u/naticom

I’m Canadian and we signed a new HGV contract yesterday in California (so 7 days to regret). We didn’t pick a crazily expensive package (Total $14K, ~6500 Club points every other year, maintenance+fees around $1100 per year) and the manager threw in 130K Hilton Honor points + additional 15K Club points to sweeten the deal.

To me, it’s something that we can afford also we’ll be able to use in the next few years. When I average out the numbers, it seems to be cheaper than what we’re going to spend out of pocket each year. But like every other said, we’ll be stuck with Hilton properties and now we’re staying between Marriott and Hilton due to the credits cards we’re holding (Bonvoy Brilliant and Hilton Aspire). Another reason why we sign up because I’ve almost run out off all the credit card sign up bonuses for Bonvoy and Hilton credit cards and our vacations in the past few years were heavily relying on those points.

That’s why I feel the timeshare might be able to give me a consistent way of doing affordable vacations in the next 10+ years.

Therefore I’m asking about your opinions - is there anything good about purchasing a package from a sales person? And do you think I picked a shitty package?

Also, the most important thing - if I want to rescind, should I send out the formal letter while I’m still in the US, or I can do it when I’m back in Canada in two days (still within 7-day window)?

Thanks y’all!

Hello, I booked a UA flight via Avion Rewards and then subsequently made some changes (after 24 hours). It took a long while for a call centre agent to get it done but he said I was lucky. Not only the change was free but I will also receive some refunds from UA for the price difference (~USD $100). He reminds that as the refund comes from UA, I can call UA to ask refund to go back to my method of payment.

However, later today I received an email from UA saying the refund has become travel credits and it's valid for a year.

As there's a bit of a wait time for calling both Avion and UA, I wanted to ask here and see if any of you had dealt with similar situation before? Can the travel credits really become a refund back to my credit card?

I did a crappy parking last week and scratched my tailgate. As it's down to primer, paint shop estimate $3000 (glass is a little scratched as well). I have total 25 yrs of good driving record (10 yrs in BC) and have never had a claim. I heard that this one might be forgiven but when I called up my insurance, she said she had no information about this and I have to open a claim to ICBC first and they'll decide. Is this how it works? I would think this might be among some areas why I need an auto insurance agent, to answer my inquiry..

Can anyone recommend a good place for car scratch repair? Wife did a crappy parking and scratched the car. I don't see any dent but the scratch is down to primer. Thanks..

I've played the ice shard build, brainless, I've never died and only need to stack ice damage (sorry, was playing in other language) + Knowledge. Super easy gameplay and a bit boring.

Then I play Spirit, and what confuss me is that no matter what weapon I equipped, or how much points I put into any attributes, vitality damage of Eidolon guards doesn't seem to increase except when I level up or put points into relevant passives. Is this how it works?

Just noticed that J1 colleague showed up in J2 org chart. He resigned from J1 a month ago. Our entire BU in J2 works from home and we’re not in the same team, but recently we have to collaborate on something and that’s why I noticed him. He had a good relationship with my J1 manager so he probably will snitch on me when he also notices me in J2.

Do I wait for J1 to fire me or resign now in case they start an investigation?

I have a Asus NUC14Pro (Core 9 Ultra + 32GB DDR5) and an Aorus 3080 10GB Gaming Box that I owned for quite a while. I'm recently learning the LLM thing and was amazed by the quality of response compared with like 2 years ago.

I came across some posts, e.g., Qwen 3.6 35B on RTX 3080 10GB + 7700X + 32GB DDR5 : r/LocalLLaMA, stating that a Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B model can fit in a 3080 10GB card with decent token speed, also saw another Youtube video about fitting the model into a 8-yr old 6GB card.

I tried their llama-server commands and while token generation is not bad (4X tokens/s after analyzing a 6000-line Python code and), the prefill is extremely slow, only 100-150 token/s, making pre-parsing painfully slow. I don't see a lot of eGPU discussions in the localLlaMa sub reddit so thinking I might get more response in here. I read some post and found that running LLM on eGPU will have like 20-30% performance hit, which I understand, but my prefill is only 1/10 of other people's which I cannot get over. Can anyone have similar setup give me an idea how I can further optimize it?

Also, is adding another 16GB eGPU going to help?

I got a Aorus 3080 eGPU BOX yesterday, plugged in to my ASUS NUC14Pro, installed the Gigabyte Control Center and everything seemed to be working fine. However, I noticed that even when I am not running any 3d applications or AI stuff, the NUC was still running super hot while idling.

Has anyone seen this problem in the past? Do I need to disable the built-in ARC GPU, or do I need to upgrade drivers (and what drivers)?

Due to some restrictions I can only use eGPU for my setup (laptop + NUC). Has anyone tried to use multiple eGPUs for local LLM? Is there any real world examples that'll be even better. Thanks :D

My NUC14Pro has two usb-c type ports with lightning symbol, so it’s very straightforward that they support Thunderbolt, also it’s mentioned on Asus website that NUC14Pro has Thunderbolt.

However when I go into Device Manager but I only saw USB4(TM). If I turn off Thunderbolt Support in BIOS, those 2 USB4 ports would be disabled.

Can anyone confirm whether NUC14Pro really support TB4? Asking because I have an EGPU on the way..

I got my Macbook Air M5 16GB two weeks ago and am very excited to know its capability of running local LLM as my friends told me it should be slow but usable. In preparation for that, I also performed the thermal pad mod and blow the blackplate with a big fan in standing clamshell mode. I actually had a 4090 laptop in the past for gaming, and I also tried to run local LLM on it but got really bad impression in the past as I didn't tune any startup parameters.

After some research online (also with Chatgpt and Gemini), I was able to start the LLM with this command:

llama-server  -m ~/Downloads/llm-models/Qwen3.5-9B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf \

-ngl 99 \

-fa 1 \

-c 65536 \

--cache-type-k q4_0 \

--cache-type-v q4_0 \

--ctx-checkpoints 64 \

--context-shift --cache-reuse 512 \

--reasoning-format deepseek-legacy \

--mlock \

-np 1 -b 256 -ub 128 -t 4 \

--jinja \

--port 8888 --host 0.0.0.0

However, when I asked my local LLM to generate a README.md for a 4000-line python code, the speed is very bad - between 12-14 t/s. However, I'm seeing online that M5 should be able to reach 20t/s. Quality of response is pretty good...no complaint on that but I definitely need your help with tuning the parameters, or even suggest a better way to run it on a Mac. Thanks

The game doesn't seem to be stable with Crossover and I've tried DXMetal DXMT and DXVK. The game would randomly freeze - sometimes just after playing for a couple of minutes, sometimes after 30 min. It doesn't seem to use a lot of system resources so my MBA M5 is still lukewarm.

Anyone also play this game and figure out a way to stably play this game? Let me know. It's my childhood memory and I'd really like to enjoy it again (Otherwise I'll probably just go back to PS emulator)

Hello, I just got my M5 MacBook Air 15” and performed the thermal pad surgery. Does anyone know if I can run RDR2 that was originally purchased via Epic Games? Also, I remember Andrew benchmarked the GPTK4, is it also working a lot better for RDR2 on a M5? Thanks!

I have a UE4 game (a pixel art RPG game) which I've been fumbling with Whisky and Heroic but couldn't get it to work. It gets blackscreen with text and music going on. Tutorials online are outdated.

However, with Crossover (on trial), it worked right off the bat. I believe the underlying engine is the same just that my Whisky or Heroic is not properly configured. Does anyone know what are the essential libraries or configurations that I should be looking for so I can replicate them to other WINE tools? I believe Crossover don't have their proprietory libraries?

We're planning for our Hawaiian trip for this winter. Moana Surfrider is probably the last resort in the Marriot umbrella that we haven't stayed before. For the dates that we're looking at, it's only 50k points difference. However, Moana Surfrider's room is significantly smaller than Waikiki Beach Marriott (unfortunately I wasn't able to secure my NUA this year), and the Waikiki Beach Marriott's free breakfast for Platinum Elite is pretty good.

Can anyone share with me your experiences? Thanks

I don't have ants coming into the house yet, but they have been digging up sand below my driveway and moving the sand out through the cracks. In the beginning I purchased Terro gel and it sort of worked, but ants just gathered around the gel without moving. Yesterday I made my own ant bait but it doesn't seem to work. I only use simple ingredients:

- 20 mule team borax 10g
- granulated sugar 30g
- Warm water 100g
- Mix until they all dissolve

I put the syrup into a plastic yogurt lid. No, not even one ant is interested in it.

Why do the ants love Terro but not my solution?

My EV9 has been showing weird charging behavior so I took it to Kia. Before sending the car back, I plugged in an ODBII and saw one of the cell has lower voltage (4.02V for that cell and others at 4.08V). After their local certified EV technician's diagnostics (also some back and forth with Kia Canada), they came to a conclusion that BMS needs to be swapped out. Since it's a BMS, it's going to be a lot faster than swapping out the HV batteries.

I'm asking the EV pros here that if a bad cell can be fixed by swapping out the BMS module? I'm always having the impression that a bad cell needs to be swapped out. If BMS causes problems, we should be seeing problems on other cells as well.

I cannot post in r/amex so asking here.

I'm holding a no-fee Amex Bonvoy card for years, and the AF is about to post early next month. I still haven't used the 35K FNA (expiring in 2.5 months). If I upgrade the card to Brilliant, do I pay less fees and get the 85K FNA + extra 10 Elite nights? How does that work?

My 2024 EV9 recently had some charging problems - SOC would jump from 95% to 100% in a second. I’ve done multiple charging tests and got consistent result. Suspecting there might be dead cell.

I’m seeing post but OP didn’t say which OBDII and app he was using to show battery info. Can someone suggest one?

https://www.reddit.com/r/KiaEV9/comments/1hhxzrv/charging_from_90_to_100_way_too_quick/