Smallwood.

As has happened each time we’ve visited exhibitions at this venue, we came away with our spirits lifted and new insights gained from studying these photographs. The idea of featuring a photobook in each of the galleries was unique and delightful. (Note: If you want to view this exhibition, you need to make a reservation on the Pier 24 website. One of the wonderful things about Pier 24 is how they use the requirement for advance reservations to limit the number of visitors in the museum at any time – making for a very nice, unhurried browsing experience! Just be sure to book well in advance of when you want to attend – and the museum is only open Monday-Friday so keep that in mind as well!)

The current exhibition – “Turning the Page” – runs through January 2024. Unfortunately, it will be the last exhibition in this wonderful space for photography, which opened in 2010. As discussed in this news release from January 2023, The Pilara Foundation, the sponsor of Pier 24, has been unable to successfully negotiate a lease extension with the San Francisco Port Commission after trying to do so for five years. Sadly, the Commission is demanding a tripling of the current rent charged to the Foundation for the space at Pier 24. As a result, the Foundation has decided to close the museum when its lease expires in July 2025.

This is such a sad event for photography aficionados in the San Francisco Bay Area. There is simply no other venue that has done such a superb job displaying photography exhibitions as Pier 24. I’m very disappointed in the actions of the Port Commission, which are forcing the closing of this exceptional museum.

Categories
Cars Living San Francisco/California

Riding Solo: My Driverless Waymo Experience in San Francisco

I had the chance to experience the future of transportation yesterday by taking my first ride in a Waymo autonomous vehicle from Tadich Grill to the Caltrain station in San Francisco. Let me tell you, it was a pretty mind-blowing experience!

After ordering the ride through the Waymo app, it took about 7 minutes for the sleek, electric Jaguar to pull up across the street. With no designated pickup zone, the car had to park a little distance away. As I approached, the doors remained locked until I used the app to unlock them remotely. Once inside the luxurious cabin, buckling up and tapping the “Start Ride” button on the center console was all it took to embark on this journey into the future.

As we glided through the city streets, the car’s displays provided a real-time view of our route and surroundings, not unlike the experience in a Tesla. But what really struck me were the reactions from pedestrians and other drivers. At every stoplight, people would do a double-take, point, and wave enthusiastically at the backseat occupant (me!), clearly amazed to see a car navigating entirely on its own.

The whole experience felt seamless, almost eerily so. The music playing in the car seems purposely designed to be very soothing too. You can select your own music if you prefer but I was enjoying the peacefulness of Waymo’s default selections.

The autonomous system handled every turn, stop, and merge with a level of precision that even the most skilled human driver would struggle to match. And the best part? No awkward small talk or dealing with a distracted Uber driver! Oh, one other benefit – no tipping the driver!

Waymo’s autonomous ride service in San Francisco is truly a glimpse into the future of mobility. If this is just the beginning, I can’t wait to see what other technological marvels await us down the road.

Categories
iPhone Photography Street Photography

Capturing the Art in Everyday Scenes

Street photography captures candid, unposed shots of people in public places. Unlike posed portraiture, street photography relies on spontaneity, serendipity, and impulse. The street photographer must have a quick eye to capture fleeting moments. As such, street photography is fundamentally an art of observation.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is often considered the father of modern street photography. His concept of the “decisive moment” emphasizes the photographer capturing the perfect instant within a scene. Famous examples like Behind the Gare St. Lazare show his knack for capturing those transient moments brimming with visual energy. His street photographs play with geometry, reflection, and movement in a lyrical way.

Helen Levitt was a pioneer of street photography in New York starting in the 1930s. She captured the daily life, humor, and grit of the city’s neighborhoods. Levitt often photographed children at play. Her work poetically captures the transitory joys within urban life. She had a gift for uncovering whimsy amid the mundane.

In the 1960s, Robert Frank’s seminal book The Americans cemented street photography as an art form. His work stripped away romantic notions of America through raw, gritty, ironic photographs of real life. Frank traveled across the country and captured strangers, cities, cars, and open roads with an unwavering eye. His photographs reveal underlying emotions through powerful composition.

The work of these photographers matters because they transformed street photography into an artistic medium of observation, social commentary, and subjective expression. Their ability to capture visually arresting moments imparting deeper meaning put street photography on the artistic map.

Importantly, street photography is fundamentally about the eye of the photographer, not the camera itself. Many iconic street photographs were shot on nothing more than compact cameras or even modern smartphone cameras. The key is the photographer’s ability to see and capture meaningful moments in public settings. A great street photograph has more to do with vision and timing than expensive equipment.

Several years ago, I’d go out on the streets of San Francisco with a camera bag filled with a fewo Fujifilm cameras. I enjoyed shooting with those cameras – but, frankly, the gear became a hassle – one more thing to worry about. Increasingly, I found myself just pulling my iPhone out of my shirt pocket and capturing the moment with my iPhone camera. Perfectly adequate for almost any kind of street photography. In fact, shooting bursts is so easy with an iPhone that I might do that and then select one image out of many that I shot in a second or two of shutter time.

One other advantage of street photography compared to, let’s just say, landscape photography, is that you’re usually just steps away from a spot where you can take a break, sit down, have a cup of coffee or lunch, etc. before getting back out on the streets. It’s a much better pursuit for older folks like me, rather than hiking the hills out in some national park somewhere to capture one of the iconic vistas! I’ve attended many photo workshops over the years, and I’ve come to smile at how there’d often be a line of us workshop participants with our cameras on our tripods, shooting essentially the same scene! So, so different from street photography. Both certainly have their place, but I’ve outgrown my early interest in landscape photography and now enjoy street photography much more—at least when we’re not in a pandemic and people are actually out on the streets!