Coby
@Cobylefko
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Working on creating better, more beautiful places to live in. Developer, Writer, Urbanist, Professor, Optimist. Check out my writing below!
Brooklyn, NY
Joined September 2018
It's a hopeful work about our ability to create places today that are as good as have ever existed. Our best days are not behind us. All it takes is a little bit of Optimism to get started! Check out the link on Amazon below!! https://t.co/janlM4lIBC
amazon.com
Tracing the history of the built environment in the United States from the rise of urbanization in the Industrial Revolution to the present day, explores why our communities look the way they do, and...
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Something that's really surprised me in Japan is how frequently I see younger kids...everywhere. On the back of bikes with their parents, walking home from school, & grabbing snacks. Cities are designed for families to be integrated within them, not segregated as in the states.
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Our AI-powered platform helps you deliver digital innovation faster and with less risk by providing a fundamentally better approach to test automation.
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Fuller context: A city safe enough where a kid can bike on their own to a micro retailer underneath a train station widely accessible to the rest of the region, or where living next to a major station is affordable enough for families to benefit from all of these amenities
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Western cities should work tirelessly until scenes like this one become as standard as they are in Japan
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More exploring and observations to come, but for now, I'm going to appreciate the city for what it is, not what I first expected it to be. A real city, not an open air museum in totality, full of layers of tradition, contradictions, and delight.
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Corporations have no loyalty to our flag, our faith, or our people... only to profit and power. Both parties have handed them control while fast-tracking a future where AI replaces workers and foreign labor floods the system. Humanity is being written out of the equation. We
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Most tourists come here not for the city itself, but for the temples, gardens, and proximity to nature (and they are magnificent). There isn't really a good Western equivalent, but when reframed this way, the quality of Kyoto is more impressive. It'd be like if one were to
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At first I was a bit disappointed, expecting (perhaps foolishly / unfairly) that it would be a Rome or Amsterdam in its comprehensive attraction But it's a modern city, bigger than San Diego, where several million people live & work. Seen this way, it becomes freshly exciting
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Kyoto has surprised me. I thought it would be more "beautiful" in the traditional sense of the word, filled with machiya and historic structures. While these exist in some places (and they're overrun), most of the city is more contemporary with history peppered in
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This is readily apparent downtown, the east village is the perfect distillation of this. Young corporate workers who also cosplay in bushwick a night or two this week. Where pockets of genuine intrigue still exist, they’re few and far between. New York is now for project
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apparently the bubble in people searching for ‘AI bubble’ has burst
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New York is decadent. While these trends have been going on for some time, they accelerated post covid. The city has gotten noticeably less serious, but also less creative, the worst of both worlds. Many new New Yorkers are living out sitcom-via-TikTok dreams, pure extraction
Signs NYC is definancializing: • Share of workers in finance went from 12% in 1990 to 7.7% now • NYC only got 19k finance jobs out of 233k created in last five years • JPMorgan employs more in TX than NY • national share of college educated and millionaires has fallen
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What’s that, tucked inside an inner lane within an inner lane? It couldn’t possibly be another cafe, could it? Dear friends, you already know the answer
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A collection of corner cafes, side street cafes, 1 meter wide cafes, and hidden in the back of apartment buildings on secret lane cafes. Few of which would be allowed in America, all of which should be!
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Premium men’s jewelry that elevates every fit. Black Friday deals live now!
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Oh, and there’s parking everywhere. Everywhere! Though I’m less car-phobic than most urbanists, It’s causing me to reconsider many of my priors. High lot coverage, very fine grained (200sf even), and oddly shaped lots along narrow streets are perfectly compatible with parking
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So many thoughts to share, but I’ll note to start that the architecture is far more eclectic than even I thought it would be, the urbanism better, and idiosyncrasies burst from every seam If you’re here, have recommendations, or any thoughts to share, let me know!
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Tokyo is far stranger, and far more wonderful than I could have expected It’s the most compelling city in the world
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One of my big projects last year was building a house! Strategy: 1) Buy the cheapest falling-down nightmare in cool downtown hood on a tiny 60'x24' lot, 2) tell the architect and structural engineer crazy things, 3) go up into the sky. Awesome knowing each bit in every wall. 1/5
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AI Agents vs. Chatbots: Why 'slow' is actually brilliant. 💡 From @NVIDIA GTC 2025 in Washington D.C., Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) (Co-founder, President & CEO of @Perplexity_ai ) joined host @PatrickMoorhead to discuss the future of AI workflows. Aravind explained that
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Beautiful. Have hope!
Per Philly YIMBY, building permits were issued last week for 42 mixed-use units at Frankford & Palmer. Plans call for a large ground-floor commercial space for this lot right next to Kalaya. This will be called "On the Parc" and is developed by Kassis & Co and designed by Gnome.
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Been talking about this with friends, for those of you who read, what percent of the books in your library / bookshelf have you read?
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And if it embraced an even higher density heritage, it would rival New York. I see nothing so much as missed potential in what could’ve, and arguably should have been, a proper global capital. The good news is we can decide to correct course at any moment.
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San Francisco could triple its population, massively improve quality of life, solve its homeless crisis, and become the most beautiful city in the world if it chose a midrise heritage to romanticize as opposed to a garage-and-Victorian one
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