San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: 'We Are a City on the Rise' Since taking office, San Francisco's mayor has been on a quest to revitalize the city and increase public safety. He's also kept the National Guard out--with a little help from some very powerful friends. I first met Daniel Lurie, San Francisco's newly minted mayor, about five minutes before we walked onstage at WIRED's Big Interview event, held in his city last week. Lurie's team let me know ahead of time that his window for this conversation was tight: He'd just come from announcing a new city police chief, and had about half an hour for me before he needed to be on to the next thing. Which was? "No idea," Lurie quipped, shortly before we were foisted from backstage and into our conversation in front of several hundred attendees--a local crowd, who, judging from their boisterous reactions to Lurie's every word, are among the 73 percent of San Franciscans who approve of the job he's done since taking office in January of this year. To Lurie's credit, the story of San Francisco right now is largely a positive one. The city is indisputably the global hub of AI innovation and the billions of dollars that accompany it, with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, along with smaller startups, investors, and plenty of young, AI-focused technologists all calling San Francisco home. Yes, that means rents are up and housing stock remains precariously low. But office vacancy rates are dropping, retail outlets are coming back to the city's downtown, and as Lurie's office is quick to tout, several key metrics measuring municipal crime--including homicides and car break-ins--are at historic lows. I wanted to talk to Lurie about all of that, but I was also curious about the bigger picture: his administration's dynamic with the federal government, particularly in the context of President Trump's October plan to send the National Guard into San Francisco--an endeavor that Lurie managed to thwart, according to The New York Times, by recruiting a powerful coterie of technology executives to work the phones in his favor. Lurie wasn't exactly forthcoming there, in keeping with his diligent efforts to focus conversations on San Francisco, and perhaps avoid attracting the attention, or the ire, of the current administration. It's a different tack than other Democrats governing progressive parts of the country have taken, from New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to California governor Gavin Newsom. But if the response in the room last week was any indication, Lurie's local fans don't seem to mind his "say less" strategy--at least for now. Someone has a 70-something percent approval rating.

Comedian Adam Corolla discusses how self-driving cars are causing chaos in San Francisco on'Jesse Watters Primetime.' A former interim mayor of San Francisco announced Tuesday he's running for his previous job, joining a competitive field of candidates who say the city has crumbled under the watch of Mayor London Breed, who is up for reelection this year. Mark Farrell served as interim mayor of San Francisco from January to July 2018, when Breed was elected to finish the term of Ed Lee, who died in office. The lawyer and former city supervisor said he had not planned to return to politics but feels he has the right skills to turn San Francisco around. "It is really painful to watch the city you love and you grew up in maligned across the globe," he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"How many hours do you spend daily on programming?" That was the question a developer recently posted on Reddit. Although the answers ranged from a few hours to full days (apparently, some people don't eat or sleep), the informal average was nearly six hours a day. This means that the developers who responded spend about six hours a day staring at screens and interacting only with their computers. If you're a fellow techie like me and fall into this average, it likely means you go long stretches before you connect with a fellow human.

"How many hours do you spend daily on programming?" That was the question a developer recently posted on Reddit. Although the answers ranged from a few hours to full days (apparently, some people don't eat or sleep), the informal average was nearly six hours a day. This means that the developers who responded spend about six hours a day staring at screens and interacting only with their computers. If you're a fellow techie like me and fall into this average, it likely means you go long stretches before you connect with a fellow human.

A lot of people are trying to make sense of artificial intelligence (AI) these days--what it can do for their business, and more specifically, their big data. Count Thad Lurie, CAE, among them. Last week, he made a career move--from chief information officer and vice president of operations at EDUCAUSE, a higher education technology association, to vice president of business intelligence and performance at Experient, an event management company that is doing a lot of work around event technology and attendees' behavioral data. The job change coincides with a significant mindset shift for Lurie that has him thinking about the power of artificial intelligence, not just as a tool to augment existing products or services but as a way to completely reimagine the membership experience. "We need to look at our business models through the lens of AI and in a completely different way because there may be member services and programs that we can do differently," Lurie says.