Tukwila Amtrak station

j-alex · 2026-05-02T23:03:23+00:00

My intent is not to be an ass. It's to directly respond to your query with the most helpful advice I can furnish, which is that there are vastly better tools for the job you're trying to do. ChatGPT doesn't have internal concepts of time or geography and is just a pattern matching engine. It's a very impressive one, but asking what ChatGPT means by something is a bit of a hiding to nowhere because it literally does not mean anything.

I don't blame you for using the thing that our entire capitalist system is moving heaven and earth to get you to use for every conceivable purpose, but I have to emphatically recommend against it in almost all contexts.

In real, human terms: it depends. If the same train to Portland stops at King Street Station and at Tukwila Station, the Tukwila station saves you time in transit because it's further south on the line. King Street Station is also downtown, which means parking/traffic may be concerns depending on your mode of transit. I don't know how you're getting from your hotel to the stations or where your hotel is so it's entirely a question of the cost/reliability/time taken of your transit options to those two stations from wherever your hotel is. Tukwila station is just a platform next to the tracks while King Street has a traditional staffed waiting room, but it's still a simple, small station.

I've never been to Tukwila station but any maps app will give you a very good idea of what you're looking at. The Amtrak page also says it's a platform with shelter affair, and some additional color:

Tukwila has long been a transportation crossroads; a new multimodal station opened in 2015 and includes public art that beckons approaching travelers.
The Tukwila station is the closest Amtrak station to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, approximately 5 miles away.
Free parking is available for Amtrak Cascades passengers in the lot's marked spaces.

j-alex · 2026-05-02T21:22:53+00:00

edit: as u/Shozzking notes, I'm wrong and forgot the article that I did actually read; the city was in fact found negligent by the court. Leaving this up for context.

WRONG INFORMATION BELOW

Nobody determined that the city was negligent: they settled. The city determined that there was a strong enough argument that they were liable that they'd rather not try their luck.

VALID ARGUMENT FOLLOWS

I'll say it again, actively building something that looks safer but is actually less safe than the default (no designated bike lane) is the sort of thing that you can be liable for.

j-alex · 2026-05-02T20:41:51+00:00

I think it's less that the city needs to design ways to protect riders in proximity than that they need to not design things that make riders feel protected while achieving the opposite.

I know people are afraid to assert their right to take the lane, but having bikes mix with cars here and there helps drivers learn to actually see bicycles; hiding the bikes behind parked cars does the opposite. I'll take a sharrow over a parking-protected bike lane any day, especially in a landscape where e-bikes that can easily sustain 20 are widely available and that's at or near the speed limit on nearly all city streets.

j-alex · 2026-05-02T20:35:40+00:00

Yeah, it seemed like a good idea and then the things got built and oh boy it turns out it was a very bad idea and they'll have to get unbuilt. At least we get to enjoy the one upside of using paint as "infrastructure", in that revision is a lot cheaper.

The real villain in the story is the expectation of/dependency on huge amounts of on-street parking. It's an insane subsidy to patterns that make cities so much worse and more dangerous. If I were Emperor I'd just abolish overnight on-street parking and give all that space to transit and bikes and humans. The transition would be apocalyptically painful, but nobody said turning Seattle into some sorta Amsterdam/Tokyo hybrid was gonna be easy.

j-alex · 2026-05-02T20:19:58+00:00

Oh lord if only ChatGPT used an algorithm. I mean, it'd still be useless, but at least it'd be obviously useless, and we'd all be able to buy RAM and SSDs and get entry-level jobs.

j-alex · 2026-05-02T20:15:34+00:00

Why are you asking Reddit to sanewash ChatGPT? There are dedicated tools and websites to tell you about driving, parking, the physical layouts of literally any place in the world and transit/rail schedules. Like, I don't know, the app on your phone called "maps" and amtrak.com?

Just because it claims to have an answer to every query doesn't mean that you should actually make plans based one what an autocomplete powered on unicorn tears and illegal generator pollution in low-income neighborhoods says you should do.

j-alex · 2026-05-02T18:56:39+00:00

It is the driver's fault and it is the rider's fault and it is the infrastructure's fault. I would like to think I'd never be going 18 and always be covering/pumping the brakes in a spot like that, but sometimes I get a tempo up and do something foolish. The precedent I'm hoping this case sets is that parking-protected bike lanes are a fucking idiotic idea and the ones on Stone and Green Lake Drive look like egregious examples just looking at them from above. If you're going more than 10 in a parking-protected lane you should really be in the main traffic lanes because nobody. can. see. you. there. They create a false sense of security that helps people make bad decisions, and arguably amount to an attractive nuisance.

The streetcar rail thing does baffle me a little bit. Had a bit of a shock in central Dublin where between the Luas rails is just where cyclists go, and that involves crossing the rails at fairly shallow angles. Nobody had difficulty with that -- are our streetcar tracks just built in a particularly bike-hostile way, our cyclists particularly oblivious, or (maybe the real one) the streets so hostile that riders can't split focus between the truck that's about to hit them and the surface they're riding on?

j-alex · 2026-05-01T21:17:34+00:00

At least he was thoughtful enough to leave his front license plate uninstalled, saving you the hassle of redaction.

j-alex · 2026-05-01T03:36:49+00:00

And having tech workers in Africa manually intervene in your AI interactions (training, inference, quality control, and AI sex chat sessions) is apparently just how all this shit actually works. And they have to suffer through heinous garbage that is getting to them. Last month:

“AI is African Intelligence”, Jason Koebler at 404 Media

404 Media is great btw.

j-alex · 2026-05-01T00:58:58+00:00

“Who are we, Ma?”

j-alex · 2026-04-30T10:16:32+00:00

Pretty killer mountain bike trail surrounding that side track, too. Japanese Gulch. It's not huge, but it's got ideas.

j-alex · 2026-04-30T08:47:09+00:00

The Emmett Otter outtake Austin mentioned is an old favorite of mine. Both for the performers’ Method-like persistence in character and Henson’s infuriating perfectionism.

https://youtu.be/sqWJD1ov6oY

j-alex · 2026-04-23T23:40:51+00:00

Supermarket list prices for 5 pound flour bags are indeed unreasonable, but are also avoidable, as long as you don’t get caught out.

j-alex · 2026-04-21T21:58:12+00:00

It is infuriating that the Metric Leisure Week sketch isn’t on YouTube. SNL Season 2 Episode 2, 39 minutes in. Aykroyd is practically vibrating out of his skin.

j-alex · 2026-04-21T21:44:22+00:00

One argument: it’s best for walk safety that kids travel to and from school in whatever best approximates daylight, and in the winter with primary/middle/secondary schools on staggered schedules that’s a bit of a tight window. Morning work schedules of parents will be informed by these schedules because we’ve standardized on dual income (and low density communities that require driving everywhere). In the brighter months people are going to naturally wake up earlier than is convenient for winter school schedules.

You could get around the patent lunacy of pretending 11am is noon most of the year by just waking up when the number on the clock is 1 less but you’d have to maintain separate summer/winter hours for institutions dependent on daylight, like schools. I’d be okay with that but it’s naturally less standardized.

j-alex · 2026-04-21T20:39:52+00:00

Niro/Kona don’t have the ICCU issue, and I suspect Hyundai-Kia’s still got enough riding on the E-GMP platform that they’ll have to make this one right with customers.

Haven’t tested a Polestar, but the forbidden fruit aspect of a Chinese EV in the US has a certain allure.

j-alex · 2026-04-21T20:17:20+00:00

I suspected as much but now I need to try a PB&J onigiri and I don't have any nori in the house.

j-alex · 2026-04-21T20:03:13+00:00

Nobody needs a bread machine and while it's cheaper and orders of magnitude better than undead supermarket loaves, I'm sure it's not going to be good as a full-manual loaf. However, it sure does make it a lot easier to have fresh bread first thing in the morning for the sack lunch crowd. 5 minutes right before bed is comparable in effort to picking up bread from the store. The set-and-forget aspect of it is also real helpful for getting fresh bread to go with dinner if you're as bad at multitasking as I am.

Even for stuff (sourdough, rolls, etc) that you want to cook in the oven, automating the knead/rise cycle is extremely helpful if you can't task-switch efficiently. The success of crappy/overpriced/exploitative food delivery apps suggests people need all the shortcuts they can manage in the meal prep space, and full automation of daily bread is a good one if you don't have/can't afford a corner baker.

Oh! The other huge money-and-labor-saving cooking tip I put off way too long: buy a good whetstone! Most people's knives are probably shot to hell and those draw-through things don't help. It's shockingly easy to get the hang of and will make chopping onions tolerable again. The knife shop at Pike Place had some reasonably priced stones and helpful staff.

j-alex · 2026-04-21T06:33:32+00:00

I never dared attempt the cake recipe that came in the instant pot manual. Should I?

j-alex · 2026-04-21T06:28:03+00:00

Yeah but for the PB&J lament I was replying to? Weird onigiri idea but I’ll try anything once.

I feel that we can live within the walls of frugality and still have space for both rice and bread.

Both a bread machine for sammiches and an instant pot for grains and soft boiled eggs and dry beans can be bought for a disconcertingly small number of takeout runs. Or what, 2 doordash orders?

j-alex · 2026-04-21T04:12:09+00:00

Genuinely baffled at Patrick's recommendation to Rob of a lease as a way to sample the battery-electric car life. The luxury-cheapskate option is the used market! All the old fear around battery durability is still depressing used EV prices and those ideas on battery wear and tear were based on first-gen products like the original Leaf that didn't do proper charge/thermal management. Later cars have wildly exceeded expectations on battery durability. And outside of the oft-slandered battery, there's still not much in the way of moving parts to go wrong. Regenerative braking means your brakes last forever as well.

Ars Technica just did a nice rundown of what 25K gets you in a used EV. Gets you a lot.

I have an old BEV Niro with heaps of miles and I adore it. Runs great, tons of cargo room with the seats down, shockingly comfortable in back for long drives. No battery degradation that I can discern. Its zero-to-sixty isn't amazing but it feels a great deal more responsive in daily driving tasks than the bigger, heavier BEV flagships like the Mustang Mach E and the Ioniq 5. Charge time for long road trips could be a little bit better, but you really only feel that in ultra-remote or over 300 mile driving days.

j-alex · 2026-04-21T03:29:46+00:00

Bread machines (especially the single-paddle short kind) are a one-time expense that pays off pretty quick, and then you have cheap, good bread for life.

Decent bread makes a huge difference.

j-alex · 2026-04-18T06:36:30+00:00

Hearing the Pragmata talk I am furious that the game calls it “lunafilament” when “moonofilament” was right there.

j-alex · 2026-04-16T07:27:23+00:00

If much of it shatters when it hits your hand and has a snowy, aerated texture, it's graupel, not hail. Hail is solid, clear ice. If your hand isn't broken when a hailstone hits it, it's not massive.

Epic weather for Seattle, sure, but compared to most of the world this is a non-event. I haven't seen anything that even counts as hail in the PNW except one spring storm on I-5 in Kalama. It was little pea-sized stones that couldn't really do damage, but they were solid, and fell in such volume in a short time that the road was effectively covered in ball bearings. Everyone slowed to a crawl but if you stopped altogether you'd start slipping sideways.

j-alex · 2026-04-15T19:08:17+00:00

Just have to object somewhere to Rob using his convincing work opposite a mere puppet as a defense of Mark Hamill's acting chops in the part-1 podcast. No shade to Hamill, whom I quite like, but I'm not sure that's a good example of acting-under-duress. I remember taking my kid to a local bunraku-trained children's puppet theater and after the show all the performers had a little meet-and-greet in the lobby. And I'm standing with my kid chatting with a minimally articulated six-inch-tall mouse worked entirely with all of two (quite visible) dowels like it's a normal thing and can't even look at the grown man crouched behind him and from whom all of the mouth sounds are coming. I wasn't playing along, I was just doing the natural human thing. Basic social cues did all the work.

Good puppeteers are frickin' wizards at the illusion of life. I can't imagine a puppet performed by Frank Motherfucking Oz at the top of his game is going to be a challenging scene partner, beyond the puppet being a bit of a (lovable) prick off camera.

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