A super-high resolution screen for when I have to use my laptop without a screen plugged in would be great. But my shopping requirement has always been non-glossy.

My phone is often unreadable because of reflections - but it's a form factor that moves all the time so it's easy to avoid those reflections. A laptop sits on a desk or a train table and specular reflections are a huge impediment to productivity.

Talking to doctor friends, there is also something weird going on where you can end up paying more tax then you take home in salary at the end of the year. I know this first hand from someone who had to use savings to pay their tax bill so essentially ended up paying to work that year.

It has something to do with having to pay capital gains tax on the gains in your pension funds, but I'm not sure about the details. Another friend has a colleague in his department who is going on a six month sabbatical to avoid the same situation.

Nothing to do with capital gains.

You're (usually) allowed to contribute up to 40K into your pension per year and not pay any income tax on that money. Over that amount and any extra you still have to pay the income tax (I'm simplifying the situation slightly)

If you're in a defined benefit pension scheme, the amount you pay into the pension is calculated by taking the difference between the pension you would have got at the end of the year and the start of the year and multiplying it by (I think) 20x. So if your expected pension goes up by 2K then that's 40K contributed. Senior consultants might be earning (take home before tax) 160K, on a 1/60th scheme. So each extra year of work will see their final salary go up by 160/60 or 2.6K so the equivalent of 50K into their pension.

So that 50K is added to their income (now 210K)

It's now been changed but a few years ago, anyone earning over 150K saw the amount that could be paid into their pension being reduced by 1GBP per 2GBP over. So someone earning 210K would only get a pension allowance of 10K (the minimum at the time).

So our consultant pays 45% tax on 40K of pension contributions.

So what, you say, that's only 18K - but they didn't get the 50K that was added to their notional pension contribution, so they have to pay it from the 160K of earnings - and they end up poorer as a result.

Because of the really, stupidly, complex rules around this pension taper, it became critical for people in this situation to avoid earning over 140K to avoid any risk of this tax whammy. So we got these senior consultants refusing weekend work, overtime and basically "working to rule" not because they weren't prepared to do more work but because they couldn't afford to do more work because their take home pay would reduce even if their total remuneration would go up.

The limit has now been changed, I'm not sure of the exact numbers but somewhere around 200K - enough that UK consultant doctors shouldn't be caught by this tax trap.

Because of the really stupid way this tax regime was created, it was actually possible to have a 1.4 million percent marginal tax rate - someone earning 1GBP more, in the worst possible case, could pay 14K tax more. This was related to that 140K limit I mentioned - be below (excluding pensions) and the taper regime didn't apply, go over it, by even 1gbp and now this taper regime does apply and your income is increased by the amount of your pension contributions.

This sounds more like a 1%-er thing to me. How many people in retirement have a pension income in excess of the UK's median salary?

The NHS still has a defined benefit pension scheme - this means that many of the older workers have very substantial pots in "final salary" schemes.

While (I think) recent contributions go into an "average lifetime earnings" scheme which isn't as lucrative, a nurse who works 40 years in the NHS can easily get a pension that has a pot equivalent to the lifetime allowance. (and at least historically, the calculation was very generous, there was no way a pot of the calculated value could buy an index linked pension of the value that the DB schemes have to use)

There's also a second issue - the maximum that can be contributed in any one year is 40K. There's the ability to use surplus from the previous three years too. But again, many of these workers who have already been in the NHS for many years see substantial hikes in their anticipated pension for each year worked, and the calculations can easily cause them to go over the limit. Senior nurses and doctors can easily fall foul of this. Worse, the tax penalty for paying in too much is due by the tax return deadline (31st Jan in the year following the end of the tax year on 5th April).

There's also a pension allowance taper - for a while this kicked in at 150K (which includes pension contributions) and many consultants were actually finding that doing overtime or weekend work was resulting in *negative* earnings once this tax penalty was taken into account. The government has now raised the start of the taper limit (to I think 240K) which has eased that pressure at least.

Yes, Kelvin would be better still. Do even US scientists use Fahrenheit to talk about liquid nitrogen temperatures?

When I plug in a monitor, it should be configured automatically by default.

Yes it should. But nobody has worked out a way to do that yet. The first problem is that you need some sort of AI image recognition stuff on the laptop so that it can work out where the monitor actually is, whether it's left or right of the laptop. Also how big the monitor is - so that the font size can be adjusted - it probably needs to do some sort of retina and brand scan too - I like a very small font, but when my colleagues come to look at my screen I have to increase the font size as it's too small for them. So I guess it also has to know who is looking at the screen.

But lets assume that you don't care about that and all you want it to do is remember the previous settings that you've manually configured the first time you plugged a particular screen in. Well you can - as I said udev can detect this sort of monitor change and xrandr provides an interface for udev to tell the X server what layout it should use. So what is missing is some "easy for you to use" tooling around setting that up. "Easy for me to use" tooling already exists - one of my biggest bugbears is often that when "easy for you to use" tooling gets created, the "easy for me to use" workflow gets broken.

The mac doesn't do it right (for me) and I couldn't work out how to fix it, windows doesn't do it right for me, but I've now got some powershell scripts that I have to manually run when the monitors change, and X doesn't get it right out of the box - but I can (and have) easily automate it to do what I want.

On the Mac, focus follows the mouse only for the mouse. I.e. you can put the mouse over a background window and scroll that window with the mouse wheel. Keyboard always goes to the foreground window.

Interesting, thanks. I suspect this would be as hard to support in X (and maybe Wayland) as supporting the normal focus follows mouse would be on the mac.

I don't get the Google search hate.

I've not used google search for a while now but it could be related to the "programmer mindset" that you probably see on here.

Way back, google was *awesome* for search - but it searched for what you asked for, didn't try to be too smart, and most of the time "just worked"

However, it did depend on a modicum of understanding of how search worked and how to structure the search terms.

Google then tried to become more user friendly, returning the results that more closely matched what the average person was *probably* looking for rather than the results that actually best matched the query.

That wouldn't have mattered except that they made it hard to impossible to get the old behaviour. I found myself adding more and more exclusion terms to a search to try and suppress results that were in the wrong domain.

Of course, this applies to all search engines, not just google - and I think "exact match" searching is now willing to return no results whereas for a while I think it would rather ignore the exact match requirement if it didn't give enough hits.

X11 as a desktop GUI fails to meet many of the core requirements of a modern OS's use case, e.g. dynamically handling different monitors being plugged and unplugged mid-session

But you're not thinking with a unix mindset.

udev can detect the monitors changing and call xrandr.

I'm not aware of anyone having worked on a "good" solution for this. My scripts won't help anyone else as they're specific to the monitors my laptop expects to see. Also in my scripts I only look at the resolution of the monitor while a good solution would want to look at the monitor IDs to handle different layouts at different places.

But, IMO, X itself gets this more right than windows or macs. Window positioning just seems "right" when you change from layout A to layout B and back to layout A.

I had a mac prior to the windows laptop but it appears the mac UI *cannot* properly support focus follows mouse. Linux laptop wasn't an option so I went with windows.

I've been avoiding Wayland as focus follows mouse is an absolute must have. I'd been using X applications for best part of a decade before I came across click to focus and while I've been forced to use the click to focus model a lot in the years since there is absolutely no way you'll convince me that it's better in *any* respect.

Errr no. It is an incredible pain to setup and get running

When you used to have to edit Xorg.conf (and whatever it was called before that, XFree86.conf? I forget now) then yes, it was an incredible pain to setup.

But nowadays it mostly seems to "just work" using xrandr.

Having said that, I've been having problems getting a dual 4k screen rpi4 working with stock debian - this thread has made me think of trying Wayland instead of X.

The use case to say "Alexa order my favorite pizza from Dominos" or "Alexa order me a Big Mac from McDonalds on Uber Eats" - is very solid and something I have wanted to work with Alexa or Google Asisstant for years now - but it is not implemented!!!

The problem is that the *vast* majority of people don't have a "favourite pizza", they *literally* have to look at the menu every time to decide what to have.

I think this is an autistic geek problem - "I know what I like, why would I have anything else" compared to "I know what I had last time, lets have something different this time"

The cash didn't disappear because he stole it

I can only speak for how it would have been had FTX been a UK company but under UK law they most definitely did steal it.

There are many situations where somebody has the legal title to something but has no beneficial interest. The simplest way that occurs in UK law is something called a "bare trust" which, in most cases[1], can be created automatically without any paperwork at all (under UK law at least)

When you buy a house you transfer the money to buy it to your solicitor. Until the purchase completes, that solicitor holds that money on trust for you and the solicitor absolutely is not allowed to do *anything* with that money that you don't expressly authorize. In fact, were the solicitor to (illegally) invest that money and make money, the gains would probably become your gains (and they couldn't even charge a management fee unless that had been agreed) while if they lost money they'd have to make good on the losses - because they stole the money to invest it.

US and Bahamas laws are almost certainly different to UK law, and there will probably have been agreements between the creditors and the firm, but on current information I'd assume that there was outright fraud and theft going on here (not least because the 10 biggest investors have apparently got around 1.5bn in deposits - I don't believe anybody depositing $100MM+ wouldn't have been checking the small print and certainly wouldn't have allowed SBF to invest it on their behalf without a lot more agreements than appear to be in place)

[1] Transactions in property (real estate) must be in writing, but that's a separate set of laws to those that create trusts.

Hopefully they're matching assets to liabilities. If your customers have BTC deposited and you hold matching BTC reserves then you don't care what the price does, you just pocket the fees when they transact.

I've used "firefox" in its various guises since the 90s. I was forced into changing to a gui browser when my bank stopped working with lynx.

My bank fairly recently stopped working with the version I had installed and the firefox upgrade took away the ability to set a proxy independent of the OS so 100% useless to me.

So now I'm on kiwi on android and vivaldi on the desktop.

I still use uMatrix, although I'm resigned to losing that one day.

I'll come back to firefox if I get two things: 1. I must be able to set a proxy independent of the OS and 2. Functionality similar to uMatrix available.

But as both of those are probably very niche requirements I doubt I'll use firefox ever again.

In order to sustain fusion you need confinement.

The sun does it with gravity.

AFAICT NIF is using inertial confinement, which works for ignition but cannot possibly work for a sustained reaction.

For those who don't know London, the deep tube line tunnels are barely wider than the train itself and it is *impossible* to evacuate a train other than via the front/rear drivers cabs outside of a station.

It's one of the reasons why, even if the emergency handle is pulled, the train will continue to the next station.

Any fire in a carriage would be serious.

A fire in an escalator in 1987 killed 31 people.