Good morning, RVA! It's 58 °F, and, whoa, that number starts with a five! Today you can expect a beautiful, sunny day with highs in the upper 70s—like, with a seven! The weekend forecast looks wonderful, too, but maybe keep an eye out for some rain on Sunday and into Monday. For the next couple of days, if you’re looking, you can find me sitting on a bicycle with a big smile on my face. Have a great weekend!
Water cooler
1st District School Boardmember Liz Doerr has put together a really nice email explaining the proposed changes to RPS’s specialty school selection process. Currently, the enrollment of the student bodies at the local speciality schools (think: the two governor’s schools, Franklin Military Academy, Open High, Community High) does not match the demographics of Richmond or its school district. To quote Boardmember Doerr, the goal with these proposed changes “is to make our specialty schools more reflective of the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in RPS while maintaining their rigor and unique characteristics.” To that end, the RPS administration has proposed to prioritize economically disadvantaged students for about half of the seats available at these specialty schools. That may seem like a lot, but about 70% of RPS students are categorized as economically disadvantaged. The superintendent lays out the whole process leading up to his preferred proposal (“Option 3”) and how it would impact enrollment in this really excellent presentation from this past Monday. Full disclosure: My child definitely benefited from the current, inequitable selection process and is now included in the numbers dramatically skewing Maggie Walker’s student body deeply toward well-off, white kids. Honestly, it’s hard for me to know how I’d write about this proposal if my son were a couple years younger and facing a change in the high school application process that would make it harder for him to get into the school of his choice. But that’s the whole point, right? 70% of his peers, neighbors, and fellow classmates already face decades-old, systemic challenges that make it harder for them to get into the school of their choice! It’s tough stuff and will involve a lot of really challenging conversations, but we must do what we can to break these entrenched and calcified systems and remake them in more equitable ways. That’s never easy. School Board will, theoretically, consider this proposal at their upcoming September 18th meeting.
Exciting news from the Virginia Mercury via the Capital News Service: Henrico County will break ground on their portion of the Fall Line Trail next month! Mostly this involves installing some infrastructure to make it a bit safer to cross from Bryan Park over Hermitage Road to Spring Park, but still! Progress!
This is terrible: The Richmond Police Department reports that, during storm clean up at Libby Hill Park, a tree fell and killed a City employee. From a statement: “We are currently cooperating with authorities and conducting a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the incident. Our top priority is the safety and well-being of our employees, and we are committed to taking all necessary measures to ensure that such a tragedy never happens again. We will continue to provide updates as more information becomes available.”
Sarah Vogelsong at the Virginia Mercury reports that Governor Youngkin chose not to offer amendments to this year’s super-late budget, and, instead, signed it as-is. No word on the mysteriously vanished $100 million to help upgrade Richmond’s sewer system, so let’s hope someone set a reminder to include it in this coming year’s budget. Anyway, if you appreciated how Senate Democrats killed all of the Governor’s shortsighted, permanent tax cuts, make sure you have a plan to vote this coming November—just a couple of votes in the State Senate are all that prevents whatever weird austerity budget Republicans dream about at night.
Lyndon German at VPM has a recap of last night’s Henrico County Board of Supervisor candidate forum, if you’re a Henrico resident looking for some more details to help inform your ballot choices (see above!).
Plant enthusiasts! Today and tomorrow, the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden will host their fall plant sale—no Garden admission or ticket necessary! Now that we’re through with the oppressive heat of summer (fingers crossed) and solidly established in the cooler confines of fall (fingers crossed again), it is an excellent time to plant perennials. Tap through to see the list of vendors, which definitely includes master gardeners and folks from various extensions that you can ask about your very specific and challenging plant-related issues.
This morning's longread
How to Think about Large Language Models
I didn’t understand the majority of this explainer on how Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, work. But, I swear, every other sentence was something along the lines of “LLMs eventually learn how to do addition, we don’t know why or how, and it’s the darndest thing!” This technology gives me the shivers, and I remain solidly in the middle of the spectrum between “these tools are boring and just regurgitate Reddit back to you” and “I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.”
LLMs can ultimately do a very good job at conversing with humans. But internally, we don’t have much of an idea about how they represent information. They can answer at least some questions about the physical world in a way that suggests there’s some kind of internal representation of causation and physics, but we don’t have any real idea of how this works. It’s also unclear if it develops some kind of representation of English grammar. No information about grammar is initially fed to the model. (Perhaps a little bit is encoded in the tokenization, but that seems pretty minimal.) There’s no specific module to learn syntactic structures or making parsing trees or anything like that. Nonetheless, we end up with fluent and grammatical text.
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Picture of the Day
High schoolers, I promise you, one day you will not be forced to use a bathroom that looks like it belongs in a subway.
