Good morning, RVA! It's 50 °F, and today we’ve got another afternoon ahead of us with welcomed highs in the mid 60s. Keep an eye out for gusty wind and possibly a bit of rain late this evening. As for the rest of the weekend, temperatures slowly drop back into the regular, springtime range with highs in the 40s on Sunday. I think you’ll have plenty of opportunities to get out and enjoy the world over the next couple of days, so I say you make some plans and do it!
Water cooler
As of last night, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield continue to have low CDC COVID-19 Community Levels. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 0, 74, and 34, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 1.7. Richmond’s data is still clearly broken, but if we take Henrico as a proxy for the region, we’re still seeing some of the lowest COVID-19 case rates since last fall. While it’s not time to hang the ol’ Mission Accomplished banner—we saw a huge spike in cases last year starting at the end of April—maybe we can cautiously unfurl the banner over in a corner and, like, start getting it ready.
Richmond’s City Council announced yesterday that the City Attorney has resigned, effective immediately, after police charged him with drunk driving last week. Council will “meet in the coming days to outline a process as it moves forward with appointing a new City Attorney.” I’m super interested to see who they end up hiring because the Attorney is such a weird and powerful position in Richmond’s oddly designed governmental structure. They’re the attorney for the whole city—for both the Mayor and City Council—which can sometimes put them in the incredibly interesting place of deciding a conflict between our legislative and executive branches. You can see how this could get awkward if the Mayor wants to do a thing but Council claims he doesn’t have the authority. It’s often the Attorney that wades in at that point and makes the final call. I can’t remember the last time this came up, as the Mayor and Council seem to be mostly on the same page lately, but when it happens I think it’s fascinating.
Whittney Evans at VPM has more details on the seven Henrico deputies who are charged with the second-degree murder of a man they were transporting to a mental hospital. Of note: “High-profile civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who’s represented the families of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, has joined the family’s legal team — along with local attorney Mark Krudys.”
Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports that demolition has started at Fire Station 12 on Cary Street. Built in 1908, this was the oldest operating fire station in the city! Tap through for a rendering of what the replacement station will look like—the new building definitely has less Ghostbusters vibes, but sure looks like it’d be way nicer place to work.
Here’s the best thing of the week, via /r/rva: “Richmond man sings elvish songs in the Texas Beach tunnel.”
Also via /r/rva (from the RVAH20 account, which I assume is officially tied to the City’s Department of Public Utilities): “things that don’t belong in storm water infrastructure.” Where does all the trash flying around on the street end up? In our storm drains!—taking up space, clogging things up, and causing street flooding when huge, climate-change-exacerbated rains move through. Anyway, don’t litter, it’s gross and bad.
Today at 2:00 PM, #12 VCU takes on #5 Saint Mary in the first round of the NCAA tournament. If this sounds like a blast from the past, that’s because VCU matched up with the Gaels in the 2017 tournament, too, losing that one 77–85. This is the Rams’ first appearance in the NCAA tournament since 2019 (unless you count 2021, they year they got downed by COVID-19 and never stepped foot on the court).
Y’all know I love space, NASA, the moon, and everything to do with exploring our universe. That’s why I’m pretty excited for Apollo: When We Went To the Moon, a new exhibit at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture that opens tomorrow and runs through the end of the year. They’ve got a bunch of models and artifacts from the Space Race era, and I could certainly lose a bunch of hours looking at each and every item! The exhibit is included in a regular admission ticket which is just $10.
This morning's longread
This Changes Everything
I really, really liked this framing of AI from Ezra Klein at the New York Times. I’m not sure I see as much instadoom in our future as he does, but I do think “the texture of a world populated by ChatGPT-like programs”, as he puts it, is incredibly different from what we’re used to today.
Artificial intelligence is a loose term, and I mean it loosely. I am describing not the soul of intelligence, but the texture of a world populated by ChatGPT-like programs that feel to us as though they were intelligent, and that shape or govern much of our lives. Such systems are, to a large extent, already here. But what’s coming will make them look like toys. What is hardest to appreciate in A.I. is the improvement curve. “The broader intellectual world seems to wildly overestimate how long it will take A.I. systems to go from ‘large impact on the world’ to ‘unrecognizably transformed world,’” Paul Christiano, a key member of OpenAI who left to found the Alignment Research Center, wrote last year. “This is more likely to be years than decades, and there’s a real chance that it’s months.”
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Picture of the Day
Big hooks.
