A mini photo dump from my August travel to San Francisco, which was my first time on the west coast since 2014.
All photos here are taken with a Pentax SP loaded with Fujifilm 200. I liked the idea of contrasting the next wave of automation and human technology with capturing them with a fully mechanical camera.
I also had my first-time Waymo experience. I intentionally tried not watching any videos, or read others’ experiences from Waymo since launch1. My most optimistic projection was that the first-time experience will be so smooth and human-level that it will feel underwhelming, as if I’m just sitting in a normal human-driven car. It was exactly what the rides felt like.
1 Inspired by the story I once heard that Putnam tries to avoid learning about the distinction between Elm and Beech, so he can keep using this example. Anyways, that’s quite off topic even for a post like this.
The other recurring topic during the trip, especially among people who haven’t been in SF for a while, is how the billboards driving into SF are exclusively AI companies. I liked the diversity, though: it ranged from genuinely good ads, to confusing slogans, to those that are outright antisocial.
I also thought I should be recording those on film, a dying medium more than a century old
I must say that the cityscape itself is quite dull and disappointing, especially for the technological center of the world. The people and the atmosphere is quite magical, though.
At SFO.