¶With a day to go, the MLB trade deadline has failed to disappoint…and to surprise. Despite the Dodger’s feigned disinterest in Tarik Skubal, which nobody believed, the team completed a trade with the Tigers overnight to land their man:

¶The Dodgers acquired Skubal, the reigning back-to-back American League Cy Young Award winner, from the Detroit Tigers for a package of three prospects: outfielder Zyhir Hope and right-handers River Ryan and Brady Smith, sources told ESPN’s Jeff Passan.

¶Starting [today], citizens of the European Union must be informed when they are interacting with an AI system or viewing content generated or altered by the technology.

¶This sounds like a big deal, but apparently it’s not…yet:

¶The EU has allowed for a transitional period, until December, for AI model providers to label synthetic audio, image, video, or text in a machine-readable format so that this material can be detected as AI-generated, clearly recognizing the technical challenge of implementing this. Other compliance deadlines within the act have been delayed, as the European AI Office has taken longer than expected to produce key compliance guidelines.

¶Will December’s end of the “transitional period” bring anything? Is any “transition” actually happening right now? Will any future deadline associated with these new rules carry any weight? We’ll see.

¶They include drive-offs, when there is no attempt to pay, and no-means-of-payment incidents, when a customer fills up and claims they have no way to pay.

¶I wasn’t familiar with the term “forecourt” before reading this article. Now I know and can’t wait to use it in a sentence.

¶It must be a British thing. Sadly, though, I suspect drive-offs and “no-means-of-payment incidents” are something America and Britain share in common.

¶Over the next decade, Rubin will illuminate a treasure trove of discoveries: pulsating stars, supernova explosions, the fossil record of galaxies, clues to the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, and entirely new phenomena we’ve never seen before. Some cosmic processes unfold slowly, unpredictably or incredibly rarely, which is why a 10-year survey is essential. By returning to each point in the sky about 800 times over a decade, Rubin data will provide the scientific community with deep, time-rich views needed to uncover subtle events, capture moving objects and study the accelerating expansion of the universe.

¶What a time to be alive. The Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is officially underway, collecting “approximately 10 terabytes of data and produc[ing] as many as seven million alerts of changes in the night sky” each night. And the data is open to “both scientists and the public”. Kudos on that.

¶This is going to be fascinating to watch.

¶The Blue Jackets announced plans on Wednesday to simulcast their TV broadcasts, with play-by-play voice Steve Mears and color analyst Jody Shelley, across their radio network and affiliates.

¶I hate to see this but I suspect radio audiences for live sports have shrunk considerably in recent years. I wonder if the Blue Jackets are a canary in the coal mine as far as home town broadcasts go.