In practice I don't know how big 996 is but a lot of people are putting in a lot of effort and excitement into their current startups. It's not too dissimilar to SF in the social network and early gig economy days, along with all the posturing about working long hours (the motto then was "work hard play hard") even when nobody is actually working the hours they say.

But the energy is a bit infectious. I'm happy to see SF on the rise again.

Far, far bigger than any other US city. Why? IMO with AI it's basically an arms-race mentality and a lot of the startups/labs here are grinding 24/7 to snap up the industries before legacy businesses realize what's happening. It's a lot easier to feel that energy/pressure when everyone around you is doing the same thing, vs in NYC or wherever where everyone is out enjoying their weekends.

It was a ghost town last time I was there about 6 months ago. You could walk down the middle of Market St at 9am on a weekday because its so empty. The only time I ever saw SF as empty was 9/11/01.

Mid-20's tech guys vigorously prompting LLM agents in the race to burn as many tokens as possible during 72-hour work week (9 am-9 pm, 6 days per week) in order to, paradoxically, not need to work anymore once AGI is achieved.

The plus I haven't encountered before, but "996" is a Google away. In short, working 9 AM to 9 PM, six days per week.

Interesting that SoCal becomes an option for these people. What’s the draw with that move?

As someone who lives and works in SF, I think it depends quite a bit on your social scene and neighborhood. Where I'm at it's constantly alive with people in the parks, out for running/biking groups, going to farmer's markets, attending art fairs, bars overflowing, etc. I meet lots of interesting people and enjoy the scene quite a bit, but maybe I run in a younger crowd than your friend who complains about the city.

Not here to change your mind, but I'm "defending" SF because I've never experienced such a difference between the lived experience in a city and the online vitriol you see constantly about it. It's a true "don't believe your lying eyes" situation and it's honestly a bit disorienting.

> abroad, SoCal, or NYC

you forgot about the rest of america.

Tacoma, WA is pretty choice. Got a 3k sqft house in the bougie burbs for $500k in 2020 for sub 3% lmao. imagine not pouncing on that as a seattlite. you probably live in a 1920s trap house for $800k BUT you're technically still "in Seattle" (LOL)

> My hunch is the people are competing for housing are mostly new AI sector transplants...

I've absolutely nothing against transplants [0], but transplants that treat this place as the "mining town" that the major landowners and Supervisors have made it to be definitely suck the life and the weird out of the city.

There may be be a bunch of people driving up rents for the city's criminally-scarce -and frequently substandard- housing, but that doesn't mean that the city's not in deep shit. I roam around the city a whole lot on foot, and I see so, so many shuttered businesses and empty storefronts... even in places that were going gangbusters ten, fifteen years ago. The only places that seem to be doing quite well are the places that serve the poorest in the city -such as much of the Tenderloin-, [1] which are places that these new transplants would probably never, ever set foot in.

[0] I'm sure that you don't, either... not in general, anyway.

[1] I can't explain why these places are still doing great. Perhaps it's because the landowners and business managers understand that there's absolutely no way that they can get anything other than a perfectly normal rate of return from these properties... so the batshit insane stuff we see in the fancier parts of town that keeps commercial spaces in fine locations empty for ten+ years and forces out healthy businesses that have been in their space for decades simply doesn't happen? [2]

[2] For folks who want to retort that I simply don't understand how any of this works: Remember that California has Property Tax Control (by way of the 197X "Proposition 13"), which means that a landowner's property tax increases by a very small percentage of its originally assessed value each year, rather than what would be that property's current assessed value. What this means is that as long as a property does not change hands, the property tax paid by that landowner pretty much never increases... and there are ways to redirect the profits from and effective control of that property to a new human or corporate entity while ensuring that that property fails to legally change hands.

I live in Boston and software is dead here. It’s a biotech city but we used to be a player in software. AI missed us, remote work hollowed it out. I would love some AI dollars flowing here but it’s pretty sad. My hope is some defense tech drone stuff blows up but your problems would be welcome on the east coast!