Working @Codethink.

Kettering, England
Joined January 2008
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
Here's the real story of this Budget, the can being kicked down the road. This Labour government is apparently planning spending cuts on most areas of public service spending of 2.6% per year between 2028-29 and 2031-32. Pull the other one. It's got bells on.
36
301
40
817
80,436
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
Now we can see the OBR and HMT Red book. The MOD faces a real term CUT to day to day spending of nearly 0.5% (RDEL) in 27/28. That’s money we spend on training, ammunition, maintenance and operations. So the Chancellors son in the Reserves will have even less training and ammo.
14
122
12
462
51,816
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
All employees come in 5 levels, choose wisely: Level 1 - tells you there's a problem Level 2 - tells you there's a problem and what caused it Level 3 - tells you there's a problem, what caused it, and options to fix it Level 4 - tells you there's a problem, what caused it, options to fix it, and which one they'd pick Level 5 - tells you there was a problem, what caused it, how they fixed it, and future proof’d it
229
211
48
2,378
296,837
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
Double your salary from £50k to £100k and your tax bill triples. £50k → £10,480 £100k → £31,443 (3x) £150k → £58,714 (5.6x) Income tax and NI only. I think the UK has fully moved over to the European mindset now. Being successful means earning £50k more than average and paying way more tax for it. America is work hard, be smart, get rewarded. We've drifted to let's all be fair and split the winnings. It doesn't matter how hard you work or how long you spent getting good at something. Past £100k most of every pay rise goes to the Treasury. I get people DMing me telling me to leave because you won't get wealthy here. Honestly it's almost impossible now on a salary.
19
32
4
261
16,448
Won't the banks just increase mortgage rates to compensate for the surcharge increase?
27
"This is a Budget for the working people of Britain" then why does OBR say "household income forecast to fall over the next two years" #Budget2026
69
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
🇬🇧 The OBR just dropped 200 pages on Healey's first Budget. I read it so you don't have to. Tax is at a record 37.9% of GDP by 2027-28, past the old high of 37.2%. Then it climbs every single year to 38.6%. Frozen thresholds are doing way too much to workers since they get a pay rise, hand more of it over. 1.8x the national minimum wage now classes you as a higher tax rate payer - what the fuck? Borrowing @ £133bn this year. In March they said £115bn. Seven months later it's £18bn worse. And it's higher than March in every year of the forecast because neither the OBR nor treasury has a clue what they’re doing. Debt interest at £39bn in 2019-20. £109bn last year 😩 £160bn by 2031-32 😩😩£15bn of this year's bill is extra bc inflation's pushing up index linked gilts, and we know the uk has a structural inflation problem, partly due to the relationship between treasury and BoE. Headroom is £14.5bn, down from £21.7bn at the last Budget. Keep the fuel duty freeze going and it's £10.2bn. The OBR gives Healey a 56% chance of hitting his OWN FUCKING rule. Debt will peak at 97.3% of GDP, still 95.6% in 2031-32. Five years and it barely moves which is completely against his fiscal demands. How it affects you? Growth 1% next year with gdp per capita basically the same as it has been since 2019 Inflation 3.4% when March said 2%. Zero real pay growth in 2027. Living standards in 2030-31? Just 2% above pre-pandemic. But don't worry. You're getting a £100 council tax rebate. Jesus Christ.
75
376
38
1,307
63,824
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
The "do no harm budget." UK has gov spending near 45% of GDP, debt near 100%. Tax revenue at levels never sustained in the UK before. Crazy fiscal drag. Concerning high income emigration. That's harm enough. Fiddling with cash ISAs and marmalade prices doesn't cut it.
40
208
4
1,208
29,469
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
The government's council tax checker site has crashed which is probably a sign of a good announcement
14
22
117
14,509
Has the budget been leaked yet, apart from the many leaks to the press over the last week?
27
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
Time to post my biannual “how artificially compressed are British wages”. Rising minimum wage and a 50k+ p/a tax bracket that runs to 40% of earnings, and hasn’t adjusted for inflation. This form of artificial wage compression has turned everyone in Britain into low productivity tax cattle - you have zero incentive to become anything other here. This is also a form of ambition and productivity compression. Source, ONS, Fig 5: ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabo…
🚨 NEW: John Healey will increase the minimum wage for over 21s from £12.71 to around £13.20
51
244
22
1,600
119,104
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
Had my agent make a small tool to upload a PR review video to a GitHub PR - uses Remotion github.com/directionallyai/p…
7
2
1
11
625
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
I heard OpenAI are testing GPT-7 Astra inside vim so the agents can’t escape.
61
169
21
2,635
76,499
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
Given the personal allowance will have been frozen for a decade at £12,570 - it's interesting to see what it would be when it's treated with the largesse of the minimum wage.
30
155
20
970
230,144
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
A wee stat ahead of Wednesday's budget, on a policy that almost certainly won't change: In 2021, roughly 1 in 10 full-time nurses paid 40% income tax. In 2026, it's closer to 1 in 3. That's the power of the "fiscal drag" tax. The term "high earner" has been quietly redefined.
41
86
7
638
59,450
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
This is one of the most blatant examples of gaslighting you’ll ever see. This clip sums up the Labour Party. It sums up Angela Rayner. And, frankly, it sums up too most politicians. Laura Kuenssberg asks Rayner about Andy Burnham opening the door to a return to freedom of movement. He’s started the debate by talking about it. Kuenssberg: “The Labour manifesto in 2024 said in black and white ‘there will be no return to freedom of movement’. You stood on that manifesto. Andy Burnham promised to stick to that manifesto. He’s breaking that promise, isn’t he?” Then this from Rayner: “No he isn’t, because he’s been really clear that this Parliament, that manifesto, we are clear we are not reopening that debate.” Unbelievable. Even by her standards. Kuenssberg put her right immediately: “He’s literally just reopened this debate. It’s exactly what’s just happened.” She denies the debate has been reopened in the same breath as it is being reopened. They will say anything, no matter how obviously contradictory. We watch car crash after car crash from Labour ministers, yet they keep rising in the polls. No wonder the country is in such a mess.
194
664
51
3,166
158,885
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
I remember sitting around a campfire shortly after the Ukraine war had just started with some Ukrainian friends. They shared that after they learned that Russian forces were jamming all communications they called Elon begging for Starlink support. Elon and the Starlink team instantly dropped everything they were working on, loaded a private jet with as many Starlink terminals as they could (terminals were in short supply at the time), and started flying the jet eastward while writing code to make terminals work over Ukraine. There was no contract or promise of payment for doing so, and no time to solve for that. My Ukrainian friends believed this saved the nation of Ukraine, and that without this effort Ukraine would have lost the war nearly instantly.
347
836
77
6,718
595,712
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
It is becoming f*cking dangerous: the NSA's own reverse-engineering tool now plugs straight into Claude Code - Ghidra has 94k stars, and GhidraMCP lets your agent read a compiled program instead of guessing what it does Install Ghidra 12.1.4 from ghidra-sre,org (free, released by the NSA) Download the GhidraMCP release and add it in File -> Install Extensions Restart Ghidra and switch on GhidraMCPPlugin in File -> Configure -> Developer Connect it: claude mcp add ghidra -- uvx --from git+github.com/LaurieWired/Ghidr… ghidra-mcp Open a binary you're allowed to analyze and let Ghidra run its analysis Ask Claude what a function does: it decompiles it, renames the variables and explains it in plain English Ask for the map: every function, import, string and cross-reference, and where the interesting code lives The decompiling runs in Ghidra on your machine, Claude just drives it Malware samples, old firmware, your own builds: your agent reads the program itself, not the docs about it Find the repo in the reply below
10
44
2
265
16,240