iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 23/09/2026

If you know, you know. I got on at West 4th after Law Revue, meant to go to Port Authority, and woke up at 168th.

Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 22/09/2026

10. 7. The 7 has all of the problems of the 456, and the line is busy its whole length, so you're never going to get a seat to get some shuteye. Pass. /thread

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 22/09/2026

9. Shuttles (Franklin, Rockaway, 42nd St). Too short a ride to be able to take a nap on.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 22/09/2026

8. 456. Narrow, old trains with AC that often fails, AND it's even more crowded than the 123.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 22/09/2026

7. 123. Narrow, cramped, old trains with AC that often fails. Hard pass.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 22/09/2026

6. L. The L is way too busy to nap reliably. It still beats the numbered lines because the trains are bigger, but it's hard to get a seat unless you get on way out in Brooklyn. Unless you like napping standing up.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 22/09/2026

5. ACE. Now we're in the "yeah this is pretty mid" category. The trains have good AC (fine) but have way fewer seats (boo). Both the A and E have express segments (boo), and I've seen more crazy shit happen on the A train than on any other. All the good things are counterbalanced by the bad. Meh.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 22/09/2026

4. BDFM. There are express portions on the B, D and F, and you're more likely than not to end up in Timbuktu if you miss your stop while trying to nap. It ranks higher than the ACE because they have the trains with more seats, but trying to nap is often dicey.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 22/09/2026

3. G train. It's tied with the JZ for type of train, AC quality and overcrowding, but it gets deducted a point because the G doesn't go nearly as many useful places as the JZ. I say this as someone who lived off the G for many years.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 22/09/2026

2. JZ. They use more modern trains with fewer seats (boooo), but the line is usually not very crowded, the trains have good A/C. Because it stops every 1/2 mile (for the most part) you're not likely to miss your stop.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 22/09/2026

BEST NYC SUBWAY LINES TO NAP ON, A RANKING 🧵 1. NQRW. Trains are roomy and usually pretty uncrowded, and the old trains with the orange seats have more seats than average, so you're more likely to get a place to have a nap. Also, the local is slow, so you're less likely to miss your stop

image of the nqrw bullets from the nyc subway

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 19/09/2026

Okay, yes, the @mta.info Caardvark plushies are really cute.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 09/09/2026

Right now, industry standard software contracts are the exact opposite: there's a specific limit of liability established in the contract that the maker can be held liable for, and not a cent more. This norm for software doesn't work when the software encourages people to kill themselves.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 09/09/2026

This honestly sounds like a good case for the courts establishing a product liability doctrine for LLMs. (For the non-lawyers: if you make an unsafe thing, whether it's a car or a chainsaw, the maker is on the hook for damages caused by defective design and manufacturing.)

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Reposted by Jake Berman

Karlee @karlee.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

To quote @lostsubways.com, “this kind of ‘I AM THE WORLD EXPERT IN THIS’” stuff on Bluesky is great

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Reposted by Jake Berman

George Takei @georgetakei.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Sixty years ago today, the starship Enterprise launched and with it, a vision of the future where humanity had moved beyond its divisions. I was there at the beginning, and I can tell you...

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Reposted by Jake Berman

Elle Cordova @ellecordova.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I am the very model of a modern day typographer A font take on the tune “Modern Major General” by Gilbert & Sullivan #typography #fonts #graphicdesign

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 08/09/2026

Traditional small-town development like what you see in New England is a great way to square the circle. My classic example is Belfast, Maine, population 6900.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 08/09/2026

What, like Fresno, Modesto and Bakersfield?

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 08/09/2026

It hasn't kept up with job growth. To keep rents stable you need roughly a 1.5:1 ratio of new jobs to new housing, and NYC is like at 4:1. We have to build much, much more.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 08/09/2026

But if you grew up thinking that environmentalism is first and foremost an aesthetic... the NIMBYism makes perfect sense. /thread

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 08/09/2026

If you've spent your whole life going hiking, driving a Prius and having a beautiful garden in the 'burbs, it's horrifying to think that the guy who takes the train and lives in a steel tower is doing a better job of saving the planet than you.

news.berkeley.edu

New interactive map compares carbon footprints of Bay Area neighborhoods - Berkeley News

Data on current carbon emissions will help cities meet goals set at Paris climate summit, and show people how they contribute to global warming.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 08/09/2026

And that's the kind of generational split that we're seeing. For a lot of greying NorCal environmentalists, it's the appearance of green living that matters more than anything else. (After all, what kind of *true* environmentalist lives in the urban jungle?)

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 08/09/2026

But at its core, Village Homes is just a suburban subdivision with a green veneer. It's a great way to cosplay as a Hobbit, but it's actively worse for the planet than living in a steel tower on top of a subway station.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 08/09/2026

It's an idyllic, beautiful place to live, and I had friends who grew up there. Hell, the streets are Tolkien-themed, with names like Rivendell, Bree, Elendil and Evenstar. The President of France even paid a visit.

picture of village homes's central green

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 08/09/2026

I grew up around a lot of these types of people. I went to high school in a college town that was famous for an early eco-development with bike paths, solar power, communal gardens, and natural drainage. It's called Village Homes.

village homes shot, showing the park and a house

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 08/09/2026

In a lot of ways, the environmentalism of my parents' generation didn't ask anyone to sacrifice anything. People still drove (but it was a Prius), lived in the burbs (but with a beautiful garden), bought supermarket food (but bought organic). It was an aesthetic choice as much as anything. 🧵

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

@sickosfc.bsky.social is getting me into watching the English third division (Wimbledon vs. Bromley)

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

There are plenty of ways to provide cheap, universal housing. If you're a libertarian, you can point to Houston. If you're a neoliberal, you have Tokyo. If you want to talk about socialism, look at Singapore. The only thing in common is, someone, somewhere, had to build a ton of housing.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

Renovated buildings count too. A lot of LA's push during quarantine was to buy and patch up motels.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

9) But mass construction can't solve things in the short term. For that you need a mix of vouchers and quick-build conversions. /end

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

8) Third is that you legitimately can build your way out of a homelessness crisis in the medium term. Average rents inside the JR Yamanote line (i.e., central Tokyo) are about 200,000 yen/mo for a 1br, or $1250/mo, because the Japanese build like crazy. This is the *expensive* part of Tokyo!

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

7) Second is to make section 8 vouchers universal. This would cost $100 billion a year at the federal level if I remember the Biden-era estimates right, and it's a big subsidy to landlords, so you have to couple this with a lot of new construction in order to drive rents down.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

5) Conditions were a mixed bag in these SROs/boarding houses, because they were the housing of last resort, but it was absolutely better than the way we do things now. After all, sharing a bathroom with a stranger beats living in your car with no bathroom at all.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

3) The shitty truth is that for the very poorest, the options are just not good. People lived in SROs (converted hotel rooms, often with shared bathrooms), they lived with relatives, they rented a room in a boarding house.

a boarding house in canada, early 20th c.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

2) In places like Austin and Portland, there's much less need for subsidized housing for the working classes, because market rents are low enough, and the hassle of finding a subsidized apartment makes it just not worth it.

screenshot: high affordable unit vacancy rates in austin due to lots of construction and cheap rents

screenshot: in portland, market rate is often preferable to affordable because there's less hassle and the prices are competitive

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

There's a few things going on here. 1) The very poorest renters just can't afford anything at all because there's no way for the market to provide it given existing cost structures. (30% of area median income is ~$35k a year, i.e., a single person making minimum wage.)

screenshot: the economics don't work for providing housing for minimum wage workers

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

Or, in other words, "bring back Jean Drapeau."

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

Hey, I'm obsessed with Battletech/MechWarrior, but I basically just play Mechwarrior 5 solo. I haven't played tabletop Battletech/Mechwarrior since... 2014? (Doesn't help that the scene is too neckbeard-y for me.)

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

NOT WRONG THOUGH. (says the guy who got together to play gloomhaven exactly once)

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

This also might just be a DC thing - DC's binge drinking culture is real, even though COVID has kind of tamped down on it.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

I haven't litigated in a long time, so I'm loath to make predictions.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 07/09/2026

I think that's a good idea. I would love to see data - if it exists - on CEQA fee awards. I'm really curious to see how many lawyers actually get a payday from these types of matters.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 06/09/2026

The best/worst example of this is the Berkeley tree-sit of 15-20 years ago. UC wanted to change the landscaping, so the rich neighbors on Panoramic Hill hired lawyers and teamed up with some tree sitting cranks to delay the landscaping project by nearly two years.

sfgate.com

Berkeley tree-sitters finally down to earth

21-month standoff between UC Berkeley, tree-sitters comes to a peaceful end University...

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 06/09/2026

... which has metastasized into today's situation, where anybody with enough money burning a hole in their pocket can claim "inadequate study" of anything, and sandbag projects for years.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 06/09/2026

Our environmental laws generally assume that a government agency can do anything that's otherwise legal, provided they followed the proper procedures and adequately studied the ramifications of their decision...

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 06/09/2026

Even if a claim is meritless bullshit, it rarely rises to the kind of outright malfeasance that courts normally use to justify sanctions. It really reveals one of the weaknesses to the 1970s approach to environmental law that predominates in the US.

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