Riley Walz built a real-time parking cop tracker using SF's public ticket database — the city killed it in four hours

Riley Walls, in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him in. He has been being a rascal the last 48 hours. Uh Riley, welcome to the show. How you doing? Thank you for having me. The most viral man on X, the the current thing. Yeah. Take us through the current thing, the current project. Uh what did you build?

What inspired it? What's the reception been? Is are those GPUs on fire? Are the servers on fire? Is it staying up? Walk me through it all. Yeah, I always got a project kind of going on.

Um, yesterday's project was I I figured out you could scrape the parking ticket system in San Francisco to reveal more or less the real-time locations of of parking officers as they wrote tickets. Okay. Um, so I made a website called Find My Parking Cops. Looks very similar to Apple's Find My Friends.

Um, and yeah, you can see where where the cops were as they as they travel around SF. Take me a level deeper on What inspired this? Did you get a lot of tickets? Is that what inspired this? I actually don't even have a car. My roommates, uh, a lot of my friends have cars and yeah, I mean, you hear a lot about tickets.

It's pretty notorious in the city. So, yeah. Uh, yeah. Take me through, uh, one layer deeper of the technical side.

Did uh uh is this just a function of uh the SF parking ticket office integrating with some sort of you know it or ERP system that basically as soon as the tickets written it gets loaded into a database and then is that is there a public API?

Is this stuff that you can just look up on the on like an actual website or are you finding like an entirely private API? Yeah, it's all it's all public. The magic is um right when they write the ticket it goes up online and you know you have to enter the ID number to be able to see the ticket.

Like there's a website you can you can pay your ticket and when you pay you can see a copy of the ticket. So um I figured out that the ID numbers for all the tickets were predictable meaning that um like there's a there's a pattern to it.

So I could um I knew kind of the pattern and I could see okay like this ticket to simplified a lot like if like ticket number like 83 was just written I know 84 is going to be next. So, I just keep checking for the next one.

Um, it's a little a little more technical than that, but like, you know, it's it's pretty magical when predictable IDs are a thing. Like, there's so many cool ideas you can you can scrape knowing that. So, talk to me about your actual workflow. Is there are you using vibe coding tools?

Is Well, before that, what what's the current state of things?

SF obviously uh you could potentially really you know if enough people in SF started using this it would be could I would hope that the mayor would write you a letter of of recommendation for this like you should win a medal for this yeah you should this is the highest calling yeah you should get the key to the city for this but what's the actual response from SF been if anything yeah so I I do websites like these that are provocative a lot and I think a lot about framing it and like how I want to present it to people so I thought this would be maybe a little like you know mildly viral among people in SF, but it actually went pretty viral like around the world yesterday.

Uh within 4 hours, the the SF government mobilized and they changed their site to prevent me from getting the data. Like only four hours it took for them to prevent me from uh make the site useless.

So yeah, the site is not up anymore because they changed the way that the data those four sweet hours though were everyone was free of free of parking tickets.

It actually is if if if if it have gone less viral and not and people hadn't, you know, if they hadn't noticed so quickly, I can imagine this being highly somebody's pulling up, they want to grab a coffee, you know, they're look, they just check the map, they can run in and out.

It's not a not a not a I I can see it actually being pretty valuable. Yeah. Walk me through some of like the how you like to build these projects, how you like to host them, um what what problems you typically run through. would love to know just a little bit about your stack these days. Yeah, I mean use AI a lot.

It makes things so much faster. I have like a gazillion ideas. These are all sticky notes for different like data ideas I want to make. So just kind of every weekend I'll try to knock one off um in my free time. Um I you guys talked about you saw the other one I made. Panama playlists. Oh yeah. Oh you did that.

We're on that. You scraped my data. I'm glad glad you I was wondering like how did I make the cut on this? Like these are some big people on on there. Uh, yeah. What was the secret to that? Because it only Yeah. Was there any Was there any strange fallout? I mean, it was hilarious to read into people's music tastes.

I don't you you wouldn't have noticed this, but my that the playlist that I had public that you featured was like seven songs I found that had like obscure references to venture capital. So, when I saw it, I was like, I don't listen to any of When did I make this playlist? I don't listen to any of these.

In like 2021, I just started collecting or whatever. Yeah. I don't know. It was just kind of tried trying to highlight like how much data has out there on Spotify and like people just forget about it and yeah, sorry you guys were part of it. But no, we thought I thought it was hilarious.

I think it was it it was pretty amusing. I think a lot of people um had a kick looking at it. So yeah, what was the what was the reaction from either the people that were in it or Spotify directly?

Has there been a change to the API or because we saw this even during the last election like the Venmo public records, people forget about this stuff all the time.

There's kind of a question about how tech platforms deal with like default privacy because there was an era when everything was public and then people started closing things down, becoming a little bit more private, but it's a it's a it's an interesting like user design problem for the big companies to shift. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, in case your audience didn't see it, I I scraped like the public playlist listening data of of notable figures on Spotify and like there like you guys were on it, like Sam Alton was on it, bunch of politicians like Mike Johnson and JD Vance and like so many people just have stuff open on there.

Um they haven't changed stuff yet. I feel like Spotify probably will change like the default behavior of playlist because right now they're public by default which is kind of crazy. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I mean it was a lot of people took their playlist down.

Um, kind of was a Yeah, interesting to see like kind of a lot of people embrace like Palmer Lucky. He was like, "Yeah, these are my songs and I love them. " Great. So, did you have to guess some sort of code or was did you just literally just search my profile and then it was there?

Yeah, I mean for you guys a lot of it was just like real names. I just searched your game and then I found a profile with your picture like probably a sim because then I could see like you guys followed each other or something. Probably done.

Uh what's walk us through some of some of the other uh stuff you've done recently? Uh and then I want to talk about uh yeah specifically what's the most underrated project or most underappreciated project you've worked on where you love it.

It's one of your dearest children but you feel like it hasn't gotten enough love.

H uh one like interesting one was a few months ago I I this was also very out there but you know you guys know looks maxing um I I made a site called looks mapping where I I scraped the Google maps reviews of restaurants in New York SF and LA and then I ran the profile pictures of the reviewers through a very jank attractiveness model and then I made an aggregate um map of like all these restaurants like okay This restaurant is usually composed of like sixes or whatever out of 10.

Very awful the idea and premise, but it was kind of funny. That would make anybody mad. Yeah, you can you can you can glean a lot of just information cuz I al also had an age map. You could, you know, get their age from the pro picture roughly and and gender too.

So you can see which restaurants had like the most men or women in in in a city like I don't know. What kind of pattern like h how much did it track with just the general hype around restaurants? like what what did you notice? Yeah, I mean like the oldest restaurant in SF is at a country club.

Um like the most um like male restaurant is a gay bar. The most female one's like a brunch spot. Like it all kind of fits when you look at it. Predictable. That feels like a product that maybe it needs a little polish, but could just be something that would actually add value to the Google Maps experience.

Has have big tech companies reached out to you and said, "Hey, come work for us? " Not for that. There's been a couple like smaller maps that are like, "Oh, you should maybe add this. " And I think they should.

Yeah, I think this would be cool to I feel like it's too politically risky for Google, but like definitely a smaller setup could do it. It'd be useful. Yeah.

I feel like even if you dialed back uh some of the framing on what you're building, like there's there's there's product insight there and there's like novel features that would surprise and delight. And I feel like that's kind of um what what what a lot of these projects like put on display. Um what were you doing?

What were you doing before all these experiments? Yeah. Does this pay the bills? Do do you have a full-time job? Like it does not. Yeah. I I I have a full-time job doing like data stuff that's more commercially viable. Um I also I mean like you guys talked to Gabe Wely of Mischief. Yeah. Yeah.

I was an intern there uh Mafia which was like very I mean you guys can kind of see like all this is very inspirational. Very inspired by mischief. Yeah. Yeah. The chat is literally saying he's like mischief for tech projects. Lol. Like people have clocked it for sure.

I firsthand I got to see up close how they they operate. They're like incredible people. Yeah. So you were at Mischief and you said I need to pursue data science. Yeah, that was my calling.

I think data is like really cool and it's cool that you can combine it with like Mischief elements to make like weird things like this parking.

Butter, let's let's uh I don't I don't It feels like you could talk through some ideas you have without giving away too much alpha just because a lot of I don't know if I I doubt people would would steal your ideas since a lot of them are like don't make uh are you're not doing this to make money but uh you want to talk through any work workshop any with us?

Yeah, let me see. Uh oh yeah, what you got on the board? All right. So, one one like terrible idea that I'll probably never build because it's awful is um there's a um OpenAI has like a um API endpoint for like how um like a moderation endpoint for how bad a piece of text is.

It will like return back like a string of like you know is this some harassment or is this like racism or whatever. I don't know. Yeah. The horrible idea is like somebody should make a leaderboard um where you like have to type in a string of text and you want to like actually hit every single one of these categories.

Say the most offensive as possible. You have to create the most offensive string of text in history in as few characters as possible as many people as possible. Yeah. Horrible. But horrible. But certainly I I think you might not need to disclose what was actually said.

You could have it be anonymous, but yeah, you it would certainly spark creativity. I mean, Run was talking about this, how there are certain strings of text that just go viral every time they're posted, no matter when they're posted, no matter who posts them. Um, these little insights.

We did this project, Banger Archive, where we took the best posts by certain people, just screenshotted them, and just said banger, and they would get another 10,000 likes every time. Yeah. We had posts that would get 50, you know, an order of magnitude more likes than the original post.

And it was like a naval post about like you should work like a lion like you know take rest and then work really hard and it's just like these universal truths that like just continue to deliver value. What else? What else you got? What else you got? What else is on the board? Give us some other stuff.

Um because I feel like 4chan would like oneshot your leaderboard. They'd figure out there's like there's four words. You put these together and make every person on earth mad. Yeah. No, it' be it'd be terrible. Um, one idea, this is something that has to do with parking tickets here.

Um, I also found out that like vandalism citations have like a similar setup in the city. So, I I was able to scrape like half a million pictures of of graffiti that cops took. Oh, interesting. So, I think it'd be cool to make a website that shows graffiti art through the lens of a of a cop in San Francisco.

They took by they took on their on their phone themselves. Yeah.

It feels like a lot of your projects touch on uh touch on like public works projects public like like cities like data in cities and I'm wondering if you have a view on like uh should cities be more open to the hacker culture actually embrace some of this stuff like some of the stuff that you're building is like very close to just like a tool that would make life in a particular city easier and yet cities are notorious for long lines of the DMV and and not being the most techforward organizations or entities.

Uh how do you think about um actually like how cities deliver tech services? Yeah, I think there's a lot there like um I think the the asset government actually has a pretty good handle on this. They have lots of data sets that they publish uh pretty frequently and there's a lot to work with there.

Like they they publish like 911 calls um with like a 10-minute delay. Um you can see kind of like an anonymized data set of what people are calling on one for which is kind of cool. Like there's lot lots of things like that nobody really knows about but um there's things there.

Um would you like in a perfect world in a in a perfect world would one of these you do it for fun and then and then you discover some like enduring business or do you like just doing one idea after the next? Yeah.

I mean all these ideas are just things I find interesting to myself and you know usually that means somebody else will find interesting too if I post online. Um, I think it's just like an outlet to be creative and it's nice to have distinct like work work and like this is more fun work.

But yeah, no, definitely be cool if something like that happened. Any any ideas? Are you are you capital constrained on anything?

Like if you had 25 grand you would you would do because I feel like at this point there's enough people are ourselves included we would we would uh uh as long as it was not uh offensive we would happily chip in to to make possible. There is.

Yes, there I I I need 33K for a project next May um for a very fun stunt in San Francisco. Okay. If anyone likes to talk Yeah. All right, let's talk we'll talk offline. We don't want to we don't have to spoil it. Last story I want to talk about.

I I didn't re I didn't put it together until just now that you're the person behind New York's hottest steakhouse that was fake. Tell me that story because I remember it happening and I didn't put it together until just now. Yeah. You talked to the the my co-conspirator Moran, the the archaeology guy if you Yeah. Wow.

No way. Wow. Yeah. No, that was an incredible like one of the best nights of my life. We had so many things go wrong, but like somehow it just happened to go right. We we um long story short, we lived in a house together in New York. Moran made stakes and then we made a Google Maps listing called Moran Steakhouse.

And then um all our friends started writing these bizarre fivestar reviews like you know I converted out of like Hinduism so that way I could try some of his beef or like he came in like drenched in blood from upstate fresh with a fresh cow like like really bizarre reviews but people in New York thought it was real cuz the dining culture there is crazy and we had this huge weight list over a couple years that we built up.

So we actually opened it for one night. We opened a real restaurant fully permitted. I was like licensed by the government to actually open up a restaurant. Wow. Um we had 120 guests come thinking it was real. It was like humongous operation logistics wise, but it somehow ended up well.

We did not get How did the guests How did the guests take it? What were the reasons it was a joke? Most of them were pretty good. Like I don't think people really realized it was fake. We We wanted people to find out it was fake in the Times and they read it about the article New York Times.

Um, and a lot of people did thought it was kind of a weird restaurant, but they thought it was like, okay, this is just how things are. It's like cool and avantgard, right? It's like edgy, new, and different and popup. What did you guys break? Did you guys break even on it?

Like did you did you end up did you sell enough stake to to No, no, we uh we we spent like 16k and then um made like 13k. So we lost like 3k but for the amount of we got like it was it was viral everywhere. But that New York Times piece is forever. It is. Yes. Yeah. Yes. The great idea. Amazing. All right.

Well, we will we'll message you. We'll we'll figure out how to how to make this talk we'd love to talk about SF stunt. That' be fantastic happen. Uh and uh keep up the great work. Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon, Riley. Thank you guys. Thanks for joining. Cheers.