🛤️ Good morning, RVA: Childcare funding, the Long Bridge, and Library investments

Good morning, RVA! It’s 34 °F, and, despite the current temperatures starting with a three, the warm weekend weather has arrived! Today you can expect highs right around 60 °F with even warmer temperatures over the next two days. Rain will move in on Sunday and spoil the warmest day we’ve had in a while, but don’t let it bum you out too bad, because Saturday looks absolutely stunning. I hope you find the time to get out there!
 

Water cooler

Anna Bryson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the first bit of Governor Youngkin’s proposed budget: a $448 million investment in early learning and childcare. Youngkin’s press release describes the proposal, called Building Blocks for Virginia Families, as an initiative that will “empower parents with childcare choice, reduce red tape, expand available childcare options for parents, and provide needed support for parents to continue in the workforce.” Virginia faces a looming childcare fiscal cliff, so this is a smart (and timely) place for the state to invest hundreds of millions of dollars. Over the past couple of years, the Commonwealth used a bucket of pandemic-era federal funds to expand childcare access to residents with lower incomes. That money starts to dry up early next year, which puts Youngkin (and the General Assembly) on the hook for filling that gap or risk close to 30,000 kids losing access to childcare. I’m overly skeptical and Republican buzzwords like “parental choice,” “red tape,” and “working families” give me the shivers, so I’ll wait for the budget language to drop so we can see how this proposal actually benefits Virginia’s families.
 

Long Bridge is probably the bridge I write about most, and it’s not even in Richmond nor does it span the James River. If you’re still in the dark about this rusty bridge over the Potomac, the Virginia Mercury’s Sarah Vogelsong has a nice write up of the Long Bridge and the recent efforts to get it replaced: “The Long Bridge, a two-track span over the Potomac that is more than a century old is a critical part of the state’s plans. Owned by CSX, the conduit is the sole way for trains to cross from Virginia into Washington, D.C.” Every train from Richmond and points south passes over this much-too-small bridge, and it functions as a really efficient bottleneck to improving rail service in the Mid Atlantic. Good news, though, because Vogelsong reports that the federal government has awarded Virginia $729 million toward replacing and expanding the Long Bridge. I’m stoked! But, like I said yesterday when writing about the plans to improve train service south of Richmond, rail projects take forever and a day. So, really, I am stoked for my future, elderly self to take a fast train to D.C. at some point.
 

RIC Today reports that the Richmond Public Library scored a $900,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to “increase community and personal archiving projects.” RPL will offer a state-of-the-art Memory Lab so folks can stop by and “preserve fragile documents, old photos, and memories by digitizing them for long term safety, preservation, and sharing.” Sounds super cool, but maybe even cooler, at least for me: “Mellon Foundation funding also enables Richmond Public Library to digitize and make publicly accessible large numbers of City Records and donated files. Historic documents from local clubs, civic organizations, almanacs, yearbooks, photos, unusual and out of print periodicals, and ephemera will be searchable online by the end of the grant timeline.” Sounds like an excellent rabbit hole for me to lose several days of my life exploring. The Mellon Foundation has spent a lot of time and money in Richmond lately, and you can check out more of their local work here.
 

Via /r/rva, a picture of chickens wandering around a parking deck at the airport. OK!
 

If you’re looking for something civic-y to do this weekend, how about a transit brunch? This Saturday, you can join RVA Rapid Transit at the Main Library (101 E. Franklin Street), from 12:00–2:00 PM, to learn about regional transportation planning while sharing a meal with fellow transit riders and advocates. Folks from PlanRVA will be there, too, and will help explain the mysteries of how the region allocates its transportation dollars. Heck, maybe it’s just the right time to ask about any of these seven-figure road widening projects; I’m particularly exhausted by the $31.5 million plan to let people drive on the shoulder of 288, framed, somehow, as a “safety improvement.” Just think about what kind of bus, bike, or pedestrian infrastructure you get for a single $10 million, let alone 20, 50, or even 100!
 

This morning’s longread

ChatGPT is winning the future — but what future is that?

Another weekend, another longread about ChatGPT and AI. This, from the Verge, is about the best “current state of affairs” piece I’ve come across. Yes, the explosion of generative AI into every corner of consumer technology happened incredibly fast. No, we haven’t created Skynet and doomed the human race to termination…yet!
 

It’s worth pausing here for just a second to point out that, in reality, most of this technology is still not very good. Large language models “hallucinate,” which is a nice way of saying they make stuff up, all the time. If you look at an AI image for more than about two seconds, you can always tell it was generated. The emails it writes for you always have that machine-made vibe to them. AI systems are not smarter than humans, or more creative, or really anything. Is it remarkable that they’re as good as they are? Sure! But AI so far is shaping up like self-driving cars — it got pretty good faster than anybody thought, and it’s going to be a hell of a lot of work to get good enough to be everywhere. There is absolutely no reason, right now, to think that we’re going to hit some kind of superhuman Artificial General Intelligence anytime soon. If ever.
 

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Picture of the Day

Fire in the sky.