About — Burnoff.fyi

What is Burnoff.fyi?

The Bay Area is full of events that will satiate your inner nerd and help you better understand the world — but they are maddeningly hard to find. Scattered across dozens of websites, buried in newsletters, or hidden behind venue-specific calendars. Almost as if obscured by fog.

Burnoff.fyi clears away that fog. We aggregate events from universities, civic institutions, bookshops, museums, and independent organisers across the Bay Area and surface them in one place — easy to search, easy to skim, and updated daily. Lectures, salons, book talks, bar-hosted talks, science nights, forums, and more.

The site is a personal project, hand-curated and built with love for the Bay Area and the curious minds who live here. If you find it useful, tell a friend.

Built by Joshua Wiese ↗.

How to use the site

Filters

Use the dropdowns to narrow by topic, vibe, location, or time window.

Topic ▾ Vibe ▾ Where ▾ When ▾

Click an option once to include it — a pill appears. Click the same option again to exclude it instead (shown struck through). Mix and match freely.

Culture & Humanities × Science & Tech ×

The search bar matches against event titles, venues, and descriptions as you type — useful when you have something specific in mind.

Search…

Ask AI

This functionality will make recommendations from the events listed on Burnoff.fyi, based on your query, and give you reasons for each recommendation.

Ask AI

Views

Three densities to suit how you browse. Switch between them with the toggle in the top-right of the event list.

Compact — tight rows, ideal for scanning a long list. Click any row to expand it. This is where keyboard navigation shines.

Preview — the full card with title, time, venue, and a short description.

Expanded — description surfaces upfront so you can read without clicking.

Images — event art shows alongside cards when the source provides it, linked to the original event page. Use this button to hide or show images.

Map — on wide screens, a small venue map slides out beside an open card, with a link to open the location in Google Maps. Use this button to hide or show.

Source — on wide screens, a panel about where the event came from slides out beside an open card, with a link to the source. Use this button to hide or show.

Keyboard navigation

Press j to move down and k to move up through events. Press Enter or o to open the event link. Press Esc to clear your selection.

Dark mode

Click the Burnoff logo in the top-left to open the menu, then toggle dark mode on or off. Your preference is remembered across visits.

Adding to your calendar

Each event has an Add button. Click it to save to Google Calendar, Outlook, or download an .ics file for Apple Calendar.

Add

What are the sources?

We try to pull events automagically from the sources below.

Are we missing something? Let us know.

How is AI used?

How it works

Whether you see burnoff as fog lifting off the bay or a single ember glowing in the dark, it's the same small fire doing the work — and two AI models tend it.

As events pour in from dozens of sources in dozens of formats, Claude Haiku 4.5 reads each one and sorts it: assigning categories, tagging its vibe, tidying the description, and setting aside anything that isn't really a talk or gathering for the curious. When you use Ask AI, Gemini 2.5 Flash takes your query, looks over everything coming up on burnoff, and hands back a few events that fit — each with a reason why.

AI recommendations are limited

Burnoff is free, and it's a personal passion project. Every AI answer costs money, so we've added limits to cap our compute costs.

Privacy

We don't store your questions or the answers — nothing from Ask AI is saved between sessions. The only thing we keep is anonymous totals, like how many questions get asked and what they cost, so we can keep an eye on the bill.