Working @Codethink.
Kettering, England
Joined January 2008
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- Followers1.3K
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
Astounding Sunday Times investigation reveals new scandal in SNP’s Socialist Scotland:
800 NHS, central government, council and quango workers whose jobs no longer exist but remain on the public payroll because of the SNP’s ‘no public-sector redundancy’ policy.
Estimated cost of paying people to do nothing: £27m a year.
One NHS Highland worker has been receiving a full salary and benefits for 17 years despite not having a specific job.
The health board refused to say what the worker had been doing for almost two decades and how much they had been paid.
Likely cost to the taxpayer is expected to be far higher with several public bodies refusing to disclose salaries for hundreds of the workers awaiting redeployment.
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
The plumber and £5 pint story of how much the government is rinsing everyone in taxes. It’s not the cost of living crisis, It’s the cost of government taxation crisis.
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
Got a cheap embroidery machine off amazon for $300 where the biggest complaint is the mandatory $12/mo app that you’re forced to use. Had ChatGPT create its own app that communicates with the machine. Generative art patches incoming!
Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de retweeted
Çin, her birinin imalatı 1 yıl süren, tanesi 300 milyon dolar olan ultraviyole litografi makinesini üretmeyi başardı.
3 nm çip üretimi için kullanılan bu makineyi dünyada yalnızca Avrupa’nın en değerli şirketi olan Hollandalı ASML üretiyordu.
ASML bu makinelerden yılda sadece 45-50 adet kadar üretebiliyor.
Bu şirkette de 1000’in üzerinde Türk mühendis çalışıyor.
45-50 adet olduğuna bakmayın.
Makine dediğimiz, torna makinesi gibi bir şey değil.
Her bir makine ayrı bir odada üretiliyor.
Bu makineler metrelerce boyunda. Üretim yapan mühendisler bile özel kıyafetlerle odaya giriyor.
Çok hassas bir ortamda üretim yapılıyor.
Hata payı sıfır olmak zorunda.
Tayvanlı TSMC de bu makinelerle gelişmiş çipler üretiyor.
Hem TSMC’yi hem de ASML’yi, daha çok mini ev aletleri ve tıraş makineleri üretmesiyle tanıdığımız Philips ortak olarak kuruyor.
Ama bu makineleri Çin’e satmıyorlar. Hatta Huawei telefon pazarında liderliği ele geçireceği sırada Amerika’nın baskısıyla çip satmayı da bırakıyorlar.
Böylece Apple zirveyi korumaya devam ediyor.
Çin ise baskılandıkça daha da güçlenen bir toplum olduğu için bu makineyi üretmeyi kafasına koyuyor.
Haberlere göre Çin, bir dönem ASML’de çalışıp emekli olan mühendisleri bir araya getiriyor. Bu ekip de gelişmiş çip üretiminde kullanılan EUV litografi makinesinin ilk prototipini yapıyor.
2030’a kadar da ticarileşmesi bekleniyor.
Ama perde arkasına baktığımızda iş o kadar da kolay değil.
Ekipler kendi içlerinde bile izole edilmiş. Yani toplamda 1.000 mühendis var diyelim; 10’ar kişilik gruplara ayrılmışlar. Bir grup, diğer grubun ne üzerinde çalıştığını bilmiyor. Proje tamamen gizlilik içinde yürütülüyor ve Çin için kritik öneme sahip.
Hatta çok kritik alanlarda çalışan bazı mühendislerin dış dünyayla bağlantıları da kesilmiş. Telefon kullanımları son derece sınırlıymış.
Bir de şöyle bir şey var.
Çin, farklı alanlarda kendi buluşu olan teknolojilerin mühendislerini muhtemelen yurt dışına göndermiyor, yurt dışına çıkmalarını yasaklıyor.
Çünkü paranın satın alamayacağı güç yok.
Kendileri çok sık kopyalama yaptıkları için bu konuda çok tedirgin olsalar gerek.
Diğer yandan muhtemelen 10 yıla kalmaz bu sektörü de ele geçirirler.
Çip üretiminin en kritik makinesi olan EUV litografi sistemlerinden, Avrupa’nın en değerli şirketi olan ASML bile yılda yaklaşık 50 adet üretebiliyor.
Çin yılda kaç tane üretir hesap edin.
Bu adamların zekası, azmi ve kopyalama yeteneği gerçekten bambaşka…
