What's so shocking in the brashness of their claims:
- UMG alleges that training generative AI on any of their artists is a "breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law."
- We are asked, which side of history to we want to be on? Apparently, original AI-generated content that imitates artists is siding with "deep fakes, fraud, and denying artists their due compensation."
The song was labeled as a wholly original, AI-generated song and in now way misrepresented itself. Many of my lawyer friends say this is testing new boundaries on copyright law because of what UMG is claiming.
As GPUs like Nvidia's H100 cost over $30,000, Microsoft's own AI chip appears to arrive at a very opportune time to enable the company to pursue a very aggressive AI strategy.
From a pure numbers perspective, it's no question that it's a good rush. I think Sam Lessin's perspective that the incumbents may reap most of the rewards here is interesting to consider --- some of the dynamics of the generative AI market aren't like previous software categories that were newly developed. Here, generative AI is seeing integration into all kinds of existing workflows.
What does a post intellectual property world even look like, though? I'm not aware of any convincing frameworks that our existing society could merge into.
> What does a post intellectual property world even look like, though?
It looks like Github! People sharing and collaborating to build new things. No lawyers getting in the way. Attribution is automatically handled by git logs.
Many parts of Github would not exist without intellectual property laws. If you post code, it's not just a free for all, you still have licenses and own your contributions if not specified otherwise. Especially company stuff would be much, much less open.
That's not to say that every facet of IP law is good, or even a judgement on it. Just pointing out that only parts of Github work like you describe.
Licensing is very important to open source. It is literally what drives and protects large scale open source innovation and stops it going extinct. It’s actually worth learning about GPL 3.0 and copy left licensing.
Anyway if that goes away. A lot of innovation will too. If privately owned LLMs go on consuming everything, not giving back to the communities that make them what they are. It may erode the system.
Building a future world where every child has access to humanity's best information makes me jump out of bed in the morning.
I agree it's an absolute daunting task, convincing people this is the way. This new freedom will not be given to people by the powers that be, they must demand it.
But I do believe that a small group of people can change the world. It's just about getting that initial group going, and sparking a flame.
From reading Reddit and seeing how people are dealing with Bing Chat's embedding of sources, it sounds like there is a lot of unanswered anxiety around what will happen to the internet if anything you put out there simply gets regurgitated by an LLM, often w/o attribution.
I'll be curious to see how this set of regulations helps put content attribution on a better path.
Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt etc. have already been sued, so there will be a lot of action in the years ahead.
The AI Act has been under development since 2021 (it's the EU... so it takes time) -- but news broke this week that there are additional provisions under discussion specifically designed to address the rise of chatbots. My full summary of the act itself and the a breakdown of these new provisions is contained within the article.
As the news media and twitterverse peddled the whole "crime-ridden SF" angle, I felt myself getting drawn into the same topic and agreeing with numerous friends on how much the city has declined. This is a good reminder of how we gravitate towards powerful emotional narratives, which in the moment can feel absolutely true despite an utter lack of supporting facts on an individual murder case.
I hope this brings some measure of peace and closure for his family and friends.
After the murder, I had to read scores of comments like this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456168 )
about the homeless, need for more law enforcement (although the US already incarcerates more of its population than any industrialized country) etc.
I had to read scores of tech bros in the professional-managerial class whinge about the poor, about black lives matter and how this was due to "progressivism".
Turns out the suspected murderer is a guy who describes himself as an "entrepreneur" on Linkedin and has a Crunchbase listing where he is described as being in executive management. Maybe we should have law enforcement target entrepreneurs as opposed to people made homeless by the enormous wealth disparity on display in San Francisco.
I saw a reply to a thread on twitter where a woman said to one of his friends, something like, “sorry to burst your bubble but bob was a champion of ‘diversity’” and if that isn’t saying that quiet part out loud, hoof.
> people made homeless by the enormous wealth disparity
There’s a tiny possibility that feckless bureaucrats, billions of dollars spent with no oversight, mental illness, and drug addiction share just a sliver of the responsibility
Sure, though if we're talking about crime, inequality is probably the strongest correlation to crime rates.[0]
"In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust."
Funny how questions like this were completely ignored in the previous conversation where people were shitting on the homeless, but suddenly are important now that the homeless aren't the target anymore.
Here's how the cycle works. We decide a certain group of people ("literally the dregs [sic] of society") causes most of our problems. Then we pass laws targeting that group, and enforce the laws most strictly against against that group — and surprise, that group ends up getting caught breaking the law most often! Then we use that to drum up further public sentiment against that group. Rinse, repeat.
Crime is a social construct. We choose what's illegal and what's not. We enforce some of the laws, against some of the people, some of the time. Saying that a certain group commits the vast majority of crimes is meaningless without additional context. And if your additional context is that they're "literally the dregs of society", you're not being serious — you just have an axe to grind.
More than you'd think. You're more likely to be murdered by someone you know than a stranger. iirc it's something like ~55% chance of someone you know, ~25% chance of a family member, ~45% chance of a stranger (which could be anything from drug deals gone bad to serial killers).
Yeah, this is something that frustrates me in every discussion about crime. People take a murder rate of X per hundred people and use that to argue that you have an X% chance of being murdered walking down the street. Except that's not true, because like you point out, your odds of being murdered by a rando are way lower than the murder rate as a whole!
This is exactly why the reactionary push for police in response to the murder spike in 2020 and 2021 made no sense. The issue wasn't that people were going out and murdering more — it was that they were locked down in their homes with the people most likely to murder them. You can't fix that by adding more beat cops.
That statistic could only possibly exist for solved murders. Only ~50% of murders are solved and it's much easier to solve if the victim knows the killer. This sounds like
a "looking for your keys under the street lights" scenario.
The person you are replying to is making a rational argument, not an empirical one. The premise that may be understated is "cases are more likely to be solved when the victim is known to the killer, because the amount of people who know a person is far smaller and more easily investigable than the entire general public."
Oh, I understand the premise. But one premise does not a good argument make. Maybe witnesses are less likely to cooperate if they know the murderer! Maybe this type of murder tends to happen inside homes, where there’s less likely to be evidence such as surveillance footage! Maybe it is easier but only by one or two percentage points! etc etc
Use the drugs that make you violent or so in need that they need to rob to get their next fix? Or the ones that make you think a lot and eat lots of tacos?
Nah it’s more of a “it’s easy to find a stick if you want to beat a dog” situation - drugs don’t make you do much of anything, aside from provide an excuse to do the thing you were too scared to do while sober. Drugs are the excuse, not the reason.
I’m not a violent guy, and I’ve never had a drug encourage me to act violently. Yes, even ‘those’ drugs.
I am however a lazy guy, and I’ve often had drugs encourage me to indulge my laziness.
Drugs can and do easily exacerbate pre-existing conditions. Especially mental health problems which would otherwise be controlled without intervention.
Many “crimes of passion” have had inebriation as a root cause of the lashing out.
> What percentage are entrepreneurs and what percentage are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?
Not for nothing, the mentally ill and/or drug addicts are no more likely to commit violent crime than you, i.e. the general population. It's amazing how with every suspect of violent crime, the first thing everyone wonders is about their mental health. Here's something to consider: everyone is mentally ill, and the majority of everyone is addicted to something or other. Let's stop demonizing mental illness and drug addiction, which are both medical conditions; stop looking for explanations there, and focus on one thing: the actual crime, the actual behavior, what happened, not what they where thinking and not if they were high. And fuck all else, especially the Goddamn bigotry. If you want a reason for violent crime, money's usually got everything to do with it. Use money as a lens, not personal biases. Because in my experience, the greatest individuals that have ever lived, that have contributed the most to humanity, were severely mentally ill, and the greatest artists, that contributed the most and most amazing pieces, paintings, music, film, that have survived the test of time, were drug addicts.
If you mean "What percentage of crimes are committed by," it's probably the second population. Probably. I'm actually pretty weak on that narrative right now.
If you mean "What percentage of the population described is committing violent crimes that should result in jail time," I'm even weaker on it. Because the homeless population is way, way larger than the tech-entrepreneur population, so by percentage of population I think it's a toss-up without hard numbers.
It doesn't take many dead executives on a yacht or strangled estranged wives to tilt the numbers when the population is small.
A reasonable question, but barely relevant to the emotional reaction to this specific tragedy, which involved a single victim and presumably a single killer and is unlikely to have much effect on the overall percentages.
> What percentage are entrepreneurs and what percentage are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?
Never really met anyone that described themselves as an 'entrepreneur' that actually was one though. Lots of people that wanted to desperately identify as one and they'd spend all their time telling anyone who'd listen that's what they were.
In contrast, the actual entrepreneurs are too busy actually going out there and building things. I think it's a label that only makes sense when it's applied by someone else.
read your comment as
"what percentage of entrepreneurs are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?"
which actually is a really interesting question.
If you want to get all numerical. Let's say an extremely generous 1% of SF population are tech entrepreneurs. 1 out of every 12 murders in SF this year was committed by a tech entrepreneur.
This would imply that Tech entrepreneurs were 12 times more likely to kill you than any other SF local, an astonishing 1100% higher murder likelihood than average!
Given that this is a forum frequented by a lot of SF Tech entrepreneurs, the FBI should monitor this forum or perhaps shut it down all together.
>After the murder, I had to read scores of comments like this[...]
>I had to read scores of tech bros [...]
Did you though? I can't recommend enough cutting out reading people's comments that you don't want to read. If other people's comments stress you out and make you angry, there are typically actions you can take to expose yourself less to them.
The problem is that these reality-deficient narratives spill out into the real world where they have real consequences.
For example, the pitchforks came out to recall the "soft on crime" DA and replace him with a "tough on crime" one. Why didn't that fix anything? And why was the DA ever the problem when crime was actually down during his tenure, but had simply shifted neighborhoods as a result of covid emptying out the previous high-property-crime areas (downtown and fisherman's wharf)? People in other neighborhoods had every right to be upset that crime shifted to their area, but alleged city-wide policy changes never made any sense as an explanation for that.
Every time there's a crime panic, a bunch of "no more mr. nice guy" politicians throw a few thousand more people in prison for minor crimes in this country, which already imprisons more people per capita than any other country except this very short list of places: El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, Cuba. Think we can beat them?
It was obvious that commenters on HN were wilding out about this specific case—but even though the outpouring of rage about homelessness/Chesa Boudin/race/etc was clearly out of proportion with this single incident, it was useful to read people's thoughts. Just because people think differently than I do, doesn't make me less inclined to want to hear them or understand them. In this case, it was illuminating to see that there were so many people who were primed to perpetuate that narrative.
I can get why people blamed the SF politics but not why people blamed the homeless. Both in my experience and by statistics, homeless are not particularly aggressive or violent. It's unfortunately enough that they became homeless, and violent or aggressive people wouldn't stay homeless for long.
I don't think anyone is claiming it does. But what's your point, really? It sounds like a conversation that goes like this:
"Wow, Lee was likely killed by someone who knew him, another tech entrepreneur."
"Yeah, and San Francisco sure has a lot of problems with homeless people."
Huh? Discussions about SF's homeless problem are pretty irrelevant to the case at hand. And it's really showing of people's biases that, when we first heard of Lee's death, the evidence-free, go-to narrative was that he obviously was killed by a random mentally-ill homeless person.
This is not bias. You don’t know in advance what the cause of an event is for sure. People mentioned a probable cause (violent homeless) and it happened to be a less probable one (a tech co-worker), although we still don’t know for sure yet. In particular, the influence of drugs and mental illness among the homeless were thought to explain the event.
It’s like predicting the price of a stock that didn’t come true. Not every incorrect prediction is due to selection bias.
I'm personally not into incarcerating mass amounts of people, as it only centralizes a prison industrial complex. Rather, one glaring issue is dangerous drugs showing up on our streets & the conditions that lead to this usage. In the comment you linked to, I noted Kensington Ave in Philadelphia, where there are videos of many people on hard drugs stooped over. Many people, who would otherwise have happier lives are now dealing with addiction & living on the streets. Note that the reason why drugs are showing up on the streets are not random acts of mere petty criminals but involve people in domestic government & foreign governments. Rick Ross & the crack epidemic detail the history of how intelligence agencies create the conditions of mass addiction.
While some, including me, think this drug problem is an example of the hypocrisy of NeoLiberalism...I also think it's a centuries old playbook of wreaking havoc on whole populations of people by introducing vices such as drugs. The Opium Wars & what lead to the Opium Wars is an example.
Side note, I would like there to be a graph based form of communication that can better express the context of statements. It's too easy to take a couple of sentences on a forum out of context.
> Many people, who would otherwise have happier lives are now dealing with addiction & living on the streets.
I don't know about you but I don't know anyone who fell into drug use and homelessness who had happy lives. I think people who are homeless and or addicted to drugs are addicted to drugs because there lives are not good. If you improve economic and social conditions for people, drug abuse becomes less of a problem because people do not need to cope with difficulty in their life in the same way.
I dont know of any people who are happier addicted to hard drugs than not addicted to hard drugs. If the supply of hard & tainted drugs increases, then people with addictions are more likely to increase their consumption of these drugs.
The problem & solution space involves more than just enforcement. A root cause is the ineffectiveness & corruption in social safety net programs including housing, drug treatment, & other domains. Not saying we should not have any programs but the ineffectiveness with increasing budgets speaks for itself. Effective & efficient programs should be rewarded while ineffective & inefficient programs should be discontinued.
Government agencies which engage in harmful activities such as drug trafficking should be reformed or disbanded. I don't expect the status quo to change, as we didn't get into this mess with rational institutions, but its worthwhile to have a sober view of root causes to at least put pressure on the institutions to be more rational.
I suspect a lot of our problems are caused by high-functioning addicts who are unhappy/dysfunctional and use addictions of all kinds to compensate - and who also happen to hold positions of real power and influence.
That sounds unlikely to me. Instead, I think a lot of society's problems are caused by sociopaths in positions of power. People like Putin and Trump didn't become the monsters they are because of additions or drugs, they were born that way.
What does that have to do with neoliberalism? Also, you'll have to say which presidents you see as being responsible. Wikipedia says Trump was neoliberal, I've seen it applied to other presidents. Trump was impactful on the world because he was so ineffectual in general. But I think every president in living memory wanted to reduce drug use and the supply of drugs coming into the us. In a free society it's hard to stop people from doing what they want, even if they take drugs that hurt them, kill them, or might not do anything bad (like pot), large numbers of people can supply enough demand to overcome the impact of law enforcement.
Of course fentanyl is a society destroying thing, the impact of that and things like heroin lead to me not knowing what to do personally to stop this. Media reports claim fentanyl components are coming from China. So now what?
First, I take Wikipedia with a grain of salt, especially when it comes to politics or anything remotely related to politics.
All I'm saying is that the results speak for themselves. The drugs come from somewhere. The drugs are allowed in somehow. Repeat violent criminals are somehow let out of prison.
Also, there is a history of collusion of governments, government agencies, NGOs, & drug trafficking. This spans over hundreds of years & there are recent cases. Watch a documentary of how Compton, CA was once a working class neighborhood with industrious people, then the CIA trafficked drugs in that neighborhood (note Freeway Rick Ross), & it quickly devolved into violent gang warfare. Now the land is being bought on the cheap. Note Sofi Statium, which is built on the ground of what were once homes.
I don’t understand why it can’t be both: SF is degenerating when it comes to random crime AND this murder wasn’t by some random thug.
Always important to reflect on whether stances like "SF is degenerating" are based on a rational analysis of what is actually happening, versus a more emotional response to stories that might be more like the topic of this post, just with less visibility into the exact circumstances of what happened.
Not saying that's likely happening here, but the clear response to the original news was that this was the perfect example of what SF is becoming. How often does that assumption happen?
I've seen SF degenerating with my very own eyes and smelled it with my very own nose. Yes, this particular case may or may not be (we don't have jury decision yet) part of this pattern. But no amount of "akshually, this carefully picked statistic clearly shows that the crime is much better than it was in 1980s!" is going to change how I felt when I went to SF and how my eyes watered from the urine stench when I tried to ride BART in the city. Call me irrational as much as you want - but this is what being there felt lately, and it's obvious it is not only my personal point of view.
I don't live in San Francisco. I can't tell you exactly what is going on in the ground, so I don't know who is right here.
However, this comment is falling into the exact situation that OP was trying to warn about. You are using an anecdote to dismiss statistics because the anecdote is a powerful emotional narrative that feels true. It is after all your own personal experience. However, that experience might not be an accurate representation of reality. OP warned to keep that in mind. Your response is effectively saying "no, my emotional narrative feels true so I'm sticking with it."
Maybe you are right and your emotional narrative is true. As I said, I don't know. But I'll tell you if one side of a debate has statistics and the other side has feelings, I think it is smart to side with the side that has statistics.
City-wide statistics seem almost entirely meaningless in these contexts. Most violent crime is concentrated in specific parts of the city where the people who participate in these debates never go. A 10% decrease in violent crime in the most dangerous part of a city could cancel out a 10x increase in the areas where most HN people would likely be living in.
Don't forget, there's different kinds of crimes with different visibilities.
So there could be a 50% decrease in violent crime in the most dangerous part of a city, along with a 500% increase in non-violent or petty crimes everywhere else: shoplifting, parked car smash-and-grabs, urinating in the train stations, pooping on the sidewalks, etc. So the tech crowd isn't going to notice fewer people getting murdered in the worst section of town, but they'll definitely see the other stuff.
I can't tell what point you are trying to make. Are you suggesting that while crime overall is down, this new situation is actually worse because the victims are now likely to have more money than past victims?
He is putting more emphasis on his direct experience than in statistics that are undoubtedly cherry-picked and potentially unreliable (by both political extremes). That's not buying into an emotional narrative; that's doing a reality check.
The direct experience of a single person has almost no value when assessing a problem as big as crime rates. It would be like saying cancer rates are up because two people you know got cancer. Direct experience shouldn't be given that much weight.
Direct experience is colored by emotion. I was mugged in the Mission 10 years ago, and it felt shitty, and it took several years for me to feel comfortable walking in some areas of the city again, especially at night. But my feelings were utterly irrelevant to what actual crime rates have been in the city since then.
I agree with you that crime stats can be politicized, but it's equally sketchy to consider n=1 anecdotes as more reliable indicators. Certainly if you yourself experience or are the victim of crime at some particular rate and intensity, then that's suggestive to you, personally. It's entirely logical to make decisions about your own life -- like moving to a safer neighborhood, or avoiding areas in the city where you've experienced crime -- but it's not particularly useful when talking about the city as a whole, or in making general recommendations to residents on how to be safe.
Aggregated year-over-year statistics are cherrypicked but his emotional experience isn't?
Ok, here's my not cherrypicked experience: The issue is massively overblown. It's nowhere near as bad as the sour-grapes living elsewhere would have you believe.
It is a kind of reality check, but as an individual you just see a very small slice of reality, so generalizing from that in space or time is often misleading. And some people cite their personal experience as a way of shutting down debate, ie 'don't tell me about the data on X, I've seen it with my own eyes', and making lengthy impassioned speeches to sideline other points of view.
> You are using an anecdote to dismiss statistics because the anecdote is a powerful emotional narrative that feels true
Statistics can be useful, not useful, or misleading. Nothing about them is inherently meaningful or valuable--it depends entirely on the question and process generating the data and statistic. GIGO applies.
Despite the meme that an anecdote isn't data, it actually is no different from data from the Bayesian point of view. It is an n=1 posterior with a prior of one's past life experiences. And many anecdotes together can be thought of as a multi-level model (if you don't believe this, just see what the methodology of many behavioral/observational studies looks like--it's collating anecdotes into "data"--including the crime statistics that you are after).
> the anecdote is a powerful emotional narrative that feels true
And researchers can absolutely be emotional! A study biased by the emotions and beliefs of a researcher will produce biased results. Statistics isn't an escape hatch from human bias; it actually compounds whatever bias exists in the first place.
Yes, statistics can be misleading and/or biased. Yes, multiple anecdotes become data when combined (which is even more susceptible to being misleading and/or biased). Do you think either of these things are happening in this instance? If so, make that argument. I don't think there is much value in arguing that anecdotes are generally more valuable than statistics because that obviously isn't true overall.
"Has statistics" does a lot of work here. When we weight visible dilapidation of the city against a set of figures showing some metric decreasing - a reasonable question would be how well this statistic reflects the reality on the ground. If we aggregate all crime over all the territory and get this metric to go down - does it mean we are doing great, or does it mean the crime became more concentrated in some places and now we have safe remote havens for the rich and a criminal hellscape for the less fortunate? Or does it mean we stopped reporting some things as "crime" either because the law does not care anymore or because citizens gave up on reporting it because it's useless anyway? I don't say it necessarily means that - I am just saying that you can not consider isolated metrics alone, you should always also consider how well these metrics reflect the underlying reality.
The problem is that official statistics are worse than useless because most victims of minor crimes never file police reports. And I don't think you'll find any statistics at all on the intensity of odors in public transit stations.
In that case, statistics in all cities should be equally as error prone.
Statistics also don't collect how many annoying people are blasting shitty music on subways or how many morons are rolling coal in lifted trucks. There are unpleasant people everywhere.
> The problem is that official statistics are worse than useless because most victims of minor crimes never file police reports.
In that case, statistics should still be useful to observe trends, if they can't be used to determine accurate absolute numbers. We should expect the same percentage of people to not report crime when there are 1,000 car break-ins per month as when there are 100. Say that's 20%; seeing that number change from 200 to 20 is still teaches you about how crime rates change.
Besides, we're talking about murder, here, and I would suspect that pretty much every murder ends up accounted for in the statistics. Contrary to what mafia movies would like us to believe, it's not that easy to hide a body indefinitely.
> The problem is that official statistics are worse than useless because most victims of minor crimes never file police reports.
While urine smells certainly affect quality of life, I'm not convinced this particular statistic is all that relevant when talking about crime or public safety.
> We should expect the same percentage of people to not report crime when there are 1,000 car break-ins per month as when there are 100
This ignores changes in police enforcement and prosecution of crimes. If there is very little overall crime and the police have the time to find the perpetrator, and the prosecutor agrees to bring charges, you're more likely to report the crime. If there is high crime, police are too swamped to deal with yet another break-in, and the DA is too busy dropping felonies to misdemeanors or not bringing charges at all, then people aren't going to bother reporting crime as much anymore.
> In that case, statistics should still be useful to observe trends, if they can't be used to determine accurate absolute numbers. We should expect the same percentage of people to not report crime when there are 1,000 car break-ins per month as when there are 100. Say that's 20%; seeing that number change from 200 to 20 is still teaches you about how crime rates change.
That's definitely not true for car break-ins. In California pretty much every one I knew who lived there experienced some form of car break-in, and of course nobody got their stuff back. If I experienced one there I'd just shrug it off as a fact of life since the process of filing a police report takes time and effort, and the reward is expected to be zero.
In other places with fewer break-ins, I will most likely respond differently.
How long have you lived here? What were the conditions when you arrived, versus what you see now? What areas do you frequent?
Have you ever made friends with a homeless person? Do you know anyone who has been homeless in the past?
In my ~20y in SF, I have seen the exact same issues and political divides repeat over and over. There are certainly issues which need to be addressed, but the constant insistence that there is some short-term degeneration constantly leads to the reimplementation of solutions that do not work, particularly homeless sweeps and policing of nonviolent property crime.
Real solutions take time, commitment, dedication, and engagement from and with the community, not just shouting at a handful of politicians. That isn’t gratifying enough for most people, who want to see some overnight transformation, which is what leads to homeless people being shifted around from block to block based on who most loudly demands that seeing the poor on a daily basis makes them unsafe.
Further, this strategy prolongs and ingrains people being stuck on the street. Having access to the resources that help people get off the street, heal from addiction, and not be so desperate as to engage in petty property crime for survival makes everyone safer, including the folks currently living on the street. Being able to establish semi-stable communities (“encampments”) where they can rely on each other to watch their property, often including medications, identifying paperwork, treasured possessions like family photo albums which keep them tethered to reality, is key to seeing them improve.
This is the strategy upon which navigation centers are built, and while not perfect, it works for a lot of people.
The, “tough on crime, I don’t want to see the homeless”, strategy which has continually failed for decades actually, counterintuitively to many people - esp newcomers’ - perception, makes us all less safe. If there has been a decline in SF since you’ve moved here, it is almost certainly because of these wasteful, costly, and dangerous approaches to public safety and health.
It doesn’t matter how many condo towers are built, SF is never going to be a gated community. If you want to live in a gated community, I suggest you move to one.
Thank you for this. I haven't been here as long as you have (13 years for me). I do feel like I've seen a "decline", especially accelerated during the pandemic. I admit that these are just my personal impressions and observations, but: increased homelessness (with many more with obvious mental-health issues), increased visible drug use, increased car break-ins. And I say this as someone who was mugged 10 years ago in the Mission, without being the victim of any crime since then (well, ok, someone broke into my garage and stole a rusty broken bicycle a few years ago, but whatever). Emotionally, I feel like my experience 10 years ago might give me the opposite view, that things have gotten better since then, but that's not what I see or feel.
I go back and forth on feelings of safety: I think in some ways I do feel less safe now than I did when I moved here, but part of that are the differences between my attitudes and lifestyle at ages 30 and 40. Logically, my risk level is probably much lower now than it was 10 years ago.
But there's also just general fear, especially when walking near someone who is screaming at the moon. Maybe that fear isn't entirely rational, but I think the fear more comes from unpredictability than anything else. A few years ago, my partner was standing on the Folsom/Embarcadero Muni platform, with 15 or so other people waiting for a train. A mentally-ill person came up onto the platform, occasionally ranting, walking past people standing there, when he, completely randomly and unpredictably, turned to someone waiting and punched him, hard, in the face (he doubled over, in pain, bleeding, his nose probably broken).
For better or worse, that incident comes to mind most of the time whenever I walk past a homeless person who seems to have mental health or addiction issues, no matter how likely or unlikely it is that they might attack me. Add on top of that the fact that police will do essentially nothing when an attack occurs, even when they witness it happen, and people know this and don't feel like they have somewhere to turn if something happens.
Anyhow, I'm rambling a bit, but I think my point is that people are afraid because they see a lot of weird, potentially dangerous things that don't fit into their view of what day-to-day life should be like, and they don't know what's going to happen to them in those situations. They hear stories -- even of isolated incidents -- like mine above, and that scares them.
I completely agree that police sweeps of tent encampments are not the answer. But I also think you're putting too nice a face on these encampments (not sure why you use scare quotes; that is literally what they are). You are almost certainly correct in what you see as the good aspects of these areas, but they also have significant downsides, as breeding grounds for drug use and other health issues.
For some out on the street, I truly believe involuntary commitment to some kind of mental health or addiction treatment center is the only real start to a solution. It can't stop there, of course: supportive housing, job training and placement, etc. is an absolute necessity. Getting someone clean and then throwing them back on the street is going to lead them right back where they were. But I'm tired of this idea that we're only allowed to help people who accept it. Refusing treatment or housing should not be an allowed option. "Tough on crime" is not the answer, but maybe some form of "tough love" is. I know California has a complicated (to put it mildly) history with forced mental health treatment, but that seems to be trotted out as an excuse to do nothing, and that's not ok either. To be clear, there are many who do want help, and accept it when offered, to varying degrees of success. But the most visible are those who have mental health and/or drug addiction issues, and asking or offering nicely often does not get us anywhere.
> the constant insistence that there is some short-term degeneration
Define "short term". I have first met San Francisco in 2006. I have never actually lived there (first because I couldn't afford it, then because I didn't want to) but I visited it fairly regularly, at some periods of my life almost daily. At the beginning, is was a very nice place to visit. And then at some point I realized I don't actually want to go there anymore. At which precise point over the 17 years of this history that happened is hard for me to describe, but I can clearly see the contrast between where we started and where we ended up. It may be that living there all the time feels differently - I only have my perspective to it.
> seeing the poor on a daily basis makes them unsafe.
This is really an unfair take, designed to shame the complainer rather than address the complaint. You are fully aware that the problems with SF go way beyond "seeing the poor" and that people that complain do not complain about "seeing the poor". Yes, people that cause these complaints are often poor - nobody would complain much about seeing a billionaire strolling through Market street - but pretending like them being "poor" is the sole basis of all the complaints is clearly not taking any of it seriously and just trying to blame the messenger. I guess it worked so well the last 15 years, keep doing it.
> is key to seeing them improve.
How has it been improving lately?
> strategy which has continually failed for decades actually
Yeah, true socialism has never been tried yet. Except SF didn't do anything like that for "decades" - the visible homelessness has been steadily increasing, and the enforcement of property crime has been steadily decreasing, to the point that it has been effectively legalized now.
> If you want to live in a gated community, I suggest you move to one.
Well, that's pretty much what I did. Except where I live there's no need for gates - it's safe enough without them. And also clean enough. I hope one day it will be the same way in SF, at least as it was where I first met it 17 years ago, or better - but it's a hope beyond hope, because right now I witness people of SF doubling down hard on "how dare you to complain, you snobby rich fuck? Just smell the poop and shut up!" and "we need to legalize even more crime and do even less enforcement and then it surely will all work". Well, I guess we'll see how it will work out for you.
"Akshually", pretty much any statistic you can find shows that crime is in SF is much lower today than it was in the 1980s.
I've lived in SF for 13 years, which I know is not as long as many others, but I agree that quality of life has declined, at least in the time I've been here. But quality of life and crime rates are not the same thing. Certainly, increasing crime -- especially violent crime, but also property crime -- can decrease quality of life. But quality of life can be hurt by things that you can't easily qualify as worse crime: increased homelessness and drug use, especially when those things are much more visible and in-your-face, as they have been here. The smell of urine and having to step over human poop is a quality-of-life issue, not a crime issue.
And yes, while I assume peeing and pooping on sidewalks is at least a misdemeanor, drawing a direct line from that to "I'm gonna get assaulted or murdered" is the stretchiest of stretches.
But still, I totally get why all this stuff makes people feel less safe, even though the city (aside from a few neighborhoods that people should avoid, just like in nearly every other city in the world) on the whole is actually pretty safe, including when compared with decades ago.
But let's not conflate quality-of-life issues with crime. They are certainly intertwined in many ways, but they are not the same thing.
> But quality of life and crime rates are not the same thing.
True. But if you say "shoplifting is not a crime anymore" and then citizens say "I am not going to report my car getting broken into because what's the use?" - then yes, crime rate statistics on these drops like a stone, but did we really improve anything here?
These threads about public pooping and open drug use show that a lot of people seem to equate their feelings of discomfort with feelings of danger. Just because something is upsetting to see doesn't mean it's dangerous. I've seen people relieving themselves on the sidewalk and have never once thought that they were a danger to me or my family. It's gross, but seeing gross things never injured anyone.
Did you read what I wrote? My entire post was about how quality-of-life issues and crime/safety issues are not the same thing.
While stepping over poop or smelling urine on the street doesn't hurt me, it doesn't exactly make me happy to live here either.
(Fortunately I moved out of SoMa and into a nicer neighborhood a few years ago, so I don't have to deal with sidewalk piss and shit on a daily basis anymore.)
Curious -- how much time have you spent elsewhere in the western world in recent years? I don't mean small towns in the midwest, I mean other cities of similar size and economic importance. I suspect you'll find that San Francisco isn't really special, and, in fact, the problems facing SF are facing most of the world, especially in the wake of the pandemic.
Interestingly, there's strong correlative evidence that wealth inequality is linked to increased crime in developed nations. So that's a fun fact!
I'm not the person you're responding to but I believe the point is that people leaving, doesn't make Bay Area degeneration a fact. Only actual Bay Area degeneration, can make Bay Area degeneration a fact. We need to know who is moving, who is coming in, the economics of the region, geological suitability to population demands, needs of the larger state and nation as it relates to the region. And on and on and on.
A blog post about a guy who didn't like the dog poo in the Mission is not nearly enough data to draw the conclusions most of us were drawing. That includes myself. But after the glaring intellectual lapses I engaged in subsequent to the Asian mass shootings and the killing of the crypto exec, the inner me is attempting to reassert rational order by demanding intellectual honesty and logic. All of which is now firmly demonstrating to me that facts don't care about feelings, and will gleefully bite you in the ass if they don't align with the world view or narrative that you're emotionally comfortable with.
Just because an economist wrote a utilitarian calculus saying "this is what makes a city great" doesn't make it so. The logic they use to define "good" ultimately has, at it's deepest core a morality. The morality that "longevity is good" "per capita GDP good", "average happiness good" ... is not an objective fact and has no bearing on how human beings measure greatness. The anesthetized bug-brained western homo-economicus would probably be laughed at by a Spartan warrior ... is one objectively a "better" human than the other?
> We need to know who is moving, who is coming in, the economics of the region, geological suitability to population demands, needs of the larger state and nation as it relates to the region. And on and on and on.
Exactly. And it turns out we know the answer: California has been hemorrhaging residents for 30 years and they are overwhelmingly lower-income, albeit with a recent surge in higher-income departures which correlates with the shift to remote work.
The issue is not that "it can't be both". I personally think SF does have a serious crime problem that is not being properly addressed.
But all the comments, tweets, etc immediately came out blaming SF government and SF's general crime problem specifically for Bob Lee's death. Like they couldn't just wait a teeny bit before forming an opinion after more facts were known? Especially from the crowd that prides itself on "logic" and "data driven" decisions.
The nature of the random crime is very different from violent crime. People were saying violent crime is the issue, and here was the proof, the turning point. All demonstrably false.
You point out the falsity and people call you naive and say it's the crime stats that are wrong, not their take. Their version is reality.
As a San Francisco resident, I don't want us wasting time, energy and resources going after the wrong problems.
Sure. However the "lack of safety" perception is real too.
If a homeless person walks up to you and aggressively threatens you as you are passing by, no crime has occurred. But if you're an SF native, you've learned to shrug it off as a commonplace occurrence. You've learned to become thick skinned towards these incidences. And when a real crime has happened, you'd likely assign more gravitas to it.
This is why there is a disconnect between numbers and quoted statistics and how people feel.
>If a homeless person walks up to you and aggressively threatens you as you are passing by, no crime has occurred.
Depending on what they say, isn't that still technically "assault"? Or "disturbing the peace"?
Also, if there's poop all over the sidewalks, those are all crimes too.
The problem is that all these petty crimes are generally never reported, and certainly not acted upon by police. So they never show up in the crime statistics.
There's a disconnect between the numbers and quoted statistics and reality, because the statistics come from the police, and their reporting isn't accurate. It isn't accurate anywhere of course, because police aren't perfect and many crimes go unreported for various reasons, but to SF natives, it may seem that this is worse in SF than other places, or in SF in earlier times.
Yeah, that's exactly my point. Even if the worst violent crimes are down (murder etc.), if general incivility has gone way, way up, that usually doesn't show up in crime statistics.
According to the chart, the current homicide rate is about 7/100,000. I found a spreadsheet showing homicides going back to 1849. The rate between 1968 (happy birthday to me) and 1996 is significantly higher than now, bouncing around between 10 and 20. Between 1920 and 1967, it bounces around between a low of 2 (1938) and 9. The 1870s were another relatively high period.
Interestingly, San Francisco's population declined from 775,000 in 1950 to 679,000 in 1980.
Possibly an all-time low. It's hard to compare numbers >40 years old, because they very possibly are not measuring the same things.
As to ease when you "start extremely high" -- SF is now safer, when it comes to violent crime, than most major cities in the US. What it does have is an extremely high rate of quality of life crime.
Since the victim lived in Miami most recently, a lot of people writing about this case commented about crime statistics and it seemed to me that based on the data, Miami is a more dangerous place than San Francisco, with more murder, rape, assault, etc.
I think where to draw the line is this "undesirable place" business. That's highly subjective, judgemental, and can cause you to lose sight of a lot.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there: "undesirable place" can come from a lot of reasons. Sure, I think SF has become more undesirable due to the increase in visible homeless population (visibility most driven by the mentally ill and addicted, as well as the tent encampments), as well has rampant visible drug use.
But I think the belief/feelings that this translates to much worse crime is just not correct. I can sympathize and agree with the idea that homeless and drug problems makes SF less desirable, but I don't think it moves the needle that much on safety and crime.
It's interesting that you say that, because I had no knowledge of the relation to Miami (it's tough to tell what you meant by that comment).
The only reason I said this, is because I was there for Miami Music Week, and they had multiple shootings two years in a row. It also has a bit of a reputation from the "cocaine cowboys" years. Honestly, the city had a bit of a "feel" to it, but it also seemed to have a great amount of character.
I'm not really passing judgement myself. I live in a place that many people would call "undesirable", and it does hurt... it's also not really fair, because it's a beautiful city with rich culture heritage, and continuing culture.
However, we have lots of shootings here too, and I understand why people are a little apprehensive.
I'm sure it has nice spots and you can make a good life for yourself. However, I can assure you that historically, it's exactly that (though maybe not undesirable)
It's all about whatever world view or narrative makes us feel emotionally comfy these days. Calling Detroit, Baltimore and Miami war zones makes a lot of people out there feel emotionally comfortable. (And also illustrates how many of us are, fortunately, completely unfamiliar with actual war zones.)
I wouldn't put too much weight in those kinds of comments.
I get where you're coming from. However, my opinion was based on physically being there back to back years when there were multiple shootings in public places (though not at the actual shootings). That and the fact that it was extremely violent in the 80s.
I never thought the issue was violent crime. More like the constant low-level theft and public urination from the homeless, drug addicts, and mentally ill.
Maybe Bayview / Hunter’s Point / Sunnydale. But SF has never been a dangerous place. Not like Oakland or Richmond. Crime was much higher everywhere in the 80s and 90s.
you might be thinking of the pervasive non-violent crimes like people doing drugs in the bustling business and shopping districts and shitting right on the sidewalk in the same. it's long been infamous for that.
11.23 per 100K. Tusla has a higher murder rate. You're about as likely to die in an automobile crash nation wide (11.1 per 100K), and in Florida, more likely (15.4 per 100K).
IMO miami is a highly class segregated area. You really don't see the working class areas while there visiting or on vacation unless you go out of your way to see them.
Because I recently visited and two people were murdered in quick succession during spring break. They shut down Miami beach last year, due to back to back days of people shooting into crowds. In general, it just seemed wild and crazy.
I really don't understand what you're talking about.
I was nearly shot by a gang in Miami for parking in front of the wrong house with a white panel van with tinted windows. Never had such an experience in any other US city. I managed to get away after a five minute high speed chase on city streets. Cops were nowhere in sight at any point and time was of the essence so calling 911 was not an option.
Gravity is a force that attracts two massive objects. While that statement is true, it is completely irrelevant to the Bob Lee case. People using this tragedy as an excuse to flog their favorite scapegoat is disappointing.
That's why we call them scapegoats right? That's what people who scapegoat others do.
Logic, Rational Thought, Dispassionate Analysis, these are all good. And one day, all humans will hopefully practice these disciplines as a matter of course. But right now, the vast majority of people are controlled by their emotions. What do they want to be true? What do they wish to be true?
Well, that's what becomes "true". At least, true to them.
Here's a good explanation of why perceived crime increased at the same time as total crime decreased in SF with COVID. TLDR: the number of crimes decreased, but the total number of people out-and-about decreased even more. The result is if you went out-and-about you were more likely to experience a crime.
Also, not every crime is reported. Not everything bad is a crime.
Swathes of homeless living in tents is not a crime. So is being screamed at by a drugged maniac. You also won‘t see people openly shooting up or defecating on the street in these stats.
Because one topic, homelessness and its contribution to crime is irrelevant to the topic at hand, the tragic murder of a person. Yet there was a rush to link them. Why discuss them together when doing so implies a causal connection between them?
> This is a good reminder of how we gravitate towards powerful emotional narratives, which in the moment can feel absolutely true despite an utter lack of supporting facts on an individual murder case.
It seems equally weird to me that so many people are taking this anecdote as a sort of proof that San Francisco does not have a crime problem.
Focusing on individual anecdotes and swinging from one conclusion to another is the real problem. The source of this unfortunate murder shouldn’t dictate your entire view of a city’s crime problem.
Every major city has a crime problem and always has. The question is whether the situation is being blown out of proportion by sensationalist media or people with axes to grind. For a group that claims to be so rational, much of the HN crowd commenting here does seem to be averse to relying upon actual data.
> Every major city has a crime problem and always has.
This isn’t true.
The idea that cities must inherently have crime problems is a form of learned helplessness. You think they must have crime problems because it’s all you’ve ever experienced. Try visiting a city that has low crime, like Singapore or Tokyo.
> Try visiting a city that has low crime, like Singapore or Tokyo.
Singapore's lower crime rate is achieved by having a nanny-state government run by an autocrat, with cruel, harsh punishments for fairly low-level offenses and little care for due process. If that's what is required to get us low crime, then I will reluctantly accept higher crime rates.
Tokyo is absolutely not a low-crime city. The Japanese authorities try to paint it as such, and deal with problems quietly. News outlets don't report on much of the crime that goes on; I'm not sure why, but a reasonable guess might be due to pressure from authorities. But I assure you there's plenty of crime (especially organized crime) to go around in Tokyo; it's just not very visible.
Japan also has a near-100% conviction rate, not because they're always right, but because they value clearing cases off their books more than ensuring justice is served. The US justice system is far from perfect, but I prefer what we have here over Japan's.
I don't think many of us would sign up for bringing the Singaporean or Japanese criminal justice systems to the US. Both places have very little due process and Singapore's police have near-unlimited surveillance powers with very little judicial oversight, not sure about Japan.
Ah yes, low-crime Tokyo, where there are definitely no problems with organised crime, standover tactics in bars, construction companies using thugs to drive people out of homes, or a plethora of other well-documented problems.
Anecdotally whenever I hear a SF resident say the "crime problem is overblown", they almost always live in the nicer areas where there's virtually no crime. I lived on the border of the Tenderloin years ago, and saw things that I've never seen anywhere else. I knew a guy who was murdered in the Polk Gulch, I had my car broken into (and rummaged through multiple times after I started leaving the door unlocked), I had to physically assert myself with my friend to not seem like a target when a man brandishing a metal rod was eyeing us suspiciously, I stepped on a used hyperdermic needle which pierced my shoe but luckily did not prick me ... this is only what comes to mind at the moment as a write this, but I'm sure there's more incidents I experienced that I could conjure after some reflection. Is my experience anecdotal? Sure, but I lived it. Your experience with the city has likely been a much better one, free from such disturbing experiences. Does that mean I didn't experience this though? Or that it is "overblown"?
tldr; I lived in SF but now happily live in New York.
Yes I believe all these things, but that would be true in any other big city in the US. Try living in the bad areas of Saint Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, or Cleaveland. When San Francisco has article after article saying crime is "out of control" yet no one is writing articles about Alabama or Louisiana which objectively have higher murder rates, I would say, yes it is "overblown".
I think the question is: where did you move in New York? When you were in SF, you chose to live in/near the worst neighborhood in the city. I assume when you moved to NY, you moved somewhere a bit nicer? Do you truly believe NY has no "bad areas" that you should avoid?
This doesn't excuse the crime in the Tenderloin, but when people talk about the SF crime problem being overblown, they mean to say that there is an expected level of crime in most cities, and SF's level of crime is no worse than many others, despite what some people would like to believe.
That doesn't mean the crime in the Tenderloin is ok! But it's important to put things in context, and decide if SF is doing better or worse than other comparable cities in dealing with crime. Stats seem to point to the idea that SF is doing ok in that regard. That doesn't mean they can't and shouldn't do better, but it does mean that the sky is not falling, and there's no reason for extreme panic over SF's crime rate.
Anecdotally whenever I hear a SF resident say the "crime problem is overblown", they almost always live in the nicer areas where there's virtually no crime.
As someone who has lived in moderate-to-high crime areas for more of my life than not, most people who express a fear of crime are even less willing to listen to data-informed analyses supplemented with first hand experience, often behaving as if they're worried it might be contagious.
tldr; I lived in SF but now happily live in New York.
It seems like it might be instructive to compare your current happiness with the rhetoric of Marjorie Taylor Greene who visited recently to show support for Donal Trump and followed up with an online tirade about how 'repulsive' she found NYC.
Not every city has the same crime problems. Stealing in Tokyo will get you thrown out of the country. Stealing in SF is acceptable and will get you praise.
Not surprising. You're on a forum full of techies and tech execs. It's like the people in Hollywood incredulous that #metoo movement was a thing because "they didn't know anyone like that!" until their coworkers and friends were outed.
Same here - techies shocked, _shocked_ that one of "their own" could commit a crime like this. Easier for them to talk about crime in general than lay blame at the feet on one of "their own".
What was surprising to me is that everyone seemed to move in mass that this was some "random stabbing". Random murders are exceptionally rare. What bothered me is this was another high profile murder of someone involved in crypto. There were a dozen murders that fit the bill that happened last year, and seemed way more likely.
The guy was stabbed in Rincon Hill. I don't consider that a crime ridden area.
I never believed the original assumption in stories. I am skeptical of what I read. Random murders are very rare. He was running a crypto company. Crypto space has plenty of shady things and people.
Same. The minute I read he was wandering about at 230am on a weekday I knew something was fishy. Despite how much reactionary tough-on-crime dorks want you to feel - homeless people rarely commit random murders of non homeless people.
Then like you said - the minute I found out he was in crypto I was 100% convinced he was murdered by someone he knew. Not in any conspiracy view like the feds did it because his company was "too dangerous" to FedNow or something. But because a significant portion of people in crypto are unhinged.
You would think the mass shootings of Asians would have taught us a lesson. But we all continue to jump the gun.
I think more generally, people are mob parrots at heart. We go with the crowd. If we see a guy killed and someone yells, "Crime Wave!!!" Well, then we all start chanting "Crime Wave!!!" The average person, even on HN as we saw, can really not be trusted to give dispassionate analysis. In the vast majority of instances, we just parrot whatever narrative or world view we feel most emotionally comfortable with.
I struggle mightily against it and still fall into that cesspool of intellectual laziness from time to time. It's just human. But you're right. We need to do better.
I got downvoted at the time, but Bob was heavily involved in launching Cash app which was exposed a few weeks ago as having inflated numbers to investors and been grossly negligent in policing their users many of whom were using the platform for crime. It's entirely possible that Lee was either mixed up with bad actors and/or pissed off some bad actors by providing details for the story. Obviously this is speculation too but it seems at least as plausible as it being truly random.
As much as I don't like SF's progressive politics, the data showed that the recalled SF DA Boudin didn't charge less on murders or narcotics: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/We-obtained-never-.... Boudin did charge less on theft and burglary.
In the future, it may be helpful to remember that murder and violence — especially sexual violence — are oddly intimate things,
In 2011, in incidents of murder for which the relationships of murder victims and offenders were known, 54.3 percent were killed by someone they knew (acquaintance, neighbor, friend, boyfriend, etc.); 24.8 percent of victims were slain by family members. The relationship of murder victims and offenders was unknown in 44.1 percent of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter incidents in 2011.
In short, people were killed by strangers 11.7% of the time. For 88.3% of murders (where the relationship between the killer and the victim was known), it was someone the victim knew.
The statistics are similar for sexual violence.
For juveniles and children who experience sexual violence, it is a family member of acquaintance 93% of the time. This percentage drops for adults to ~80%, i.e. in 80% of cases the victim will know the perpetrator.
These crimes are very different from a mugging or robbery. It is easy to imagine why if you replay the situation in your mind — looking someone in the eyes as you stab them, up close takes a lot emotionally. It is a very intense situation. Almost everyone — if driven to it — will steal out of desperation and hunger, but very few can look people in the eye, walk up to them and stick a knife in them. There is a strong psychological aversion to hurting other human beings built into most of us and it's what keeps society mostly safe.
This is a bad take and itself an emotional narrative. For one, the person arrested is a suspect and not in any way proven or admitted to be the killer. Putting that aside, it's still a bad take because you're ignoring the many other incidents that took place on the same day, such as the SF Fire Commissioner who was beaten with a metal pipe by random drug users outside his house.
the SF Fire Commissioner who was beaten with a metal pipe by random drug users outside his house
Former fire commissioner, not outside his house (actually a parent's home), and what makes you so sure it was random? A man was arrested for that, who alleges that the victim initiated the confrontation by pepper spraying him. I'm quite interested in that case as I have relevant personal knowledge about people involved, but for that reason I'm reluctant to draw any conclusions about it for now.
I said random because I haven't heard of anything linking the attacker and the commissioner beyond that the attacker was homeless and camped near the house.
> who alleges that the victim initiated the confrontation by pepper spraying him.
The reports I have seen state that the attacker claims the victim sprayed him with bear mace, not pepper spray. Regardless of this - and other minute points that don't matter - the subsequent footage of the attack shows the commissioner turning his back to and running away from the attacker, who quickly gives chase. It doesn't matter who started it; there's no justification for continuing the assault in such a situation.
So, the lesson here is not to jump to global far-reaching conclusion based on one single case, and the reason why it is so important is because of this one single case from which we can totally make a global far-reaching conclusions...
The emotional narrative that was initially gravitated toward is in fact correct.
Had there not been the entrenched environment of lawlessness in SF the perpetrator would not have even attempted his attack. And had the victim not been a prominent person the SF police would not have bothered to keep looking.
The only mistake the murderer made here is he underestimated the public outcry that forced the police and the DA to keep investigating in fear of theirs and the city's reputation.
Maybe it's time to stop paying attention to what Elon Musk and other so-called "tech industry" people publish on the internet. These are not journalists and it is not "news". It's garbage.
Maybe it's time to wake up.
One can only imagine what these two "tech industry" people were arguing about before one killed the other. The media reports make them sound like such wonderfully nice people, drinking and driving around SF at 2am on a Tuesday, one of them liking stay out to the wee hours on weeknights the other liking to keep butterfly and switch blades in his car. One of them apparently believed an "emotional narrative" about SF being in decline; that's allegedly why he moved to Miami.
Here is the Expand IT Inc. website, listing the survivor's colleagues.
The song was labeled as a wholly original, AI-generated song and in now way misrepresented itself. Many of my lawyer friends say this is testing new boundaries on copyright law because of what UMG is claiming.