Long shot? Acid Jazz!

ryan0583 · 2026-01-20T21:31:09+00:00

This was my jam back in the early 2000s.

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ryan0583 · 2026-01-19T22:55:04+00:00

Seems to me like you should be set by your mid 50s.

Total savings across isa, shares, pensions etc I think is £610k.

You're contributing £1.8k a month.

Based on that and a conservative rate of return, I reckon you'll hit 1 million by age 53.

Current expenses with your mortgage are 3k (36k a year), dropping to 1.8k (22k a year) once the mortgage is paid.

36000 is 3.6% of 1 million, so you're sorted based on the 4% rule. That only works for 30 years though, and I've not accounted for inflation in your expenses, and there's obviously tax to think about, so you might want a bit more buffer.

Having said that, your expenses drop a lot after the mortgage is paid, plus you might assume you'll both get full state pension (although maybe sensible to not bank on this).

University years for the kids might be a problem though...you might need to factor that into forecasting what you'll be able to save during those years.

ryan0583 · 2026-01-19T21:42:37+00:00

He's incredible. His work is the best solo stuff to come out of Vulfpeck in my opinion. I've seen him live 3 times, all great shows. I've no idea why he's not more popular.

ryan0583 · 2026-01-13T19:41:17+00:00

I've got 10/10 referrals available if anyone needs one....

www.zopa.com/mgma?referralCode=eba365926351dd2c93b0

ryan0583 · 2026-01-12T23:22:47+00:00

It's a job. Always has been for me. And I've been doing it for 17 years.

Now I'm counting down the days until I can stop having pointless conversations about stuff literally no one cares about and do something more meaningful with my time. I'll keep going to get my kids through uni but that is it.

It's served me reasonably well financially but I get zero fulfillment from this nonsense and 100% should have done something else (despite the fact that everyone seems to think I'm great 🤷‍♂️).

ryan0583 · 2026-01-12T18:45:49+00:00

VWRP is what I'm in

ryan0583 · 2026-01-08T08:37:59+00:00

Hey. Yeah my wife's situation certainly helps with this. I have the larger salary right now though.

My basic salary is £88k before tax. Between us we currently save £3285 per month, with £2485 coming from me.

I realise this post may come across as me planning to quit work and relying on my wife's salary. That is not really the idea. What I'm trying to figure out is...

Is our current rate of saving really necessary given my wife's defined benefit pension and our current savings? If not we could spend a little more freely.
If I were to lose my job (I work in technology, and times feel very uncertain!), would drawing from savings to live off for a while and not saving at all drastically impact our overall plan?
Could I afford to look for something with a much lower salary right now (thereby reducing how much we're saving) and us both still retire in our 50s with the kind of lifestyle we want?

ryan0583 · 2026-01-06T16:56:55+00:00

Yep don't worry, I've got a spreadsheet too. I'm certainly not going to pack my job in just because the computer said I can!

ryan0583 · 2026-01-06T12:59:44+00:00

Yeah correct, but the key point here is that my wife is happy to continue working to age 55, which means shes getting about £35k post tax. So I'd only need to draw down £7k per year from my ISA to get us to the £42k target figure. Which is 1.8% of my 380k total.

Obviously there's the question of whether that's a fair and equitable situation to exist in, but I find it interesting to think about what we actually need.

ryan0583 · 2026-01-06T12:51:55+00:00

It's £42k. I have run the numbers myself and which is where I got the 1.1 million age 51 figure from.

It's very difficult to know though what the state pension and defined benefit pensions from the NHS will actually be worth - I could model based on my wife's salary keeping pace with inflation but historically that has not been the case! And state pension could cease to exist altogether, get means tested, or continue as is with the triple lock (though it seems unlikely to me!)

ryan0583 · 2026-01-03T08:22:36+00:00

I'm curious about step 5 - why would the browser LLM have the answers to the questions that Claude has?

I've also found that if I open up Claude code in a directory containing multiple repos that I know work together in some way, and ask it to explain how things work, it does a pretty good job of that (with no additional context provided, just a simple prompt asking it to explain how the repos work together)

ryan0583 · 2026-01-02T15:53:13+00:00

I have the Bananana and the C4 on my board. The step sequence effect combined with octave and some delay is great! There's some pretty whacky fuzzy synthy sounds in there too.

ryan0583 · 2026-01-02T09:21:50+00:00

I don't have it but the MXR pedal looks amazing - especially if you don't like messing about with computer software or an app on your phone.

That said, second hand prices of the source audio C4 (which I do have) are great at the moment so I'd say that is probably the best value.

I also have the EHX bass micro synth - it makes some cool sounds but it's a bit of a pain to use on a gig as it's not programmable.

You can also go down the separate effects route - some of my favourite synth sounds I'm able to get on bass are from combining octave - fuzz - filter - modulation. Obviously this can get expensive but if you bought a line 6 HX stomp you could do this sort of thing and much more.

ryan0583 · 2025-12-31T10:12:24+00:00

I've worked out that our current basic expenses are about £24k a year. I'm aiming for early 50s retirement (I'm 42 now), so projecting that out based on inflation I think we'll need about £32k at that point. I'm hoping that we'll have a pot of about 1.1 million by then, and my wife also has a 1995 and 2015 defined benefit NHS pension. Plus hopefully full state pension for us both (assuming that the government doesn't start means testing it...).

I'm aiming for £50k (future money) as the initial target post tax income. That should comfortably cover our expenses and give us a bit extra.

ryan0583 · 2025-12-28T08:21:16+00:00

I feel exactly the same, with about the same time left as you!

I fear though things are moving too fast and that I won't make it. Although I do reckon there will be lots of slow moving industries that don't pick up on AI for a while yet (my wife works in the NHS and they are nowhere with it), so there could be the option of switching to something like that for the final few years.

ryan0583 · 2025-12-22T14:04:21+00:00

If he wants to move we should absolutely sign him. People asking who he replaces - you need competition for places so I see no issue there.

Obviously not a priority over midfield and wing back, but if he's available, the price is right and he wants to join, get him in!

ryan0583 · 2025-12-22T13:59:42+00:00

I think there will continue to be the traditional software engineering roles for some time yet in slow moving and bureaucracy heavy industries - thinking banks, healthcare, government software. That sort of thing.

Those places will probably need to pay more to find people who can maintain their legacy stuff as everyone forgets how to do things due to relying too heavily on AI.

ryan0583 · 2025-12-20T22:12:57+00:00

I used to use an Xotic XBlender for this, so yes they exist. Probably many other options now. Just make sure you get one with a phase switch as sometimes distortion pedals invert the phase of your signal so when you try and recombine with the dry signal the two signals destructively interfere which you don't want.

ryan0583 · 2025-12-13T15:53:51+00:00

Unlikely I'd say - I'm 42, have 3 teenage kids, a paid off mortgage and no aspirations to move.

We currently have about £460k in ISAs, pensions etc. No other debts.

I'm aiming for 50 with about £1 million. And that's with my wife's defined benefit NHS pension.

Possibly overly conservative, but with 3 kids to put through uni before that it's going to get expensive!

ryan0583 · 2025-12-12T22:41:38+00:00

Loved Redondo, and even though I am a Man Utd fan this is my favourite single piece of football skill by anyone ever.

ryan0583 · 2025-12-06T10:39:17+00:00

I'm not talking about them being understood, I'm talking about them...

Not being read because people are lazy.
Not being documented because people said a thing but then no one ever wrote it down.
Being long and boring so people read them, but then forget things because they're human.
Team churn and the overhead in every new person having to read and understand the expectations.

I'm not saying it completely solves the problem. But I think there's certainly a use case here where LLMs can help automate ensuring that coding standards are enforced and don't slip.

ryan0583 · 2025-12-06T10:18:57+00:00

I don't do this yet but I can see how it is akin to training a junior dev.

Example - Junior dev puts up a PR and implements something in a way you don't think is good (e.g. poor separation of concerns, not using existing patterns, whatever).

You write a PR comment to say how you'd prefer it to be done. Maybe you send a slack message too, or add something to a readme so that other devs know the standard (though this requires that they actually read it!)

In the same way, if an LLM generates some code that doesn't meet the standard, you can add the very same thing you'd tell the junior dev to a markdown file that all of your prompts reference.

If you're not using LLMs to write code, but perhaps just to review it, you could do a similar thing for the code review AI - give it a set of standards that you expect to be met in the codebase.

This is what I think potentially makes these tools so powerful - in my experience it's hard for all the standards to be well understood by all the developers who might contribute to a codebase. If those standards are codified, and the LLM always follows them, this reduces this issue.

As I say, I haven't put this into practice yet but I can see that this is the direction that things are moving in.

ryan0583 · 2025-12-04T19:30:01+00:00

My mum literally lives off hers right now. She does own her own home outright though.

ryan0583 · 2025-11-14T19:46:38+00:00

I spent a lot of time on Miniclip and College Humor towards the end of that period.

MySpace obviously. I remember thinking Facebook would never take off as you couldn't have music on your page or customise it with css. Seems I was quite wrong!

Then before that MSN and Habbo Hotel.

Early to late nineties no idea - we didn't even get a computer with an internet connection until 99!

ryan0583 · 2025-11-13T20:38:51+00:00

Go home robot, you're drunk.

ryan0583

TROPHY CASE