Everyone benefits from this type of transparency.

Apple has not fared as well with transparency lately.

Getting Linux to run on a toaster is of questionable value when a Raspberry PI is so inexpensive, but people still want to do it.

It's called a hobby.

I know playing and hacking tech for fun is a thing. But really why even bother trying this? it isn't like the motherboard is the most expensive component when doing an upgrade. Surely their are better projects to waste ones time on?

Show me the receipts,......

No really though, I've seen I think now, at least 3 articles in the past 6 months, discussing limited running of genuinely autonomous vehicles on the roads.

Note the headline: "Uber Self-Driving Trucks Are *Now* Moving" ,....

So for all these articles I've not seen a single photo or video of an actual self driving vehicle operating on it's own without being either PR video or testing video.

Is this /actually/ occurring or just claimed to be? I find the tech exciting and interesting. Scary for the world for certain but it is interesting and it's very very obviously not going away. So, more pics, more video, more evidence or, less talking.

Another, possibly bigger, issue is that you've now given geek squad members incentive to plant evidence in exchange for cash.

How do you prove chain of custody in these cases? How much do you trust that near minimum wage "tech" from best buy who now gets paid every time he "finds" something on a computer?

Yeah, it does happen. It's unpleasant and noisome and it does occur more than it should.

But then the City has become stratified - it's terribly expensive to live there.
Public conveniences like bathrooms are surprisingly few and far between.
For better or for worse, it's got a large homeless population.
And whether or not people like to admit it, that large homeless population is made of humans who need to eat, breathe, and empty themselves just like the rest of us.
But there's really nowhere they can do it.
There aren't public restrooms, in part bc of the hysteria after Sept 11th when the public restrooms in BART and MUNI were shut down, and partially because other bathrooms are shut to them bc some of the homeless use bathrooms to shoot up or whatnot, making them less safe for the rest of the population.
So they poop in the street, and it sucks.

Lest people think this is unique to SF, it's not. It seems to happen in every reasonably warm city in this country, from Savannah GA to a number of Gulf Coast cities to Austin and Dallas and more. And, more and more, it seems to be showing up in the suburbs, as people who have been comfortable up to now lose jobs and become homeless (for whatever reason).

The Valley isn't unique, but because of the scrutiny it receives as an oasis of wealth, it's often a harbinger of what will happen elsewhere in places that don't have the economic power to maintain a small segment of the population while the rest suffers.

And so I kind of have to think that it's not 'The Valley' that's over, it's the economic model that marginalizes people with limited skills while handsomely rewarding people with relatively narrow, specialized skillsets. As much as I love how much freedom and power tech provides, it also accelerates inequality (at least, in its current form) and ensures that non-STEM students are going to scrape by for a living....and not every kid is a STEM learner.
IMHO, we as a nation need to start thinking about how we create opportunities and economic security for people who are not going to be university material - that will stem the tide, maybe, if we start realizing that we all need the people who do the thankless jobs. It's gonna be a long, long time until robots can take over, and I'd assume avoid pushing people to the brink of homelessness and beyond just because their job pays so little they can't live within an economically viable distance of their job.

41% of their drivers make less than min wage and 4% make nothing.

So even if you game the numbers (by changing the survey questions, which is how Uber got those numbers) you still get a shit sandwich...

Not will be, is.
People are already shooting at the tech buses...
Even insufferable engineers don't deserve that.

I've seen this attitude cripple and break more startups than I care to count. Its great to innovate, but first do the basics correctly and without those basics your innovation means shit. Example, spending all your time experimenting with Machine Learning while your site has > 4 sec latency costing the company over a billion dollars a year in revenue. And this isn't the unique weird case, this is the typical case. You are making the classic mistake of thinking you can learn from other's success. That's proof by induction (which isn't valid) and very prone to missing the reasons for success. Learning happens best after failure, not success and perhaps that's your real problem, you don't learn from your failures very well and repeat them often which is something SV has done quite a bit.

My parents grow them in Michigan too, after converting the deck into a large sun room / green house (I call it The Conservatory). The lemons are small and not very abundant. I probably throw out a bushel of oranges a year at my California home because they start to pile up on my yard waste, and they don't seem to compost that well. It's amazing how many things I can grow here in Silicon Valley, but not so amazing when I realized that this land used to be cherry, peach, plum, apricot and orange groves some 70 years ago.

There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to either location. And I love winter sports, but I don't like driving to work in bad weather. I'd like to add that fishing is far superior in Michigan than it is in California in terms of accessibility and fun (subjective, I know). But you can eat the fish in California more readily, especially if deep sea fishing, as there is less environmental contamination in California's lakes and coasts than Michigan (with obvious exceptions like Santa Clara's Almaden Lake and other lakes part of the old mercury mining industry).

It's a lot easier to get a house on a large lot and commute a reasonable distance in Michigan than it is in California. But the large cities in California all seem to have better infrastructure than anything I experienced in Michigan (but not as good as NYC). There are cheaper places to live in California than in the big coastal cities, but it's harder to get a tech job if you're in some remote town. (the towns are often lovely though. on my list of places I'd like to retire would be in a little mountain town in the Sierras)

Are you on crack? There's a huge number of top tech companies based in SF. Uber, Twitter, Square, Dolby. Google, Yahoo, and Cisco have big offices there. It's not as big as Palo Alto (and doesn't have have the space for the huge office complexes Google and so forth have) but it's definitely one of the top tech cities in the Bay.

What made silicon valley is the 3 large and very many small universities producing a large "high-tech" labor force ready to be exploited....er...disrupt industry at a particular time in history where we were going though an economic revolution, and in a location where people wanted to live, with extremely good infrastructure already in place, where there were already several world-class research operations running (ie. Xerox PARC and DoD/NASA $$).

So you can't just say "but the land's cheap!" or "we've got a liberal enclave" or "taxes are low!" and create a new Silicon Valley.

You need a large stream of new graduates (more than one major university can produce). You need the place to be desirable to move to before your "tech center" is up and running (or the executives aren't going to even fly there to take a look). You need good infrastructure already in place (they're not willing to wait a few years for it to be built). You need some major R&D dollars already in place for people to meet and start inventing stuff (doesn't happen in today's corporate governance).

And even then, you aren't at the right moment in history. We aren't in 1960, about to totally reinvent how every first-world worker does their job (even ditch digging involves computers now).

There isn't going to be another Silicon Valley. Instead, we'll invent some other radical change to humanity's existence, and that will produce another "hotbed" with the right mix of inputs.

So we need to wait until discrimination gets worse before we do anything about it? Isn't that like watching a fire burn until half the house is gone before trying to stop it?

Stop surrounding yourself with people just like yourself - if you want diversity, seek it out. But don't hang out in a tech-heavy bar sipping $18 hand crafted artisanal cocktails and bemoan the lack of diversity there. There are still a *lot* of people in SF and the Bay Area that don't work in tech.

Incompetent city and state government is what prevents any significant tech investment in Michigan or Wayne County. A large portion of the technology and industry is attached to the auto industry, and most of the nice things we have in our schools are because Ford or GM donated. Betsy DeVos is from my part of Michigan. She works hard to ruin public schools for the middle and working class. Not that they were so great before she got involved.

Operating a business in Michigan is about making sure every little pissant gets their cut. And while your business taxes will be lower, that most of the infrastructure is missing or broken means you'll end up having to spend money to work around it. In rich parts of California like SF Bay or LA you can find real infrastructure for businesses, shipping, schools, and commuting. (even if just highways that are in perpetual gridlock, it's still better than what I used to do in Michigan)

Also I think most people would rather live where you can grow orange and lemon trees in your yard rather than where you have to shovel snow. (although if I didn't have to work for a living I would love to live on the lakeshore in West Michigan)

The word or idea itself (conservative) is not the ideal way to run a small tech start-up for example. Being conservative implies that you don't like taking risks

That is totally wrong. It means conserving energy for things that are important. So risk taking is fine, but you can be prepared for failure or alternative paths before you take risks, not just jump in blindly.

It can also mean taking BIGGER risks, just fewer of them. Basically you cannot ascribe risk taking with a political bent, as people of all persuasions are happy to take risks, they just have different approaches or conditions.

I'm surprised that no one has tried to turn Detroit into the next SV. You've got a decent sized city that's on the rebound (although it still needs A LOT of work), a large and affluent suburban ring around the city, and tons of well educated people already in tech with the car industry. Not to mention you have the uber liberal Ann Arbor and U of M a half hour away. The only major thing holding Detroit back is the lack of good infrastructure, but that could be remedied if someone was willing to pay for it. Land is beyond cheap in Detroit, in fact a savvy tech investor could probably buy what's leftover from Dan Gilbert's shopping spree and split the city with him. True the weather isn't the best here (although it's not the worst) but is is right next to Canada and all they have to offer. Maybe it's just easier to move into a sparsely populated area and build it up rather than tear down and rebuild?

Silicon Valley has worked really hard to bring crime to the Internet.

Now the Internet is full, and the crime has, naturally, spilled over into the streets.

Tech companies already have private bus lines, so their employees don't need cars anyway.

All they need to do is "Mad Max" armorize their buses, and then they will be all set to defend against Master Car Burglar Wez, and his pals.

My family has been in San Jose over 100 years. We lived through many tech and population booms, but they were always manageable. Traffic wasn't too bad in the 70's and 80's. Schools were pretty good, housing was affordable, and there was enough space to feel like you could escape the bay area.

90's came, and that's when a huge influx of people started moving in. Every square inch of buildable land was built out. None of it had any of the charm, uniqueness or craftsmanship of the previous architecture. Slowly we started seeing OSB and stucco square boxes everywhere. A lot of places started doing "mixed use" putting retail on the bottom and residential on top. Our politicians, fueled by special interests began dismantling laws meant to keep the growth in check. As more people came in, the freeways congested. Not just Monday through Friday, but every day of the week. We had a small stall during 9/11 as the economic downturn caused a lot of people to lose their jobs, but through the 2000's and into the 2010's the growth was fast and steady.

Today it's very very hard living here. State income tax is sky high. Property taxes, home prices, hell even rentals are so high that it causes everything else to be expensive. Food, gas, clothes, cars, everything is $0.50 higher than it would be in any neighboring state. Even if you wanted to take a drive over the hill for the day to Santa Cruz, you can't, because everyone has the same idea. The gas is sky high, and a night at the movies for your family is a $100 affair. Some people act like $100 isn't a lot of money, well it is when you have a family of 4. Don't get me wrong, I love my kids, and in the words of Goonies Data's father, "My greatest invention" Your prison is basically stay home. At least my family has computers and can keep ourselves entertained, but we can't let the kids go out and play because there are 4 sex offenders on every block. It's not the life I grew up with.

At some point, maybe you do get a vacation. You pack your wife, kids, and dog into the car to drive up the Oregon coast. You realize that slower life you had, the decent people, the lack of trash, graffitti and income inequity simply don't exist. People don't go 15 miles under the speed limit in the fast lane, and if they do, they move over. Traffic doesn't crawl to a stop because of a little rain. Nobody tries to run you over in a crosswalk. You can all go to the movies for $40 less than in the bay area. Gas stations actually have employees that fill your tank so you don't have to get out of you car.. It's such an odd feeling NOT having to pump your own gas. As if.. customers were important up there. Please, thank you, you're welcome aren't considered quaint little constructs, but are demanded.

I'm really getting tired of living and working here. I just don't feel it anymore. I'm tired of the tribal politics. Tired of my neighbors constantly trying to get into my business, or my employer spying on my social media. I have to have some forms of "social media" now, every employer needs linkedin as a minimum. You also need indeed, monster, dice, all told at least a good 6 profiles so your employer knows you're a real person here.

It's not all bad, there are some good points, but are they even worth mentioning? Crime, cost of living, homeless suffering, bad schools, the list goes on. Not sure if it's worth the salary anymore.

If they were just moving it in-situ, they'd pick a city and gang up on it. For awhile I thought Austin, TX would be the New Silly Valley, but nope... companies are (at least form what I've seen) moving to New York, Oregon, Washington, Texas, lot of other places...

The days of needing to be in one physical spot are, well, over. All you need is decent Internet infrastructure these days. The same is coming true for startups as it is coming true for tech workers.

I see this as a good thing, and would love to see it accelerate a bit - now all that flirting I get from SV companies won't require me to knee-jerk a "...hell no, I ain't moving to that shithole!" just to do interesting and exciting things in technology.

The only real danger I see form the overarching evolution would be an increase in outsourcing (because if you follow it to its logical conclusion, a remote worker in India or wherever can be just as competitive as one in Utah or Ohio.)

SF proper is small. SF proper doesn't contain Silicon Valley, or any real tech worth speaking of.

When people say 'SF' they generally mean the SF bay area.

SF is like Manhattan.

The whole Left echo chamber statement seems idiotic. Left or worded better liberal views fit the development of technology better than right or conservative views. The word or idea itself (conservative) is not the ideal way to run a small tech start-up for example. Being conservative implies that you don't like taking risks which is the opposite of what's needed to work on new technology. All new technology is by its very nature risky which is why technological centres tend to be left politically. The main reason why I would think Silicon Valley is not an ideal place anymore is the fact that everything is too expensive.

Everyone's on drugs, companies treat investor money like it's a gift rather than an obligation, and a "barely scraping by" wage is 100k/yr. Which means that the budget programmer the company your money is tied up in actually costs $120k/yr despite his or her massive roxycodone addiction which is why he or she gets jack shit done. There is NO WAY I would ever invest in the SF tech economy.