Living well in San Francisco for cheap #
San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities on earth. I live here on a fraction of what my neighbors spend, and none of it involves suffering. It involves knowing which defaults are just a tax on not paying attention.
I pay $1,680 a month for an apartment that rents for $3,800 today. I get to SFO for $2.05 while everyone else pays $11 on BART or $60 on Uber. I have not bought socks in years, and I do not intend to. This site is where I write down exactly how, with the real numbers.
Alongside the frugality: cheap Chinese home cooking, plain-language explainers on how AI actually works, and write-ups of the apps I build.
Frugal SF #
Specific, tested tactics for living in an expensive city cheaply. Not “skip the latte.” Actual leverage.
- San Francisco rent control, from someone paying $1,680 for a $3,800 apartment, the biggest lever there is
- The $2.05 way to SFO: take SamTrans, not BART
- How to eat for free in San Francisco: the tech event circuit
- Cut your own hair: a $25 clipper pays for itself
- Furnish an SF apartment for almost nothing
All 13 articles in Frugal SF →
Cooking #
Cheap Chinese and home-style cooking: classic, easy dishes with the real ingredient list and honest notes on what to swap, skip, or simplify.
- Egg fried rice, the best use for leftover rice there is
- Tomato and egg stir fry, the most-cooked home dish in China
- Chinese dumplings the easy way, about $15 and it feeds six
- Mapo tofu, restaurant flavor at home-cooking price
AI #
Plain-language explanations of how modern AI actually works, no hype and no jargon.
- What is an AI agent?
- How large language models actually work
- Why LLMs hallucinate, and how to reduce it
- What is RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)?
Apps #
I build small apps and games, mostly solo. These are honest build write-ups: what I made, how it works, and what went wrong.
- An AI chat app that runs entirely on your phone
- Capybara Crossing: what shipping an arcade game taught me
- A private, on-device speech-to-text app with Whisper
More on who I am and why I write this in About.