Far from the palm trees of Miami or Austin's taco trucks, Catalin Voss has headquartered his literacy start-up between a cannabis club and pawn shop in the heart of the Mission District. Voss rents a nondescript office building in one of San Francisco's most vibrant neighborhoods as a home base for Ello, a company he co-founded in 2020 that uses speech recognition technology, powered by artificial intelligence, to help struggling students develop their reading skills. The office is within walking distance of his Noe Valley apartment and only steps away from some of the city's best taquerias and cocktail bars. And those are just a few of the perks he recited in explaining why he is headquartered in San Francisco. Voss is part of a sizable cohort of San Francisco loyalists -- old and new -- who say they are flummoxed by the "all is lost" narrative propagated by conservative media hosts and more recently a vocal contingent of tech leaders that includes billionaire entrepreneur-turned-agitator Elon Musk.

Autonomous vehicles could transform parking as well as driving, new research suggests. Parking lots could house more driverless cars than human-driven ones, but autonomous vehicles could also lead to nightmarish gridlock if they slowly cruise the streets waiting for their owners, instead of paying to park. The typical vehicle spends 95 percent of its lifetime parked. The need to store parked vehicles has turned a lot of potentially valuable real estate into parking garages--for example, in the United States, roughly 6,500 square miles of land is devoted to parking, which is larger than the entire state of Connecticut. Autonomous vehicles could, in principle, transform parking lots.

The first question I ask Mahdi Bahrami is, "How do you say the name of your game?" He laughs and responds smoothly, "Yes, it's called En-gar-ay." Engare is an eye-catching game. Engare is sparse yet richly detailed at the same time, filled with looping lines and delicate curves. Put simply, it's a game about beauty.