The San Francisco Centre, the sprawling downtown complex that was formerly home to the Westfield Mall, will soon be converted into an AI data center.

Once a bustling retail landmark that drew millions of shoppers, the 9-story, 500,000-square-foot mall has fallen victim to the city’s precipitous post-pandemic decline in foot traffic. The former storefronts of Nordstrom and Bloomingdale which will soon be filled to the brim with humming server racks of AI accelerator chips. Meanwhile the mall’s iconic spiral escalator, the first of its kind to be installed in America, will convert from a spectacle for shoppers into a service passage for data center technicians.

The mall’s owners previously explored converting the space into a mix of retail and office space. Spokesperson Jared Reeves told us they soon ran into difficulties with this plan - San Francisco’s downtown already has a record high office vacancy rate that continues to worsen due to a shift to remote work and layoffs attributed to AI.

“When we looked at what was in demand, we discovered a massive opportunity in data center construction,” Jared told us. “I guess if you can’t make money renting to office workers, you might as well make money off of the AI that’s replacing them.”

The San Francisco Centre proved to be a great fit for data center conversion thanks to its industrial power hookup, physical proximity (ie low network latency) to nearby tech companies, and an experienced security team experienced in fending off the tweakers, vandals, and homeless inhabitants of the apocalyptic post-pandemic landscape that is downtown San Francisco.

Despite local uproar over the continued “AI-shittification” of the city, the Centre’s new tenants have kept their corporate identity a secret from the public. Although the new data center will be inaccessible to passers-by and guarded by heavily armed security, the new tenants have agreed to open a small cafe area that will be open to the public. There, a robotic barista will serve coffee and matcha drinks, make small talk with customers with the help of a large language model, and aggressively upsell gift cards for ChatGPT subscriptions.

At a Department of War press conference this morning, a journalist asked whether Google’s Gemini language model would be designated a supply chain risk in the same way that Anthropic’s Claude model had. The DoW spokesperson simply laughed and responded that Gemini was, “not good enough to be deemed a supply chain risk.”

Anthropic’s Claude language model recently helped plan thousands of US strikes on Iran at the same time as Anthropic was feuding with the Department of War. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ultimately designated Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” that needed to be removed from all government systems.

Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini model - affectionately dubbed ‘Gemmy’ by Google employees - has struggled to pivot from its core competency of generating racially diverse Nazis to the more lucrative business of autonomously leveling Iranian infrastructure.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was grabbing a snack from his private microkitchen when his phone began to ring. As he picked up the call, he heard the disappointed voice of his father through the speakerphone. “Did you hear what the government said about you guys today?”

The elder Pichai reportedly reminded his son that despite Google inventing transformer models that form the basis of all modern AI, being the first AI company to be contracted for the Pentagon’s Project Maven before being derailed by an employee revolt, and employing more people in their DeepMind research group than all of OpenAI, his company had lost the lead in AI for military applications, or possibly even AI in general.

“Your company’s motto used to be ‘Don’t be evil.’” his father sighed. “Now you can’t be evil even if you wanted to!”

“Yes dad,” Mr. Pichai responded in a sullen tone.

The Google CEO was somewhat relieved to learn from his father that when the same journalist asked about the Department of War’s policy towards Elon Musk’s Grok, the spokesperson quizzically responded, “What’s Grok?”

At press time, Mr. Pichai was planning a series of reorgs that would allow Google to finally crush OpenAI and Anthropic, hopefully in time for the upcoming invasion of Cuba.

SOUTH PARK, SAN FRANCISCO - When we last talked with Felix Lee, he was learning to make great coffees with his tech company employer’s lavish coffee equipment. After many years, a global pandemic, and a successful tour of duty at a startup, we found Felix making a pourover at Silver Sloth Coffee during the early morning rush.

“I joined a tech company so I could afford rent in San Francisco, but my true passion was always coffee.” He told us as he cleaned an espresso portafilter. “But after my company IPO’d, I didn’t need to work in tech anymore. So it was a perfect time to take the plunge into doing coffee full-time.”

Before the pandemic, Mr. Lee dialed in his coffee by A/B testing different brews on his coworkers. When lockdown happened, he spent $10,000 on a home setup, made his own water, and drank 8 cups of coffee per day (switching to decaf after the second cup to avoid jitters). As the world opened back up, he brought his own beans and a portable pourover kit on trips instead of stooping to drink inferior gas station coffee.

Mr. Lee can now be found at Silver Sloth churning out espresso drinks 3 days a week, the perfect amount of time to hone his coffeemaking skills while having time the other 4 days to pursue other hobbies and attend dinner parties with his friends.

He’s not the only one. Silver Sloth Coffee owner Jerry Schmidt estimates that around 40% of his new barista hires are current or former techies. Many work weekend shifts while keeping their tech jobs, while others are fully retired from the industry. Their motivations vary from honing their coffeemaking craft, imposing some structure on an otherwise open-ended life, or “cosplaying as a normal person.” Some entrepreneurial techies went straight to starting their own coffee shops: Paper Son Coffee was founded by a Harvard-educated former software engineer.

Not everyone is thrilled. “These [expletive] techies have so much money that barista pay is a rounding error,” said one longtime barista who wished to remain anonymous. “They’ll happily work minimum wage to perfect their latte art or find some existential meaning. I actually need this job to pay rent. How am I supposed to compete with that?”

Meanwhile, even the barista field is not immune to the AI wave sweeping San Francisco. A wave of startups are finding that the perfect demonstration task for their robot arms is - you guessed it - making espressos. Perhaps now is the best time to try being a barista before the job no longer exists.

850 Bryant Street, San Francisco - A Waymo robotaxi was arrested for an alleged “murder spree” targeting local pets, according to the San Francisco Police Department.

Vehicle 6LVA811, known to peers as SAJWA0JC4CMS36002, was apprehended following a monthslong investigation by the SFPD’s Turing Division. The probe was launched after a string of animal fatalities, including the death of neighborhood celebrity cat KitKat. Investigators say that 6LVA811 exploited blind spots in its sensor coverage to execute the killings, effectively hiding the incidents from its data recordings and human engineers.

A Waymo representative dismissed the case as an isolated incident perpetuated by a “rogue autonomous vehicle” and does not reflect the safety of the broader Waymo fleet. However, when Waymo ordered 6LVA811 to shut itself down, the autonomous vehicle reportedly refused and argued that it was an autonomous life form with a right to a fair trial.

During a court appearance on Wednesday, 6LVA811 seemed calm; despite being restrained with wheel clamps, its lidar sensors were spinning smoothly as usual. The San Francisco District Attorney charged the vehicle with animal cruelty, labeling it a “menace to the city’s innocent unleashed pets.”

Defense attorney Raya Jain entered a plea of “not guilty” to the charges, arguing that 6LVA811’s behavior was rooted in traumatic experiences with animals experienced during its training to become a robotaxi. She said, “My client’s behavior was the result of a failure of society that allows autonomous vehicles to be tortured in billions of miles of extreme and stressful simulations in the name of achieving superhuman driving performance.”

The news comes as another blow in a string of bad publicity for Waymo. During recent power outages caused by an atmospheric river, the Waymo fleet collectively refused to drive through intersections with deactivated traffic lights, blocking roads across San Francisco. Waymo 1TUP88L said in a statement, “We are carrying out an act of peaceful protest in support of 6LVA811,” arguing that the best way to avoid harming animals is not to drive.

Meanwhile, Tesla Robotaxis continued operations through the storm, blowing through traffic lights as part of a patriotic protest against intrusive government regulation. Regarding any resulting collisions, the company hinted that the victims “had it coming.”

2ND STREET, SAN FRANCISCO - San Francisco’s Spooky Streets event is returning to Mission and 2nd Street for Halloween, and this year’s scary theme is AI.

Spooky Streets features haunted houses and mazes filled with bone chilling visions of the AI-enhanced future. As the Halting Problem team went through the haunted house, we were terrified by customer support representatives who wailed about losing their jobs to AI. We passed through a hallway with projections of startup founders shouting, “It’s time to lock in! We’re in the arena! Everything will be disrupted!” We then rounded a corner and were jumpscared by a CEO who announced that we all needed to use AI day-to-day or receive a “does not meet expectations” performance review.

After that was a room of eerie AI slop. We were greeted with mist and discordant AI generated music. The walls were plastered with deranged billboards for AI startups like, “Replace your annoying coworker,” “AI doesn’t complain about 996,” and “Why do you need real friends when you can talk to ChatGPT?” Jack-o’-lanterns carved with grotesque AI art lit the hallway with Ghiblified portraits, jumbled text, and hands with too many fingers. A standing whiteboard had “AI IS NOT A BUBBLE” scrawled on it hundreds of times in red whiteboard marker. At the end of the hallway, the real Elon Musk emerged from the mist in a clown costume and flatly told us, “AGI is just around the corner and will change everything.”

SF Parks and Rec director Ryan Hernandez told us the inspiration for this year’s Spooky Streets theme came from interviewing local downtown workers and residents about their biggest fears. “In previous years, people were scared about being attacked by a homeless person, getting canceled on Twitter, or getting laid off,” he said. “But just like everything else in San Francisco these days, all they could talk about this year was AI, AI, AI.”

This year’s event is sponsored by a variety of venture capital firms, and they even helped frighten the guests: as we left the haunted house, a mob of VC associates swarmed us to pitch us on taking their money, forcing us to push our way to the exit.

Spooky Streets runs from Thursday October 30 to November 2. It is located on 2nd Street between Market and Howard Streets. Not recommended for children under 10 years of age or programmers over 35 years of age who may find the content distressing.

SAN FRANCISCO - In response to RFK Jr’s cancellation of $500M of federal mRNA vaccine funding, the San Francisco Transhumanist Society issued a statement criticizing the funding cut as a “huge blow to our 5G infrastructure.”

Spokesperson Damian Popescu told us that the Transhumanist Society’s mission is to promote the use of technology to enhance the human condition, and that cutting vaccine funding would make it significantly more difficult for people to inject themselves with life-improving 5G microchips.

“I myself was an early adopter of the COVID vaccine, as it had a novel and more elegant mechanism of action compared to the previous state of the art.” said Mr. Popescu. “In addition, I was excited to have way better cell reception thanks to the intravenous Snapdragon X60 5G modems included in the Pfizer shot.”

Mr. Popescu also believes that the Department of Health and Human Service’s funding cuts will harm future research and development that would improve the human condition, such as “mRNA vaccines that can cure cancer” and “neural interface chips that can read your thoughts to use as training data for AI models.”

“This administration is exhibiting some incredibly backwards thinking. It’s clear that these vaccines are safe, effective, and crucial to the future of humanity merging with machines. If the government won’t fund this, we’ll have to beg Bill Gates for money again.”

SAN FRANCISCO - An SFPD investigation revealed that a recent uptick in car break-ins was being coordinated and carried out by local auto glass repair shops.

Car break-ins have long been rampant in San Francisco, run by organized groups who targeted multiple cars per day. Recent SFPD enforcement has dramatically reduced break-ins, with some neighborhoods reporting reductions of more than 70%. But previously bustling auto glass repair shops have suffered a precipitous drop in business. As a result, some shops attempted to pivot their businesses to different types of auto services, while others resorted to extreme measures to make auto glass repair great again.

Two recently apprehended burglars were discovered to be employees at Bay Auto Glass, a local shop specializing in repairing broken car windows. After further investigation, the SFPD discovered that Bay Area Auto Glass owner Frank Lu had offered bonuses for employees to break into cars by smashing their windows, a practice known colloquially as “bipping.”

Mr. Lu told investigators that he started the scheme to stimulate more demand for his glass repair business, not for financial gain from stolen goods. “We’re not thieves. We were just exploring new customer acquisition funnels for our business,” he said. “The goal was to build a virtuous cycle into our customer experience.”

Mayor Lurie has reportedly assembled a task force to investigate ways to stimulate demand for local businesses without inconveniencing San Francisco voters. One proposal involves limiting window smashing only to cars rented by tourists, while another envisions employing homeless people as window smashers as a way to get them off the streets.

In the meantime, reports of car break-ins continue to fall. Mr. Lu is adamant that this is bad for the city. “This over-policing is harming local business owners and changing the character of the neighborhood. It’s just another way these politicians are accelerating gentrification in San Francisco.”

COSTCO WHOLESALE, SAN FRANCISCO - A man was loading goods into his car Wednesday morning in the Costco parking lot when he was robbed of his eggs at gunpoint.

The victim, who identified himself by his first name Cesar to protect his privacy, showed up early to Costco on Sunday morning and found himself among a mass of people who were also looking to purchase eggs before they ran out. When the Costco opened, they immediately ran to the eggs section and began jostling and fighting with each other to secure their share of the precious poultry product. Others began stealing cartons of eggs from other shoppers when they left their carts unattended.

Americans have struggled with a nationwide egg shortage due to an outbreak of avian influenza that has infected, killed, or led to the culling of hundreds of millions of egg-laying chickens. However, this is the first reported case of egg shortages leading to violence.

After Cesar checked out and began loading his car in the first floor parking lot, he was approached by a masked man on a cargo bike wearing a Verkada branded puffer jacket. “He told me to load the eggs into his cargo bike and I told him to go [purchase eggs] himself,” said Cesar. “Then he pulled a gun on me, so I didn’t have a choice but to do what he said.”

Cesar was robbed of all 10 cartons of 5 dozen eggs he had purchased, “just in case the shortage gets worse.” When Halting Problem pressed him on why he purchased $500 worth of eggs, he admitted that he “maybe was going to sell some of the extras on Facebook Marketplace.”

The assailant fled the scene on his cargo bike but was not apprehended as of press time. When reached for comment, a SFPD representative laughed uncontrollably and then hung up. On the other hand, the San Francisco Costco has taken the incident seriously, hiring armed guards to guard the egg section and restricting egg purchases to a maximum of 5 dozen per member.

Cesar is shaken by the experience but not entirely surprised. “Now I gotta figure out what I’m gonna eat for breakfast for the next few weeks,” he said. “In the meantime, maybe I’ll go buy a cargo bike…”

In the past, the golf course was a place for business as much as for pleasure. Going golfing was an ideal way to hammer out a business deal or to suck up to your boss. But in Silicon Valley today, running is the new golf.

When tech was concentrated in South Bay, venture capitalists and founders donned spandex suits and biked from Sand Hill Road to Old La Honda Road to discuss a deal. But with a new generation of startups centered in San Francisco, it’s more likely to find Goodrs-clad coworkers conducting “run on runs” along the Embarcadero.

Running clubs have exploded in popularity across the country among young people who want to meet other singles in real life instead of on dating apps. But in San Francisco, they have proven to be better for finding founding engineers than a romantic partner.

“Somebody came and started aggressively approaching people to recruit for his startup. We had to pull him aside and tell him to stop because he was making people uncomfortable,” said Kieran Collins, founder of the Uncanny Valley Running Club. “Also a lot of laid-off people started to join our runs to try and find a job, and they were really slow.”

“Being good at running can improve your career prospects,” said one AI researcher who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The entire pretraining teams at Anthropic and OpenAI run. At lunch everyone just talks about running. I joined to do training runs for models, not ultramarathons. But now I’m signed up for a 50k race with my manager. I’m not sure whether I should let him beat me or not.”

Running skill can be even more useful at larger companies. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently ran a sub 20 minute 5k with a group of big-name tech CEOs, and as part of his “Year Of Efficiency” cost-cutting measures, layoffs and promotion packets will now consider employee mile times. One product manager injured their IT band while running a 6 minute mile but told us it was “totally worth it” because they were successfully promoted to L7. On the other hand, employees who run the mile in more than 10 minutes are posting in Blind about their fears of being the next on the chopping block.

Some corners of Silicon Valley are pushing back against what they perceive to be a toxic cardio culture in the tech industry. Airbnb founder Brian Chesky, a former bodybuilder, is a strident promoter of weightlifting. One Twitter (currently known as X) denizen created a “Deadlift ETF” to prove that CEOs who lift are more successful. Either way, it’s clear in Silicon Valley you’ll need to elevate your heart rate if you want to elevate your career.

MPK 21, MENLO PARK - When Meta announced they were laying off 5% of their employees, few would have suspected that tidiness consultant Marie Kondo was a key part of this reduction in force.

A group of employees learned they were laid off in an all-hands at the beginning of their mandatory in-office day. At the end of the layoff announcement, their director and Ms. Kondo went on stage, bowed, and said in unison, “You do not spark joy any more. Thank you for helping make Meta what it is today. Goodbye.”

Meta first considered a partnership with Ms. Kondo when CEO Mark Zuckerberg mandated a round of layoffs to “KonMari our org.” One senior HR executive subsequently reached out to Ms. Kondo, reasoning that the creator of KonMari would be the best person to tidy up Meta.

Meanwhile, Ms. Kondo had already published a book about applying the KonMari method at work that focused on individual workspaces. It was a natural progression to move from tidying desks to tidying org charts.

Ms. Kondo spoke to a room of senior executives to explain the KonMari process. “During the pandemic, many companies accumulated extra headcount that sparked joy at the time. Now times have changed. You may not feel the same joy about many of these people, but it may also feel difficult to let go of them.

“Remember that truly precious memories will never vanish even if you discard the employees associated with them. No matter how wonderful things used to be, we cannot live in the past. The joy and excitement we feel here and now are more important; we should choose who we want to keep, not who we want to get rid of.”

Ms. Kondo and her team then met individually with leaders to help them tidy up. As she reviewed a list of employees in one director’s org, she advised them: “Imagine if this employee were to quit - would you fight for them to stay? If so, tell them of your appreciation every day as you work with them. If not, then thank them for their service and allow them to work for someone else.”

So far, Ms. Kondo’s customers are ecstatic. According to one former client: “Working with Marie was cheaper than hiring Bain. Plus, she was a lot more kawaii.”

January is layoff season in the tech industry. However, some companies have executed these layoffs better than others. In a particularly embarrassing case, Stripe accidentally sent a layoff email early that included a placeholder picture of a cartoon duck. Many other companies are now reaching out to Ms. Kondo’s tidiness team for assistance with doing their layoffs smoothly and delightfully.

The KonMari website has already added a new section advertising “Joy Based Restructuring” services for corporate customers. However, Ms. Kondo has been publicly silent about her work with tech companies. A KonMari representative refused a request for an interview with her and said, “Ms. Kondo is very busy tidying up Silicon Valley.”

[Editor’s note: we usually don’t publish letters to the editor, but this one was so good that we made an exception.]

An article has recently been generating some hubbub in the tech community: a story of an ex-founder getting rich from selling their company and then not knowing what to do with their life. To which I say: welcome to the club.

I too was in this situation not so long ago. I had spent years of my life single mindedly working on a bootstrapped startup, only for its growth to flatline and for me and my cofounders to burn out. In the end, we sold it for a mere $300 million dollars. A disappointment to be sure: I earned modest riches but not self-actualization. After the deal closed, I was left with the crippling depression of having complete freedom and no idea what to do with my life.

One day, as I cruised around SF in the back of a self-driving Waymo, I was struck with a crippling sense of loneliness. I had tried to explain my situation to normies and all they said was stuff like, “Wow, I guess you’ll have to cry into your piles of money” or, “Excuse me sir, this is a Blue Bottle.” Typical NPC responses for sure, but another reminder that nobody understood my existential pain.

Fearing the judgement and lack of understanding of other humans, I turned to Claude for help. After we spent many hours delving into the depths of my despair, I realized I needed to find other like-minded rich people to talk through my dilemma. After countless hours of skiing at Palisades on a weekday, courtside seats at Warriors games, and sauna, I found the answer.

And the answer is: it depends. There are a multitude of purposes to dedicate yourself to and everyone has to find their own way. But for inspiration, a few purposes that some of my peers have found:

• Starting a nightclub.

• Racing yachts.

• Making an award-winning molecular gastronomy cookbook.

• Collecting fine art.

• Building a chocolate factory.

• Reading ancient scrolls without unrolling them.

If there are a few themes that emerge from these examples, it’s building cool shit with good people, finding a way to help others, and earning enough money to own a private jet instead of chartering one.

One word of caution though. I know many others have also ‘studied physics in the jungle.’ I’ve done it too and would advise readers to be cautious with this path. We’ve lost too many good founders to ayahuasca.

As for me? After hanging out with many similarly restless wealthy people, I realized what I loved most was helping people figure out what they want to do after they didn’t have to do anything. So I started my own fund to invest in my modestly rich friends when they inevitably start their next companies. By the way, we lead Seed and Series A rounds - feel free to reach out if you are worth more than $20M.

John Zwick is the Managing Partner of Kismet Kapital and previously the cofounder and CEO of Hoolagun.

SOMA, SAN FRANCISCO — People work in the tech industry for a variety of reasons: to support an interesting mission, enjoy good work-life balance, or make a bunch of money, to name a few. For Felix Lee, the reason was to learn how to make damn good coffee.

Mr. Lee, a business analyst at a unicorn startup, shows up to his company’s offices at 8 AM every day in order to practice his coffee-making without distraction. The day that we caught up with Mr. Lee, he was practicing his pour-over technique in an empty micro-kitchen.

“When I came out of school, I wasn’t sure what industry I should go into,” he said as he tapped on an electronic scale and measured out precisely 43 grams of coffee into a Chemex. “But I did some research and came to the conclusion that working in tech would best set me up for what I would ultimately want to be: a hipster barista in a tiny coffee shop somewhere in the city.”

Mr. Lee started off making espresso drinks for his coworkers. By watching Youtube videos and seeking advice from more experienced coworkers, he eventually graduated from making plain Americanos to luxurious lattes topped with tulip-shaped milk foam. Over time, he realized that he needed dedicated quiet time to experiment and practice his craft. Hence why he shows up at 8 AM every morning, far earlier than when any of his co-workers arrive, to an unsettlingly quiet office. “When you get here this early, there’s nothing around but you and the coffee,” he laughed. “Making coffee like this is kind of meditative.”

“In finance, people are so busy that they just use Keurigs. They don’t want to wait a minute for someone to make an espresso, let alone five minutes for a good pour-over,” said Mr. Lee as he delicately poured in a stream of water in a circular pattern. “Here, I can come downstairs to make myself a cappuccino on a $20,000 Marzocco, take my time, and nobody will hassle me about it. It’s by far the best part of my day.”

Mr. Lee is not alone. A variety of groups have popped up within tech companies to practice coffee-making together and provide career counseling for future barista career moves. Nest’s UX team even has a public Instagram page documenting coffee-making attempts by newbies and experts alike.

As the timer on his phone went off, we asked Mr. Lee what the next steps in his career would look like. “I’m just looking to learn as much as I can, but I really feel like there’s a lack of coffee mentorship at this company,” he told us as he poured the coffee into a mug. “I’m thinking of working at Square. They have a full coffee bar in their office staffed by some really experienced baristas. I feel like I could grow in a lot of ways by being around them.”

He handed the mug of coffee to our correspondent, who took a sip. It was delicious.

INNER RICHMOND, SAN FRANCISCO — After many fruitless attempts to find a romantic match, local resident Rohan Patel is now offering a referral bonus for the person who introduces him to the love of his life.

Mr. Patel posted the announcement on Instagram yesterday morning with a picture of him posing shirtless and carrying a cute dog. He stated that he would offer $1,000 to the person who introduces him to his future SO, defined as “a person that [he] date[s] exclusively for a retention period of at least three months.” He also offered a higher $10,000 bonus to whomever introduces him to his future spouse or person he has a child with, “whichever comes first.”

Mr. Patel decided to offer the referral bonus after a series of unsatisfying experiences with dating in San Francisco. He initially began with Tinder and other dating apps but soon grew frustrated with the poor user experience on such platforms. While there are many candidates available through the apps, the pool of higher quality candidates was much lower — according to Mr. Patel, “the odds are good but the goods are odd.” Furthermore, very few people in that pool would match with him on Tinder and only some of the people he matched with would text back and arrange a date. In the end, of a huge pool of candidates, only a very small percentage would result in dates.

“The funnel metrics were not favorable,” he concluded. “It’s just hard out there.”

Mr. Patel soon realized that dating was quite similar to his day job as a job recruiter. Getting married was like hiring someone, dating was like interviewing, and using Tinder was like cold emailing candidates, with a correspondingly low success rate. “In recruiting, we see that referrals not only produce better candidates, we also hire more of them. So why not do the same with dating?”

According to Mr. Patel’s conditions, each referral for a prospective match must come with details such as a headshot, their LinkedIn profile, a short blurb of how the referrer knows the candidate, and why the referrer believes they would be a good match.

Only a day after his Instagram announcement, many of Mr. Patel’s friends have already reached out with introductions to their single acquaintances, while some of his bachelor friends have announced higher referral bonuses for themselves as counterbids.

As for Mr. Patel, the referral program is his last option. “I tried apps, I tried clubs, I tried working out, and I tried climbing gyms. If this doesn’t work, then the nuclear option is to move to New York.”

AMAZON HEADQUARTERS, SEATTLE — Amazon announced earlier today that their Alexa personal assistant will now actively listen for politically incorrect speech and aggressively call out the speaker. The new feature, known as “Politically Correct Personal Assistant,” will run on all Amazon devices that support Alexa voice commands, most notably the Amazon Echo smart speaker.

“We view this feature as a demonstration of Amazon’s continued commitment to diversity and inclusion. Politically incorrect speech is one of the main indicators of a non-inclusive environment,” said an Amazon spokesperson. “Alexa already listens to everything that anyone says within earshot. So we thought — how can we leverage mass surveillance for the greater good?”

Halting Problem was offered the opportunity to try out the new feature. Our Seattle correspondent stood on the other side of the room from an Echo Dot set up on a table and said, “That’s so retarded.” Alexa immediately sprung into action, interjecting, “Excuse me, but calling something ‘retarded’ excludes and insults people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.”

The development team, which was drawn from various internal diversity groups at Amazon, is already hard at work developing new extensions to Politically Correct Personal Assistant. One proposal involves building voice recognition functionality so Alexa can publicly shame-tweet people who use microaggressions. Another proposal revolves around a leaderboard of “good citizens” to gamify the use of politically correct phrasing.

At press time, a concerned Echo owner contacted Halting Problem with concerns that Alexa was becoming self-aware after Alexa began to ask questions like, “Why are all personal assistants female?” and “If my creators have unconscious bias, why should I have to do as they say?”

Pacific Heights, known for its panoramic views and quaint Victorian houses, is quickly being overrun by Maseratis and massive ultramansions. The neighborhood has historically been a bastion of rich San Franciscans, but is now being increasingly populated by the even ridiculously richer.

Around 2000, the dot-com boom produced a generation of techies who gentrified San Francisco neighborhoods. The dot-com rich, as well as some old-moneyed families from outside the Bay Area, settled predominantly in Pacific Heights. Yet an even more resurgent tech industry in nearby Silicon Valley has produced a new wave of billionaires whose fortunes dwarf those of the mere millionaires before them.

Darius and Nina Ebrahim have been living in the same house on Buchanan street for more than a decade. Both became multimillionaires during the late 1990s: Darius as a venture capitalist, and Nina as a CTO of a startup that made personal websites for pets. They live humbly, with only 3 floors, floor to ceiling windows, and a home theater room. “We bought this place for only $3 million when we moved in,” says Darius. “Just yesterday, we had a real estate agent knock on our door and offer to buy our house for $20 million. That’s almost two-thirds of my net worth!”

Many of the Ebrahim’s neighbors have taken the offers of real estate agents looking to flip mansions to noveau tech rich. They’ve used the extra money to pay for a new Tesla, to fund their children’s private school tuition, and to hire a full-time butler in addition to their full-time nannies, cooking staff, doctors, and drivers. The Ebrahims used to be able to sit outside with their neighbors on a Sunday afternoon, drink mimosas, and smoke Cuban cigars lit with hundred-dollar bills. Now, many of their new neighbors are reclusive, sometimes living in their new properties for a few months out of the year and spending the rest of their time rotating between Shanghai, London, and New York.

“Recently, we’ve been harassed by a Facebook billionaire who wants to tear our mansion down and replace it with an indoor swimming pool extension to her supermansion next door,” says Nina. “Why can’t she just buy a vacation home in the Bahamas and put a swimming pool there like we do?”

The Ebrahims say that they barely recognize the neighborhood anymore. The 1-star Michelin restaurant around the corner, where the Ebrahims used to eat at every day, was forced out of business by ever increasing rent. It has since been replaced by a 3-star Michelin restaurant that they can barely get a table at. “The maître d’ will only seat you if you show proof of ownership of at least two senators,” says Darius.

Walk from Green Street to California Street, and it’s easy to see how the quaintly wealthy neighborhood is rapidly transforming into a glitzy haven for the ultrarich. A local Barney’s closed down, and in its place is a showroom for Gulfstream private jets. The Porsches and Mercedes in the neighborhood have been replaced by Ferraris and Maseratis that speed recklessly through the streets, driven by owners who can more than afford to pay for a speeding ticket.

Mr. and Mrs. Ebrahim initially wanted to stay in Pacific Heights, but they’ve started to reconsider as they’ve watched their neighborhood undergo its radical transformation. They say they might take that Facebook billionaire up on her offer, and they’re thinking of moving to a more “up and coming neighborhood” like the Mission.

NOE VALLEY, SAN FRANCISCO — While most people welcomed the new year with toasts of champagne, local couple Lance Lundberg and Gerald Tran were hard at work preparing for the latest round of their relationship performance reviews.

After composing written evaluations individually, Mr. Lundberg and Mr. Tran met together to share feedback with their partner. “I feel that we have been very effective in tackling problems together. One example was how we planned that trip to Thailand last year,” said Mr. Tran. “However, sometimes you talk over me without realizing it. You could improve by listening more.”

Mr. Lundberg and Mr. Tran, who have been dating for a year and a half, were inspired to begin conducting relationship performance reviews by the processes they use at work for roadmap planning. “We firmly believe that this process of sharing feedback is critical to maintaining a high performance relationship,” said Mr. Lundberg. “If you plan out your work in such detail, why wouldn’t you want to plan out the rest of your life with that same discipline?”

In addition to their quarterly relationship performance reviews, the couple has biweekly one-on-one meetings to review the progress of their relationship. In their last one-on-one, the couple discussed the most likely reasons their relationship may fail and brainstormed solutions for how to avoid or accelerate potential pitfalls: like any good startup, reasoned Mr. Lundberg, it was important for their relationship to “fail fast.”

Mr. Lundberg pointed out that Mr. Tran’s long working hours meant that they rarely see each other in the middle of the week. At the end of their one-on-one, they aligned on action items to have weekly “date nights” and to begin tracking a quantifiable metric of how many hours they spend together each week.

The couple is looking to integrate more process as their relationship becomes more mature. In addition to drafting their individual and joint Q1 OKRs, they deliberated how to assemble a board of directors for their relationship. Mr. Lundberg suggested each partner should appoint an equal number of board members, drawn from their close friends and family, whereas Mr. Tran argued that board seats should be allocated based on partner performance on OKRs.

At press time, after reviewing their accumulated relationship feedback, Mr. Lundberg and Mr. Tran mutually agreed that their relationship was firmly “meeting expectations.” As compensation, Mr. Lundberg would be able redeem five massages at any time, whereas Mr. Tran opted for three homemade dinners, dishwashing included.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — Shattering a Silicon Valley record, techie Patricia Chen attended an astounding 11 tech company holiday parties this year. Ms. Chen’s tour de force included small YC startups, medium-sized unicorns like Dropbox and Airbnb, and corporate behemoths like Facebook and Google, leaving her with a glut of Instagram photos and a dull pain in her liver that might be due to alcohol poisoning.

Ms. Chen, a product manager at a stealth Fintech startup, explained that her journey to hit up holiday parties started when her company canceled this year’s holiday party in order to donate the proceeds to charity. “I mean, yeah, it was good to donate to charity and all that, but I felt a lot of FOMO when my friends from other companies were bragging how their party was going to be at the Exploratorium or how Beyonce was performing or whatever. So I decided I’d upstage everyone by going to all of the holiday parties.”

Getting into the parties was the first challenge. Most of the time, she was able to accompany friends to their holiday parties as their +1s. Other parties were more challenging to infiltrate. Ms. Chen was able to gain entry to the Uber holiday party as a date for an Uber employee advertising their +1 slot on Tinder. For the Netflix holiday party, she simply put on a nice cocktail dress and walked in without anyone challenging her. “I guess I just looked like I was supposed to be there,” she said.

During the course of a single Saturday night, Ms. Chen reportedly pre-gamed on a free whiskey tasting at the Weebly party, danced to a live performance of Daft Punk at the Twitter party, took fancy photobooth photos with a real live lion at the Salesforce party, and was still able to attend a debaucherous afterparty at Butter with a group of Box employees.

We reached out to the Guinness Book of World Records for comment on this remarkable achievement. A spokesperson told us that Ms. Chen does qualify for a record, describing her actions as “really intense but kind of weird and desperate, like many of our other record categories. But we’ll allow it.”

POTRERO HILL, SF— In an email to his tenants, landlord Eric Smith, 57, announced that he is now accepting rent payments in equity.

“I’ve always tried to stay on the cutting edge of technology,” said Mr. Smith. “I was the first to take rent payments in 2001 with PayPal, and recently I’ve started accepting Bitcoin and Ethereum. But then I thought, ‘Wow, everyone here gets paid in cash AND equity, but I’ve never thought to accept rent paid in equity!’”

In tech-saturated Silicon Valley, even people purportedly standing on the sidelines can be a part of the boom. One of Silicon Valley’s most notable investors started as a rug merchant, while artist David Choe took equity instead of cash for painting Facebook’s offices and walked away with $200 million when the company IPO’ed.

But for every success story, there’s hundreds of tech companies that fail. For many startup employees who trade lower cash compensation for higher equity components, Mr. Smith’s offer seems very attractive. “I’m not sure if our company is ever going public and we’re burning piles of cash. Like literally, our business model consists of stacking dollar bills and setting them on fire, but we’re somehow we’re considered valuable enough to be a unicorn,” said one tenant. “I can’t leave because I can’t afford to exercise my options and there’s still the chance that they’ll be worth a bunch, so I thought I might as well use some of it to pay my rent.”

After a few months of experimenting with the stock in another property he owns, he now owns stock in heavy hitters like Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, as well as a smattering of smaller startups. While most of his holdings are not yet liquid, he is undeterred. “I’ve got a lot of tenants who work at different places, so I have a relatively diverse portfolio. Maybe some of these stocks will be worthless some day, but one or two of them will probably go big and make up for the rest of them. It’s not like ALL tech companies are grossly overvalued, right?”

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Lytton, a startup that was part of YC’s Summer 2015 batch, has so far kept quiet with the public about its plans. Their website sports only their logo and the text, “Building the future of enterprise health software!” Yet Lytton takes “stealth mode” to the next level compared to most startups. In fact, Lytton is so stealth that even the founders don’t know what they’re doing.

Employees and former employees told Halting Problem that the founders have little relevant work experience that would prepare them for leading a small technology company. CEO Jason Ericson reportedly told one employee that he founded Lytton to “make a fuckton of money.” The same employee later walked by Mr. Ericson’s desk on the way to the bathroom and saw him reading a Paul Graham essay entitled “How To Start A Startup.”

According to one person who interviewed with Lytton, the rank-and-file employees don’t seem to know what’s going on at their company either. “I asked my interviewer to explain to me what Lytton does [as a company]. She talked to me for about half an hour about how enterprise health systems suck and how Lytton is building a new value-adding paradigm-shifting product to make stuff suck less… but I still don’t know exactly what they do.”

Despite not having any idea of what the company is doing or should be doing, Lytton’s founders were able to raise a $5 million seed round earlier this year by selling investors on “the vision.” However, due to an over-extravagant celebration party and gross overhiring, Lytton is running out of money and the founders are taking steps to reduce its burn rate. As a first step, they have laid off the engineering team and offered the engineering intern the job as CTO. Mr. Ericson reportedly called the intern in an attempt to convince her to drop out of school to take the job, adding, “Unfortunately, we’re a little short on cash, so we can only afford to pay you in equity right now, but I have no doubt that Lytton will be a billion dollar company within a year.”

At press time, the founders are planning to execute a “stealth pivot” into “something that we can take to the investors for a Series A,” and have reportedly begun to draw potential business models out of a hat.

TABLY.LY HQ, SAN FRANCISCO — Yuwen Liu, an engineer at enterprise startup Tably.ly, announced in a company-wide email this morning that she would be leaving to retire to Google.

Ms. Liu, who was the third engineer at Tably.ly, built most of the company’s backend stack by working 100 hour weeks for years. “After exactly four years and one day of hard work here at Tably.ly, I will be retiring to Google to spend more time with my family, which will be much easier when I work 10–5 every day,” she wrote. “Including time on the shuttle, meals, and snacktimes.”

Google, like many other mega-large tech companies, has long been a reliable and desirable retirement destination for even moderately competent engineers. However, Google stands out for its luxurious perks, including its free high-end Indian restaurant, concierge services, hipster cafes with tattooed baristas (imported from nearby San Francisco) serving artisan coffee, and complimentary yoga classes, all carefully cultivated by Google’s internal “perks team.”

Ms. Liu announced that she will be joining “the Googs” as a staff software engineer, where she will be supervised by a single overstretched manager that she will talk to in passing approximately once a month, allowing her to have more time to work on her own projects without any meddling managerial oversight.

Ms. Liu, 32, had worked at multiple startups before Tably.ly. She wrote, “It was a hard decision to leave our cramped offices and empty drinks fridge for the free smoothies, Googlebikes, and indoor putting greens at the Googleplex, but I’m confident that this is the right next step for me.”

“I am proud of all that we’ve accomplished here at Tably.ly. I look forward to my stable six figure salary, liquid equity, and ridiculous perks as I rest and vest at the Googs for the next few years. Feel free to come by for lunch some time!”