SF News Two Stalled Waymos Gummed Up Lurie’s Chinatown Inauguration Party, But Cops Just Jumped In Them and Drove Away Police can apparently now hop into stalled, confused Waymo robotaxis and drive them away manually, and this reportedly happened twice Wednesday night at Mayor Daniel Lurie’s inauguration party.
SF News Walgreens Closing 12 SF Stores In Late February, Here’s a Map Showing Which Ones are Closing Those 1,200 nationwide Walgreens closures are starting to kick in, and 12 Walgreens stores in SF will close in late February, including the one where Banko Brown was shot. The company blames high rent, but legal settlements probably have a hand in this too.
SF News Massive Office and Housing Development Proposed for What Is Now Just a Bunch of SF Caltrain Tracks The latest twist in the ambitious plans to extend Caltrain to the Salesforce Transit Center is a developer hoping to send Caltrain tracks underground, and cover that land with new towers, one of which would be taller than the Transamerica Pyramid.
Business & Tech Waymo Passenger Says He Was Late to the Airport Because Robocar Kept Doing Circles In a Parking Lot This week in robocar snafus: A Waymo in Phoenix went a little haywire recently, and its passenger says he was late getting to a flight because the car refused to stop circling the same parking lot.
Business & Tech Saying Its Content Moderation Has 'Gone Too Far,' Meta Now Set to Become Hotbed of Transphobia and Conspiracies In a shift akin to what Elon Musk has done with the platform we still call Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads will soon be more of a free-for-all when it comes to misinformation, with "community notes" inserted when facts are questioned.
Business & Tech Meta Continues Its Trump Turn, Adds UFC President Dana White to Its Board of Directors Facebook and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg continues his mixed martial arts fascination, and his increasing kowtowing to Donald Trump, with the curious addition of UFC president Dana White to Meta’s expanding board of directors.
Business & Tech Turns Out Blind People Really Love Taking Trips in Waymo’s Self-Driving Robotaxis Here’s one demographic that does not loathe the robot cars driving around San Francisco, as blind people have rave reviews for Waymo’s dedicated features to accommodate people with visual impairments.
Business & Tech SF’s First On-Street, Curbside Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Are Coming to Duboce Triangle and Dogpatch People who don’t have garages can have a hell of a time finding a place to charge their electric vehicle, but hundreds of new SF curbside charging stations are in the works, and the first few will be in Dogpatch and Duboce Triangle.
Business & Tech Office Tower at Sixth and Market Getting Acquired By Tech Group for 'Post-AI Singularity' Vertical Village Well, this sure sounds like a positive, if kooky, sign for mid-Market as a Burning Man-esque tech collective is close to buying the 16-story building at the corner of Sixth Street that was once home to the Burning Man organization.
Business & Tech Now the Proper Hotel on Mid-Market Appears to Be In Financial Distress One of two boutique, luxury hotels that were meant to be part of a renaissance on mid-Market Street — which never really materialized — the Proper Hotel at Seventh and Market, now looks like it might fall into the hands of its lender.
Business & Tech Parents of OpenAI Whistleblower Don't Believe He Died By Suicide, Order Second Autopsy There is a bit more intrigue around the tragic death late last month of former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji, who was found dead in his Lower Haight apartment of an apparent suicide.
Business & Tech As Bluesky Blows Up, So Do the Bots With rapid growth, and without a robust content moderation system, Bluesky is already entering an era of bots and misinformation.
Business & Tech Waymo Takes Another Step Toward Entering Airport Taxi Market Waymo could have one of its biggest fights to date on its hands as it pushes toward providing rides between San Francisco and SFO — but a permit process is underway to allow the company to begin mapping the airport for that purpose.
SF News Striking Hotel Workers Reach Tentative Deal With Marriott Some of that hootin' and hollering and banging will quiet down near Union Square as some 1,500 striking hotel workers have reached a tentative deal with Marriott — a contract deal that Marriott did on its own, without Hyatt or Hilton.
Business & Tech San Francisco's Sky-High Office Vacancy Rate Declines Slightly, In Sign of Possible Turnaround The improvement was ever so slight, but a key indicator of the health of the office leasing market in San Francisco showed another glimmer of hope that the bottom has been reached and leases continue to tick up.
Business & Tech OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead In His SF Apartment Three months after publicly accusing his former employer, OpenAI, of infringing on copyrights when training its AI chatbot, 26-year-old Suchir Balaji was found dead in his Lower Haight apartment.
Business & Tech OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Sucks Up to Trump With $1 Million Inauguration Donation It’s a little awkward for incoming mayor Daniel Lurie that his top transition adviser is now a Donald Trump donor, as AI titan Sam Altman has donated $1 million to the Donald Trump inauguration, obviously hoping to curry favor.
Business & Tech No Surprise Here: Bay Area Has Highest Concentration of Million-Dollar Jobs of Any US Metro Area The good news is that the Bay Area has the highest concentration of high-earning people of any United States metropolitan region. The bad news is that this is partly the case because rich people have priced so many lower-income people out of the city proper.
Business & Tech Yes, Instagram Is Down, and So Are Other Meta Apps The Luigi Mangione memes have officially broken the internet. Meta was experiencing some sort of major "disruptions" Wednesday morning, which were causing outages on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and Messenger.
Business & Tech SF Revokes Approval for $700-a-Month Sleeping Pod Complex, Ironically, Because It Doesn’t Have Affordable Housing That embattled $700-a-month sleeping pod complex has lost its City Hall approval, because the SF Planning Department says it doesn't comply with the city’s affordable housing rules, among other permit violations.
Business & Tech No More TikTok? Appeals Court Upholds Law That Could Boot TikTok Out of U.S. Barring Supreme Court intervention in the next five weeks or so, TikTok may have to shut down its US operations, something that a legion of influencers making incomes from the platform are not happy about.
Business & Tech Google DeepMind Says They Have an AI Weather Model That Outperforms All Existing Models at 15-Day Forecasts Reliably predicting the weather more than a week out has been something of a Holy Grail in the meteorology industry for half a century.
Business & Tech Tesla Temporarily Halts Cybertruck Production, Amidst Rumors of Slumping Demand Assembly line workers at a Tesla production plant that makes Cybertrucks were told to take the next three days off, without explanation, and the Tesla rumor mill says it may be because of declining sales.
Business & Tech Viral 84-Hour Workweek Guy Calls Himself 'San Franciscan,' Has Lived Here a Year and a Half You may have seen a story about a San Francisco AI startup founder who posted to X — where else? — about how he tells prospective hires that his company expects "no work-life-balance" and 84-hour workweeks, in order to weed out the less motivated.
SF News Lake Tahoe Is Getting An Electric ‘Hydrofoil’ To Speed You Across the Lake In 30 Minutes Time The first ever electric hydrofoil watercraft in the US is coming to Lake Tahoe, promising to be the fastest craft on the water with "hydrofoil wings” that appear to make it fly.
