Chris Groskopf

She's here 😭😭😭

Nosferatu (2024): Meh, but enjoyed spending two hours trying to figure out which old masters Eggers had been studying. I'm sure there was a lot of German Romantic stuff I missed but I appreciated the Dutch classics. The Vermeer was particularly nice!

As an amateur genealogist and occasional art detective I've probably spent more time trying to decipher 19th century cursive than just about any other related activity. It's legit hard.

Former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao has been criminally indicted Former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao has been criminally indicted by a federal grand jury following an FBI corruption investigation.

Former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao has been criminally indicted by a federal grand jury following an FBI corruption investigation, a source familiar with the matter told the Chronicle.

Donate to Help Mithani family rebuild after Eaton Fire, organized by Jasmine Mithani Hi all, It’s Jasmine. Like many, many people, my parents Mike and Jan… Jasmine Mithani needs your support for Help Mithani family rebuild after Eaton Fire

News nerds particularly may know the kind and talented @jazzmyth.bsky.social . Jasmine Mithani's parents and three-legged cat Shiloh lost their home in the Eaton Fire, which caused so much damage to Altadena, California.

www.gofundme.com/f/help-mitha...

God, Jasmine, I'm gutted to hear this. Sending our thoughts to you and your family.

Concerned about Oakland’s budget crisis? The city wants your ideas An advisory commission is collecting feedback from residents about what to focus on in Oakland’s next spending plan for 2025-2027.

Live in Oakland?

Tell the city what it should prioritize as its drafts its next 2-year budget (2025-2027). What programs or departments should absorb cuts? What needs more funding?

oaklandside.org/2025/01/10/o...

Guys, C-SPAN is momentarily in a state of lawless anarchy.

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past …

I think everyone who has an opnion, good or bad, about LLMs, should read how @simonwillison.net has summer up what’s happened in the space this year. He’s the most credible, most independent, most honest, and most technically fluent person watching the space. simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/...

I wish DuckDB had existed back in the era when I was coding 12-hours-a-day! There’s so many fun excuses to use it!

The metric by which I would like my 2024 to be evaluated: I checked out 559 books from the Oakland Library.

People are doing some really delightful things with Range headers these days! protomaps.com

Not at hand. Here's the original story: www.npr.org/2015/08/04/4... I believe the data was from a Congressional Research Service report. They frequently do repeat them so you may be able to find an updated one.

Charts from 2015 showing the Obama era funding to combat homelessness amongst veterans was strongly correlated with a decline in veterans who were homeless.

I made these charts *eight years ago*

The kicker here is so important: "Veterans were the lone group among whom homelessness declined last year, the report found. That continues a long-term trend driven by bipartisan support for services and housing..." There are strategies for fixing this problem that have shown success.

Topology has always been my favorite branch of math to dip into and this video is a fabulous demonstration of why. The shapes of things are encodings of mathematical properties!

Toddler didn’t so much as sneeze for two months, but comes home from the last day of regular daycare looking like a plague victim.

Table of the scientific classification of the flower Dryas octopetala annotated with a handmade illustration. Created by Eleni from the Datawrapper team.

Screenshot of I “Made a Graph of Wikipedia... This Is What I Found”. Shown is a network graph of all Wikipedia articles and the links between them, resulting in a colourful representation of the world's collective knowledge. Among the most interesting findings are so-called communities, groups of articles that are more closely linked to each other than the rest of the site, represented by the individual colours. Published on YouTube by adumb.

This image shows a spectrogram of three sound types: elephant rumbles (mostly infrasonic, red), human speaking (audible range, blue), and bat noises (ultrasonic, yellow and blue), with frequency increasing from bottom to top on a logarithmic scale. Published by Financial Times.

Map of downtown Singapore with little 3D butterflies added where butterflies have been spotted in the area. Different colored butterflies represent different species. Published in The Straits Times.

End of the year! ✨🎄🎇 So here we've got a special Data Vis Dispatch for you: it comes from the whole Datawrapper team. We're sharing our favorite visualizations of 2024. Take a look here 🎁  https://blog.datawrapper.de/data-vis-dispatch-december-17-2024/ and tell us: what were your favorites?

The version I heard from my friends that took this path: All the problems that look like easy technology problems are actually hard legal or regulatory problems. Certainly resonates with my experience working in government!

Adair, Iowa, had a population of 794. So, it seemed suspicious when its three-person police department asked regulators to buy 90 machine guns, including an M134 Gatling-style minigun capable of shooting up to 6,000 rounds of ammunition every minute. Federal agents later discovered Adair's police chief, Bradley Wendt, was using his position to acquire weapons and sell them for personal profit. A jury convicted Wendt earlier this year of conspiracy to defraud the United States, lying to federal law enforcement and illegal possession of a machine gun. Wendt is unapologetic and has appealed his conviction. "If I'm guilty of this, every cop in the nation's going to jail," Wendt told CBS News just days before a federal judge sentenced him to a 5-year prison term. Wendt's crimes appear to be part of a nationwide pattern.

This story is uh, insane www.cbsnews.com/news/police-...

Maybe they have a business address here but sell online?

Huh, I wonder where they are. I can't recall ever seeing one and Google maps shows zero hits for gun shops.

Bluesky has unexpectedly resurrected an old problem: There is way more good internet than I have time for!

It's gorgeous. I continue to be amazed by your joinery journey!

A short list of things I experience only on my annual pilgrimage home:
* Sandstone rocks
* Satellite TV
* Little Critter books
* Folgers coffee
* Ice scrapers
* Vintage Tupperware
* Ancestral tintypes
* Shotgun fire at dawn and dusk

Meet Superblack Wood - Ambrook Research A fluke lab discovery could upend our need to import endangered wood — a thriving underground market.

A fluke lab discovery has led to the creation of the world's first "superblack" wood. Researchers are hoping it can upend our need to import endangered darkwoods — a thriving underground market.
ambrook.com/research/tec...

We've got the '24 Ioniq and it's by far the best car we've ever owned. I can't speak to the earlier models, but this one has been a joy to use and 100% hassle free.

Hundreds More Nazca Lines Emerge in Peru’s Desert With drones and A.I., researchers managed to double the number of mysterious geoglyphs in a matter of months.

Some 303 previously uncharted geoglyphs made by the Nazca, a pre-Inca civilization in present-day Peru dating from 200 BC to 700 AD, were identified with the help of drones and A.I.