I'm airbnbing in Palo Alto right now for two weeks and my stuff is already being shipped cross country from NYC, so I'm already here, the question is should I be looking for a place in SF or the broader south bay for my long term rental if I want to take part in a lot of the tech culture, in particular a lot of the ML/AI work going on?<p>Is it like NYC where if you live in Jersey City, you basically never go to NYC? So in this case that would be if I don't live in SF, I basically never go to it? Or is it like as long as I have a car and I'm cool with traffic then whatever?<p>How's Redwood City?
Depends on what you mean by tech culture. That could be anything from IPA snob brewpubs to ML meetups at Goog or Meta or unaffiliated gatherings at Ihop to working 60 hours a week at Palantir or Tesla or Nv.
The peninsula is close enough to SF and PAMTVSVALE. Rents in the area are a human rights abuse as always.
You can make a Google map with pins of all the locations where events interesting to you usually happen to understand better where you can be.
meetup.com has a lot of events to look at.