"Without San Francisco, Star Wars wouldn't exist," says David Reat, the culture studies director of the architecture department at Glasgow's University of Strathclyde. SFGate reports: Lucas was born and raised in Modesto, where his father expected him to run the family stationery store once he turned 18, but Lucas instead left for Los Angeles,...

From the Washington Post's "Technology 202" newsletter: As tech giants move toward a world in which chatbots supplement, and perhaps supplant, search engines, the Microsoft executive assigned to make sure AI is used responsibly said the industry has to be careful not to break the business model of the wider web. Search engines citing and linking...

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal: Drunken-driving deaths in the U.S. have risen to levels not seen in nearly two decades, federal data show, a major setback to long-running road-safety efforts. At the same time, arrests for driving under the influence have plummeted, as police grapple with challenges like hiring...

An anonymous reader shared this report from SFGate: Late last year, tales of tech workers paying $700 a month for tiny "bed pods" in downtown San Francisco went viral. The story provided a perfect distillation of SF's wild (and wildly expensive) housing market — and inspired schadenfreude when the city deemed the situation illegal. But the provocative...

The Associated Press reports that an F-16 performing aerial combat tests at 550 miles per hour was "controlled by artificial intelligence, not a human pilot." And riding in the front seat was the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force... AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s,...

Last month Reuters reported that Venezuela's state-run oil company "plans to increase digital currency usage in its crude and fuel exports as the U.S. reimposes oil sanctions on the country, three people familiar with the plan said." [The oil company] since last year had been slowly moving oil sales to USDT, a digital currency also known as Tether...