🐋 Good morning, RVA: Register to vote, animal news, and writing advice

Good morning, RVA! It’s 36 °F, but we’re on track for another warm day with highs in the 60s. Stick around, because temperatures tomorrow and Thursday could creep up into the 70s—totally normal middle-of-February stuff! While today looks dry, rain will move in before the weekend, if that impacts your plans over the next couple of days.
 

Water cooler

Today is last day you can register to vote or update your existing voter information before the February 21st special congressional election. You can check your registration status on the Department of Elections website. Technically, that first sentence was a lie, because, thanks to Democrats, you can still “register after this date, through Election Day, and vote using a provisional ballot.” But, as someone with a lot of anxiety about The Rules in unfamiliar situations, I’d recommend avoiding the provisional ballot entirely if you can and just taking care of your registration business today.
 

Jack Jacobs at Richmond BizSense reports that Hustler Hollywood, the sex toy shop across from the Science Museum on Broad Street, is now open. Listen, I’m not against sex toy shops across from science museums, but surely we could do better than a small, single-story building surrounded by a parking lot fronting our biggest street! Maybe we could tear this building down (which had a previous life as a Pizza Hut), put ten stories of apartments in its place, and then open a Hustler Hollywood in the ground floor retail space?
 

Via Axios Richmond: Remember how the Governor tanked plans to bring a Ford battery plant to Southside Virginia? That facility (and its accompanying jobs) will now move to Michigan instead. CNBC has the details.
 

The Virginian-Pilot reports that an endangered North Atlantic right whale washed ashore in Virginia Beach this past weekend. I learned a lot about these whales from Wikipedia this morning, including that “a common explanation for the name right whales is that they were regarded as the right ones to hunt, as they float when killed.” Also there are only about 400 of this particular species of whale left in the entire world.
 

In less depressing animal news, via /r/rva these photos of red-tailed hawks flying around looking dangerous and impressive. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a “courtship flight” but interlocking talons and beaks and birds screaming through the air sounds pretty awesome.
 

This coming Thursday, February 16th at 8:00 PM, you can join the folks at STAY RVA for one of their STAY Chats—this one featuring community leaders Amy Wentz and Ashley Williams. They’ll facilitate a conversation titled “Doing the Work: What does that mean?” in which, I assume, you’ll learn what it means to do the work but also a bit about the work both Wentz and Williams are doing. Another opportunity to learn smart things from smart people! This is a virtual, free event, and you can register over on Eventbrite.
 

This morning’s longread

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

Ted Chiang has a really lovely article in The New Yorker describing this current round of text-generating AIs. Tap through for thoughtful commentary on AI, but read the entire thing for some great insight on writing—like, human writing. I can’t stop highlighting this bit: “Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. ”
 

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.
 

If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
 

Picture of the Day

Rooftop details.