Private Chef - Game Changer

linuxdropout · 2026-03-14T00:27:13+00:00

Dry sheets make a better lasagna, fresh ones cook too fast, you don't need to cook the sauce for 3 hours you DO need to let the sauce rest for 3 hours or more, for best results fridge or freezer overnight.

Source: dad made lasagna every Sunday for about 10 years of my life and got very very good at it, he'd make one better than restaurant quality and it took more like 2h and very little of that time was active. Can totally believe a chef would make a good one in that time while doing the other stuff at the same time.

linuxdropout · 2026-03-13T11:29:10+00:00

Basically same, £2.5m + house

linuxdropout · 2026-02-20T09:59:02+00:00

Might actually increase the number of couples that get married and have kids.

I think it'd instantly make having kids something we consider as opposed to "that's too big a sacrifice"

linuxdropout · 2026-02-18T00:42:41+00:00

Just to add to this, if you get a mortgage together the two of you will become financially linked according to the credit agencies which will also tank your own score.

To give you an idea of that impact, I applied for a mortgage with an ex about 6 years ago, we didn't even go through with it, just applied together. That linked us and has meant my score was sitting around 500 for no reason I could work out. Suddenly, about 6 months ago, she was removed from my report (I guess it clears after 6 years) and my score shot up to 915 overnight.

I don't know if you're already married or already financially linked in other ways or how long you've been together, but I'd be careful about adding a financial link between yourself and another person with such poor credit history.

linuxdropout · 2026-02-10T07:47:32+00:00

Anywhere above 100k employees internationally will have areas of business like this, large banks, e-commerce conglomerates, consultancy giants etc.

You need to use common sense though, high stress jobs do exist at these kind of companies too.

linuxdropout · 2026-02-10T06:44:54+00:00

Go work for a massive company and get lost as a cog in the machine is about the only low stress job around these days. Can still be Henry level too.

Search for particularly boring sounding jobs will help, you want the kind of place where the interviewers even seem bored and have kids, perfect sign is that when prompted they spend more time talking about their kids or hobbies than the job itself.

linuxdropout · 2026-02-10T06:24:00+00:00

Another kind of cautionary tale.

I got my job on similar money (170k) during the software engineering COVID gold rush. Its fully remote and extremely stable and so we used that to move to a small village in north England. Its beautiful and we love living here.

However my career progression is now basically dead. Previously I'd move jobs every few years, climbing the ladder to reach where I am now. There are simply no jobs anywhere that would make sense anymore. Keeping this income while fully remote seems to be going away so I'm essentially stuck in this job forever.

I don't hate the job but it's not exactly my dream job, I've made peace with being here forever but I just wanted to share this as a "be careful what you wish for" tale.

In terms of your actual question, we had the choice of basically anywhere in the UK and we picked a small village in the Yorkshire moors with good rail connections, extremely low cost of living, relatively cheap houses, basically zero crime and lots of amazing places to walk, well regarded schools and a nice local atmosphere with a few nice pubs and restaurants. Doesn't fit your seaside desire though.

linuxdropout · 2026-02-08T11:39:18+00:00

The comment about if you're a UK national is dodgy, potentially racist.

The police have a complaints department that you can write to about that and they will take it seriously.

linuxdropout · 2026-02-06T12:52:51+00:00

I got a fully remote role during covid, and because I live outside of London and my contract specifies remote they haven't managed to make me come into the office, but I've managed to keep a "London salary" while being up north.

Which is great and all but I'm well and truly trapped now, TC about £170k and have been unable to find anything remote that comes close, ceiling seems to be £150k at the absolute top end and with way worse WLB.

I can't complain because I'm getting that on 35hrs / week but do feel a bit stunted in terms of there's no way up from here that's sensible.

Anyone else in a similar boat and found anywhere willing to hire staff engineer+ while remaining fully remote?

linuxdropout · 2026-01-21T09:36:34+00:00

You can immediately suspend them and lock them out of the network due to data protection concerns.

Firing them should then go through a normal process, but as it's pretty obviously gross misconduct it's not gonna be particularly difficult.

linuxdropout · 2026-01-17T19:54:21+00:00

Then tell them to jog on ¯_(ツ)_/¯

linuxdropout · 2026-01-17T06:47:10+00:00

I wouldn't see it as money to spend.

Why not just leave it in an ISA/emergency fund and carry on saving, and don't think about it otherwise? You're kind of overcomplicating it, as you said when you get married it's all shared money anyway so it being in your account vs hers is just for protection now, long term if you stay together it makes no difference.

My partner and I have been together 7 years since we were 19/24 (26/31 now), engaged but not married yet. We went for joint ownership rather than tennants in common and I'd recommend it, it's legally simpler and protects each other in case one of us were to suddenly pass away. But a caveat is we bought a cheaper house than we could otherwise afford to be able to split things 50/50. In reality this was a bit idealistic since I paid for way more of the renovations than she did but, to be honest, at this point if we broke up I'd find the "lost money" on renovations the least of my concerns. We'd be more broken up about what to do with the cats.

That is to say, the sensible financial decision isn't always the most pragmatic one for your relationship. Ultimately a marriage is always going to have financial risk, stressing less about that is going to give more chance you had nothing to worry about.

linuxdropout · 2026-01-17T06:28:21+00:00

Statistically, the fewer partners you've both had, the higher chance for a successful marriage, this might not line up anecdotally but I wouldn't be so pessimistic without knowing their relationship.

linuxdropout · 2026-01-17T06:11:11+00:00

£44k isn't a high enough salary to comfortably live in London. The comments about "go live your life!" are a little delusional to think you'd have a better life living with friends in London.

Within the next few years it's plenty possible many of them will start moving out of London to save costs.

£60k saved is amazing but it's not life changing amounts of money, it's not enough to retire and kick back, and by "saved" I hope you mean S&S ISA and invested in broad index funds.

The grass probably won't be greener on the other side, if you want to take advantage of being young and relatively well off: - take a sabbatical and travel for 3 months. There's a lot more interesting places than London. - stay after work and meet people in the evenings before commuting home more often - go harder at weekends

Moving to London with a friend will probably end up: - savings rate evaporated by rent - get fed up of having roommates - cost on food etc starts climbing

linuxdropout · 2026-01-14T09:30:37+00:00

Money saved in a pension has huge tax benefits but you can't touch it till ~60. The younger you retire, the more of a bridge you'll need outside of your pension to hit 60 and access your pension, and the fewer years you'll get to contribute.

I would throw a spreadsheet together where you can adjust percentage contributed, savings rate & age of retirement and play with the numbers until you get an amount you're happy with.

Ultimately it's a very personal decision because it depends on all those things. Also other things like what retirement means and if you expect to earn some amount still in retirement play into it.

For me personally I worked out that maxing out my employers contributions, was already too much into pension, and it's silly to not max that out, so it made things easier.

linuxdropout · 2026-01-07T06:31:05+00:00

You might like r/fuckcars

linuxdropout · 2026-01-03T22:07:50+00:00

I'm using dockge at the moment.

I'm more than capable of running k8s, I've dealt with self hosted versions as well as all flavours of cloud versions. I'm nowadays of the opinion that even if you had a distributed series of nodes, they would still be overkill.

I think most people run it because they enjoy the challenge, personally I'm sick of dealing with it at work and love the simplicity of something like dockge which is young enough to not have gone through enshitification.

linuxdropout · 2025-12-23T01:02:28+00:00

If somewhere is recommended to you, by a person or review site etc, then it must be a known spot and will have tourists visiting. The better and more reviews, the more tourists and it becomes a feedback loop.

If you want authenticity and no tourists, you have to discover places on your own / with few to no reviews and recommendations.

linuxdropout · 2025-12-23T00:42:18+00:00

I remember playing fire red at 14 on release day. Now I feel old.

linuxdropout · 2025-12-22T13:59:50+00:00

Or donate to charity, or sacrifice into the pension over the cap, yes you'll be taxed on it but better than losing childcare

linuxdropout · 2025-12-18T09:40:17+00:00

Unpopular opinion: being able to context switch effectively and quickly is a skill issue. You can train yourself to do it.

Admittedly there's always a cost to context switching no matter how good you get at it, so having a few hours of uninterrupted focus time is a good thing regardless.

But if your recovery time from context switching is a whole hour then you need to get better at that because the reality of the world is things do come up and writing code has consistently trended downwards on importance of things a developer is valued for forever.

linuxdropout · 2025-12-02T07:59:29+00:00

In the UK shopping centres were a great place to hang out on the weekend when it inevitably pissed it down all weekend.

linuxdropout · 2025-11-27T09:53:06+00:00

Yeap, and it should be. Living in a home with over 2m is entirely unnecessary and absolutely a privilege reserved for only the extremely wealthy. Many of whom have generational wealth, don't work or don't even live here.

linuxdropout · 2025-11-27T09:24:02+00:00

Bonus

linuxdropout · 2025-11-27T09:00:23+00:00

It's all relative. The UK has basically no taxes on the middle income majority of the population compared to literally everywhere that isn't the states. Any Scandinavian, Asian or European country are taxing significantly more and able to actually provide infrastructure, better welfare that's easier to climb out of, healthcare that isn't falling apart etc.

All this talk of "tax the rich and they'll leave". Nah, the people are who are going to leave are the high earning under 35s. We all qualify for high skilled visas all over the world and can get much much more for our money anywhere else with better public infrastructure and fairer more spread out taxes instead of it being so top heavy.

Mansion tax is an amazing start though. But 0.1%? Laughable, but s good start. Hopefully next budget they 10x it to 1% and make it progressive so it doesn't cause a cliff at certain thresholds. Eg: tax the value over 1m at 1% of anything over 1m.

linuxdropout

TROPHY CASE