That’s like half a years salary

Also, it’s a post-tax $50k, whereas your earned income is a pre-tax $100k in that scenario.

There are some limits on what you can put in a Roth IRA in a year. I don’t think that you can contribute $50k in one year.

searches

https://www.schwab.com/ira/roth-ira/contribution-limits

The maximum total annual contribution for all your IRAs combined is:

• Tax Year 2026 - $7,500 if you’re under age 50/$8,600 if you’re age 50 or older.

• Tax Year 2025 - $7,000 if you’re under age 50/$8,000 if you’re age 50 or older.

For single filers, in 2026, your Modified Adjusted Gross Income (MAGI) must be under $153,000 to make a full Roth IRA contribution.

Hmm. I dunno if you can defeat that via the Roth backdoor loophole.

searches

Sounds like not. That apparently defeats the more-restrictive income-induced contribution limit, but not the absolute cap on contribution limit.

https://investor.vanguard.com/investor-resources-education/article/how-to-set-up-backdoor-ira

“Backdoor Roth IRA” is a term that describes a strategy used by high-income earners who can’t contribute to a Roth IRA because their income is above certain limits. Rather than contributing directly to a Roth, the backdoor strategy calls for contributing to a traditional IRA and then converting it to a Roth.

EDIT: That being said, would be possible to invest it and to annually max out the contribution. Have to pay capital gains taxes on the gains you make prior to getting it into the Roth account.

EDIT2: If you’re currently working somewhere with a 401(k) that you aren’t maxing out, I think that you can max that out. That apparently increases the annual absolute contribution limit.

https://www.fidelity.com/viewpoints/retirement/earn-too-much-contribute-Roth-IRA-conversion

High income taxpayers can still benefit from the tax advantages of a Roth account by converting traditional IRA or 401(k) dollars to Roth, or by contributing to a Roth 401(k) if available. Roth conversions have no income or contribution limits, but do require payment of applicable federal and state income taxes.

https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/401k-contribution-limits

For tax year 2026, the most you can contribute to a Roth 401(k), a traditional 401(k), or a combination of the two is $24,500.

That leaving trails feature was more designed for very old school LCDs with extremely slow refresh time,

It’s true that there was an type of early LCDs that had very slow response rates and that that produced a visual artifact, a visible trail behind the pointer (as well as ghosting behind anything moving). I’ve used those displays. But that’s not what I’m talking about. There was also software that explicitly drew pointer trails to make the pointer more visible.

searches

This kind of stuff.

A lot of software packages have existed across multiple OSes and graphical environments to provide some way to make the mouse cursor more visible, whether via creating trails or a screen-spanning crosshair or various other forms of functionality.

I don’t know if that functionality is necessary, but I think that as a lot of people have moved to higher-and-higher resolution screens, that the mouse pointer defaults have not really kept pace. Like, the default mouse pointer size should maybe be larger. On my desktop system, I recently started using a monitor at a higher resolution of 165 ppi, and by default, sway didn’t increase the mouse pointer size; I lost track of the pointer multiple times. I wound up resolving that with:

# Larger cursor
seat * xcursor_theme Adwaita 48

in my ~/.config/sway/config file to get a 48 pixel pointer.

I’m pretty sure that most desktop environments have some mechanism to increase pointer size, and my thinking is that the default should perhaps be to try to cover a larger portion of the user’s visual arc than is currently the case.

The ideal would be to base it on visual arc…but that requires knowing how far the user is sitting from the monitor. We do have the ability to get physical monitor dimensions from the monitor, which gives ppi, which is part of the problem, but not how far the user is located from the monitor.

Laptops often have integrated webcams, and if their field of view were queryable (which, AFAIK, is not currently the case) that could let one compute that distance to the user’s face using a webcam image, as long as they’re using the integrated monitor. With desktops or external monitors, though…we don’t generally have that monitor-surface-aligned webcam.

Me, using terminal emacs: The mouse pointer is generally unnecessary overhead that the user probably shouldn’t be using anyway.

I’m not a huge fan of tomatoes in isolation, but there are a lot of very popular foods that incorporate tomato. Hamburgers have tomato. Chili has tomato sauce. Pizza has tomato sauce. Pico de gallo—what most people in the US refer to when they say “salsa”—has tomato.

Do a video search with “site:youtube.com” on the various Web search engines that have a video search.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ayoutube.com+bif+naked+let+down&iar=videos

You don’t need to use YouTube’s search engine to search YouTube.

EDIT: I mean, many of you, like me, probably long-since tried and then gave up on using Reddit’s (really bad, at least last time I tried it) search engine to search Reddit, but found that doing “site:reddit.com” searches on Web search engines was still useful. The same principle applies elsewhere…

EDIT2: Plus, you may not even want the site:youtube.com qualifier, if you’re fine with videos from other video-hosting websites.

I mean I’m new here

You have already become part of the solution!

It’s a Linux feature to compress some of your memory and then store it in a RAM disk. For systems with limited memory, it makes it go further.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

zram, formerly called compcache, is a Linux kernel module for creating a compressed block device in RAM, i.e. a RAM disk with on-the-fly disk compression. The block device created with zram can then be used for swap or as a general-purpose RAM disk. The two most common uses for zram are for the storage of temporary files (/tmp) and as a swap device.

I use Super-Enter instead.

Super-F gets reserved for movement among windows, as f, b, p, and n are emacs’s movement keys, and I use emacs-style keybindings rather than vi-style keybindings in sway.

I would be opposed to requiring it. I think that even an example from another state or country might have useful bearing on how things work elsewhere.

I mean, end of the day, if you’re going to go out and ask anonymous people on a forum legal questions, I think that it’s safe to say that it might be a useful starting point for further investigation, possibly involving talking to a lawyer. But I wouldn’t go do something with major risk based just on what they say. I don’t think that it’s going to be really practical to change that.

Some people can taste certain chemicals in some vegetables much more strongly than other people and really don’t like them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster

Supertasters are individuals whose sense of taste for certain flavors and foods is far more sensitive than the average person.[1] The term originated with experimental psychologist Linda Bartoshuk and is not the result of response bias or a scaling artifact but appears to have an anatomical or biological basis.

Reports of variations in human taste perception date back to 1888.[5] The major advance in understanding human taste variation came in 1931 with the discovery of “taste-blindness” specifically for thiourea compounds, when Arthur L. Fox, a chemist at DuPont, discovered that some people found phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) bitter, while others found it tasteless.[6][7]

Fox describes the event:

Some time ago the author [Arthur L. Fox] had occasion to prepare a quantity of phenyl-thio-carbamide, and while placing it in a bottle the dust flew around in the air. Another occupant of the laboratory, Dr. C. R. Noller, complained of the bitter taste of the dust, but the author, who was much closer, observed no taste and so stated. He even tasted some of the crystals and assured Dr. Noller they were tasteless but Dr. Noller was equally certain it was the dust he tasted. He tried some of the crystals and found them extremely bitter.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylthiocarbamide

Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), also known as phenylthiourea (PTU), is an organosulfur thiourea containing a phenyl ring.

It has the unusual property that it either tastes very bitter or is virtually tasteless, depending on the genetic makeup of the taster. The ability to taste PTC is often treated as a dominant genetic trait, although inheritance and expression of this trait are somewhat more complex.[2][3]

https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/12/04/brusselssprouts/

At this point, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with brussels sprouts. Whilst the compounds PTC and PROP aren’t found in the vegetables, they both contain within their molecular structure a thiocyanate group (nitrogen, carbon and sulfur bonded in series) which is thought to be related to their bitter taste. This same group is also present in compounds called glucosinolates, which occur naturally in brussels sprouts, as well as broccoli, cabbage and kale (collectively known as cruciferous vegetables). The glucosinolates are thought to form part of the plant’s defence systems , for example against diseases and creatures that feed on the plant. Additionally, the breakdown products of glucosinolates, the isothiocyanates, also contain the thiocyanate group within their molecules.

So why is this structural similarity significant? Well, there seems to be a strong association between the ability to detect the bitter taste of PTC and PROP and a sensitivity to the bitterness of these vegetables. Of course, it’s not the case that sensitivity to PTC and PROP automatically implies a dislike of cruciferous vegetables; other factors may also have an effect, such as a person’s particular flavour preferences. However, if you’re a brussels sprout hater, you can now suggest a potential chemical reason for your dislike if you’re ever berated for your perceived vegetable prejudice.

I think that configuration management software is important for many people who admin a large number of computer systems, because being able to modify and spin up identical systems is important to them.

But if you don’t fall into that category, it may not buy one that much.

Cursive is faster (and more comfortable) than printing.

But that assumes that you’re handwriting in the first place.

Typing is faster than cursive, and many people who work a lot with text can just type any substantial amounts of text that they want to write.

I think that the mathematical concepts that I learned were mostly generally useful.

But what was useless was the emphasis on doing work by hand. My particular pet peeve is all the time I spent in calculus classes being taught techniques to do symbolic integration by hand.

I was doing a math project once, working with the husband of one of my calculus professors. He himself was a mathematics professor. I dropped by his office. He had to work something out that involved a symbolic integration and fired up Mathematica. I said “You can probably do all this by hand”. He laughed and said something like, “Nobody who has to do actual work with this is going to waste time doing this by hand”. He was right.

Today, I use maxima to do symbolic integration. It’s in my Linux distro and on my Android phone.

My limited experience listening to ham radio operators with my scanner (listening to voice, not Morse code) is that when hams do get in contact with each other, they mostly talk about ham radios. Which, I mean, I guess is understandable, since it’s a common interest to all of them, but a lot of it is people who like building and tinkering with radios talking about building and tinkering with radios.

Well, I’m here rather than on Usenet. Overall, I think that the Threadiverse is preferable — Usenet had real spam problems for a long time.

But if you want some benefits:

• Wide range of powerful, mature clients with extensive filtering functionality, offline reading support.

• Better client-side accessibility. I mean, you can be blind and use a screenreader or something on Usenet. Going to be a lot less ideal on the Threadiverse.

• Comment editors are probably better than the in-browser textarea editors or clients with limited text-editors that I’ve seen (though the Threadiverse has Markdown as a standard, which I think is generally preferable). Though I haven’t been browsing Usenet in some time, and maybe they have MIME-encoded Markdown or HTML or something as a common thing now.

• More-standardized support for posting embedded binaries.

• Commercial service is available. It’s great that people donate their time and funds to make Threadiverse servers run, but there’s something to be said for the resources available from commercial service. There’s nothing stopping someone from running a commercial Threadiverse instance, but AFAIK, nobody presently is doing so.

• Newsgroups are more discoverable than are communities on the Threadiverse — you really need to use the https://lemmyverse.net/ index to find any communities out there, as otherwise you’ll only see it once the exact name “!community@instancename” has been searched for on your local instance. Usenet (mostly) propagated newsgroups everywhere.

• Probably a larger userbase, though I haven’t dug up current numbers. Certainly a different group and set of interests.

• Some PGP use and client support.

• I would bet that Usenet servers can scale up to more load than can Threadiverse servers.

I was actually thinking that screensavers might make a comeback if OLEDs become the norm. CRTs could suffer from burn-in, even if the problem was minor enough that most screensavers were really for fun, and in the 1990s, screensavers were pretty common. LCDs don’t see burn-in, so screensaver use seems to have kinda disappeared. Plasma displays can get burn-in, but never really hit very widespread use. But…OLEDs can.

Today, I think that most systems have some form of automatic power-down of the display if someone isn’t using it, so maybe that competes with screensavers.

I’ve used a Kobo that has a limited browser, but if she wants to browse the Web, I’d just get an Android tablet rather than a dedicated hardware e-reader. She can run the Kobo or Amazon or whatever apps on an Android device, as well as run reader apps for PDF or whatever.

IMHO, the major reason to get a hardware e-reader is to have an eInk screen. If she’s going to be doing anything other than the most minimal of web browsing, she’s most likely not going to want an eInk screen.

I just overheard a coworker saying “Oh, I would never try that in my life!”, in a discussion of food. (This was about consuming a steak cooked less than medium well). It made me wonder what life is like for those who refuse to try new food, especially those who refuse to try mundane things like fried shrimp.

I mean, they might be concerned about health risks. Cooking is part of our process for making a lot of food safe to eat.

I mean, I wouldn’t worry about a medium steak, but I wouldn’t eat steak tartare. It isn’t because I’m worried about the taste or texture, but because I don’t want to pick up parasites or similar.