When I worked at BigCo [1], we were interviewing a candidate for a position. He was pretty good, and we were in the process of making him an offer, but he was asking for more money and trying to negotiate his salary higher.
I don't have an issue with this, BigCo has plenty of money, but other people, including a manager, were complaining. They felt that this is a good job and he shouldn't be doing this for the money.
I, not realizing that this was controversial, said "yeah, but come on, we all do this for the money."
Some people got defensive, explaining that they love the job. I responded "sure, it's good to like your job and your coworkers, I'm not trying to discourage that, but if BigCo stopped paying you then you'd probably stop showing up for work. At least I would hope so."
They kind of begrudgingly agreed, and the day went on as normal. The next day, I have an impromptu meeting scheduled with my manager's manager, explaining that I have a "bad attitude" and he mentioned that specific comment as a reason that this meeting was being called.
Now, to be fair, at the time I did have a bad attitude (in no small part due to at-the-time-undiagnosed sleep apnea), but the fact that I got in trouble for mentioning something that is objectively true really confused me. We weren't working for a charity, we weren't trying to cure cancer, we were working for a for-profit corporation. Of course we were doing it for the money, just like the corporation hired us so that they could make more money.
But I guess people just like to believe a collective lie.
[1] I'm sure you might be able to go through history and find the specific BigCo, and that is fine, but I politely ask that you don't post it here in relation to this comment.
There are various levels of self deception that almost everyone subscribes to.
A pretty high level one is that our jobs are meaningfully making a positive difference in the world, when in fact, most white collar jobs are just producing bullshit to grease the corporate wheels of modern society. Most people don't like to admit that though, so we tell ourselves little lies and go along with the corporate narrative. That's what you experienced.
But it goes deeper the more truthful you try to be. Down near the bottom of this pile of self deception is that humans are making the world a better place, when in fact we're ruining the world, causing environmental damage at an unprecedented rate in geological history, all the while exhausting the readily-accessible non-renewable resources, like hydrocarbons and minerals, that'll make the chance of a better future civilization on Earth highly unlikely.
I've been at BigCos in times past where there was some plausibility to this, but in the current BigCo workplace climate, anybody who tries to claim it's not about the money has a long row to hoe!
They don't have to be as cynical as the internets are these days. It's perfectly normal to take pride that half the phones in the world run software you wrote or that you've solved whatever problem for people.
That's completely fine. I have no issue with people working hard on a product they are proud of at a big for-profit company. It's good to like your job, it's good to like your coworkers, it's good to be happy that your software is being used by lots of people, or if you built something that you think is really cool. I've certainly take pride in such things and I certainly do not mean to diminish that by saying "we all do this for the money".
I just think it's important to be honest with yourself, and realize that a job is transactional. When I work for BigCo, I am selling my time and/or expertise for money and/or benefits (e.g. health insurance). If the company doesn't feel like they're getting their money's worth out of me they might fire me. If I feel like I'm getting a reasonable enough compensation then I might go to another company.
Such is the way with capitalism; I don't love it, but until we change to a different system that's just how it is. I absolutely hate when companies say "we're a family here", because that's simply not true. I don't get cut from being my parents' son because I'm not meeting some bottom line this quarter.
Yeah, this tendency of people to believe a collective lie, to try very hard to believe it, or at least make it look like they believe it, even when everybody knows its a lie, astounds me to no end.
Some examples:
- Russians (or insert any other dictatorship trying to appear otherwise) faking "democratic" elections. Who are you kidding, yourselves? No one believes it. Just tell the west: to hell with your democracy. Like, I just don't see why they need to go though that charade that everybody can see through.
- A country where pretty everybody is stealing from each other, and they all know it, and are still trying to fake uprightness to each other. I guess most countries fit this scenario. Like, we all know what's going on. The world does not end if you come right out and say to the effect of, yeah, we steal from each other (if not in so direct a fashion). But for some weird reason, people seem to feel it is important that the elephant in the room remain unacknowledged.
- The world is a very shitty and harsh place, especially to those with seemingly little status. Injustice abounds. Stupidity and absurdity reigns. And yet, almost all of us are expected to put on a happy, confident, optimistic face. Those unable to keep all the horror in are labeled freaks, anti-social, maladjusted, etc. People that fail are labeled lazy, not driven, etc. And yet, we pretty much all know the truth, but we like to lie to each other.
I find it kind of sadly amusing how many conspiracy theories exist about rich elites exist and then they go off about Jews or lizard people or something else ridiculous.
Because there is a conspiracy of rich elites who are trying keep you down. They don't even hide it, and they've been so successful at it that they have bought their way into the highest levels of government. They actively campaign to ensure regular peoples' taxes subsidize their lavish lifestyles and then actively try and turn us against each other instead of us collectively realizing that we need the people who actually do the work much more than we need the people who leach off of it.
I've also been baffled by this for a long time, but I think I understand this:
1. Our society is a complex system of independent actors, most of which are willing to lie for their personal benefit. It's not hard to argue that given enough time, there will emerge lies that most people do believe.
2. Most people aren't capable of holding a thought in their mind without being emotionally affected by it. This means that if some problem isn't immediately actionable, they don't want to discuss it, because that makes them feel bad.
3. Most people are simply stupid and do not think logically.
The wildest part of this is that the salary negotiations were open to a group of interviewers. Why in the world would engineers need to be a part of that?
I used to do something similar with an old Samsung ML-2010 back when I was in college the first time around.
I think it was software and not hardware, but for some reason when I had that printer hooked up to my computer and idle for more than a week, it would simply stop printing. I probably could have dug through logs and figured it out, but I instead set up a cron job to print a test page every Monday and Thursday. The test pages would just have something on the top that said something like LOL PRINTER WORKS.
This wasn't actually as wasteful as it sounds; I was taking a boatload of math courses and needed tons of scratch paper in order to do my problems. Since it was scratch paper and would eventually end up in the trash anyway, I would usually prioritize doing my problems on failed prints and/or test prints, and I would usually exhaust those and then use blank paper afterwards.
I use the Interactive Brokers MCP pretty heavily. I don't do any cool automatic fun "trading", but instead I use it to have "pseudo-QQQ".
I didn't like the relatively high fees for QQQ, and I realized that Invesco releases the weights for QQQ for free. I also think Tesla is too overvalued, and I want to avoid the SpaceX IPO. With the Interactive Brokers MCP, I just feed it the CSV of QQQ's weights, tell it to remove and redistribute Tesla, and then I tell it to buy "$1000 of pseudo-QQQ", in the form of raw stocks.
Doing this, I still basically get the same exposure as QQQ, without any fees.
EDIT: Some of the responses here were right; this is a actually a bad idea, at least with the naive way I was describing it. There's a lot more tax stuff that you avoid with ETFs compared to the makeshift thing I'm describing.
This is absolutely and unfathomably terrible to such a great degree that I think it reinforces OPs point. It seems like using an LLM has given you the confidence to make an incredibly ill-informed decision that will cost you dearly.
Every single time you rebalance your portfolio, you will need to pay short-term capital gains taxes on any gains, as opposed to an ETF in which you simply pay for the gains when you sell your stock which can be years/decades from now. This alone will reduce your average expected earnings by 20% over a 10 year period eviscerating whatever tiny advantage you think you'll get from saving a few bucks in fees.
Furthermore, assuming you rebalance your portfolio monthly, which is the minimum you need to rebalance in order to remain even somewhat aligned with QQQ, you're basically going to be paying a MINIMUM of 30-40 bucks a month in commissions to Interactive Brokers, or 400 dollars a year. And on top of IBKR's commissions you then need to pay the pass through fees of about 5-10 dollars a month for a total of around 500 bucks a year.
Compare that to QQQ which only costs you 18 dollars a year for every $10000 invested.
I've read some incredibly foolish investment advise on HackerNews, but I think this one just about takes the cake.
IBKR has payment for order flow if you use the Lite service, so it actually wouldn't be $30-40 a month.
You still are paying the capital gains taxes with the ETF, they are just rolled into the management fees.
You can avoid a lot of the short-term capital gains taxes by only rebalancing within certain thresholds and being ok with being "close enough" to QQQ instead of being completely aligned with QQQ.
ETA:
Looked it up, looks like I was wrong about the taxes being rolled into the fees. There's some extra weirdness associated with tax efficiency of ETFs.
I still think some of the numbers the parent provided were a bit handwavey and bullshit, but I'll acknowledge I was mostly wrong in my response.
>You still are paying the capital gains taxes with the ETF, they are just rolled into the management fees.
There is just so much wrong with this statement and several others that I don't even know where to begin.
At the end of the day... if you are having fun doing what you're doing, then by all means go for it, my main concern is that people might read what you're saying and actually get misled by it or believe that you're saying something that is true. Your statement seems sophisticated enough that someone could read it, think you have actual knowledge of this topic, and come away with the idea that this is actually a remotely good idea.
For those people... please understand that tombert has no idea what he's talking about, his reasons for what he's doing are not actually because he's trying to save any fees, or because there is anything optimal or rational behind it or he's in anyway outsmarting actual institutional ETFs.
His genuine reason for this appears to be entirely whimsical and for his own amusement and enjoyment, and honestly that is fine, people can do what they want with their own money and there is nothing inherently immoral about this. My main issue is him not being upfront about his actual incentive and instead misleading people into thinking that there is some kind of economic advantage behind this.
Yeah I was wrong, I actually updated my comment right before you posted your response so I understand why you didn't see it.
I was definitely wrong; I misunderstood something about ETFs. ETFs probably are more tax efficient after all, or maybe some kind of direct indexing thing if I want to avoid Tesla and/or SpaceX.
I'll acknowledge that there's some validity in "doing things for my amusement". I do think that if I avoid selling things and instead only buy to rebalance, that could avoid a lot of tax bullshit, but that's definitely not what I was suggesting before so I'll acknowledge that I was absolutely in the wrong.
ETA:
I actually think I agree with you for the most part. I don't think it's the worst financial advice on HN but it's definitely not good financial advice either.
It's too late to edit the root comment directly but I did email HN support to ask if they could amend it for me.
If short-term capital gains taxes are the main concerns, perhaps this pseudo QQQ strategy can be done in a Roth IRA account using brokers that offer free commission?
The poster was mostly right, and I was mostly wrong, I don't like admitting that but that's just what it is.
I updated the skill I wrote to make it so that rebalancing is "buy-only", as in rebalancing will just buy shares for the underweight things instead of selling the overweight. I don't think buying is a taxable event so I don't think that's going to make me have an absurd tax burden then.
I will say that I think Maxatar was a bit misinformed about Interactive Brokers though; they've had PFOF/"commission-free" trading with their free Lite package for awhile. Of course you still pay the bid/ask spread, but if something is popular enough to be on the NASDAQ-100, the spread is usually on the order of a cent or two.
It was a creative use of AI to essentially fork your own version of QQQ, which is definitely interesting! It probably doesn’t work with a US based retail account but some Roth IRA account holders or expats in Hong Kong trading US stocks might appreciate your idea
If that was his genuine concern, then instead of trying to balance a portfolio of 103 stocks... you simply buy QQQ and short Tesla at 3.53% worth of your QQQ holdings.
And if we want to talk about "bad financial advice", I think telling people to try and time the market with a short is considerably worse than "buy the same shares that QQQ does".
You pay interest on the margin you put up for shorts net profits from the position itself and cash or other assets you place inside investment accounts. You're also usually being charged interest at only a few basis points above the RFRR so this isn't "interest" in the sense of a loan.
> I think telling people to try and time the market with a short is considerably worse
Nobody is trying to time the market. If you want QQQ but don't want the Tesla exposure in it, it's a lot cheaper net to simply hedge against your Tesla exposure with a short position counteracting your long position. If you're worried about margin rates interfering with your profits, you can model all of these and come up with the optimal short needed to hedge your risk. This is standard financial practice.
Shorting doesn't have anything to do with timing the market, the reason why pop investing communities think that shorting and timing the market are synonymous is because as a whole asset prices are expected to keep pace with the RFRR assuming they at least hold their value, so taking a short position is going against the "default" market direction.
The GP did not try to time the market. He suggested a sensible strategy to exclude a tiny subset from an index (less expensive than maintaing the alternative index yourself).
I'm unsure what SpaceX's weighting would be in QQQ but with Tesla being <3.54% weighting it would take both companies being 0s within a year to offset the cost in taxes from reweighting...
You don't need AI for this though. I was doing something like this with a python script and a crypto meta etf I created years ago. I even had some simple heuristics for selecting what coins and quantity to purchase given trading volume and spot price. Its like 175 lines of python. Probably could be a lot leaner too.
I agree I don't need it, I actually wrote a program to automatically buy and sell stuff years ago using Alpaca [1].
I just found it a bit of a pain in the ass to manage a service to do that automatically, vs thirty seconds of chatting and getting results immediately, and having something that can be supplemented by RAGs in the process.
[1] I swear I had a blog post about how I did it somewhere but I seem to have misplaced it.
It sounds like you are just pulling weights of qqq and buying based on that though. What more management do you have to do? Just pull and parse the weights wherever they might be stored, break the investment up based on that weight. Should work until the heat death of the universe.
and then you want to track orders states, and then you want to track exit strategies - trailing stops that are sometimes internal, sometimes sent to the order book - profit targets, and then you want to track settlement statuses as balances change on margin, and how you get filled
all while dealing with different and complex broker APIs and routing to different exchanges that have their own rules and limitations
on the other hand, agents just do it and handle edge cases themselves
Have you actually put together trading strategies by having the agent drive? I've never trusted it that far and I use agents a lot at my job right now. The way I usually do it is, I break out pen and paper to do an analysis of what I want mathematically. I then have the agent build out some Python that lets me backtest and analyze my work. I read through the code (which is usually fairly compact since numpy/scipy and various finance libraries do most of the heavy lifting for me), make any changes as needed, then run my analysis. Then I run it in a production setting if I like it. But the actual strategy is something I come up with on pen-and-paper.
I have, and agents come up with the strategy and execution based on my contribution of what sectors to look at and alternative data sources I tell them to look at a certain way. My time horizons are quarters, as well as signal conversion into a variety of single and multi leg options trades
I feel like you could probably have the AI write a script that uses the API to do the same thing, except this time you have code you can test rather than relying on the probabilistic machine every time you do a trade.
I don't let it buy anything without confirming, and I will load the CSV into Google Sheets to make sure that the numbers more or less correspond to what I think they will. It's just easier to directly use the MCP and set up some custom skills for what I want to do.
I have thought about this but snag on rebalancing, because it would create a taxable event, or be drawn out over months/years.
Although maybe a bit spicier, VGT is half the cost of QQQ, so that is what my "NASDAQ" has been. I also blend in VTI to cut the volatility a bit, which is 1/3 the cost of VGT.
I'm doing the same strategy for rebalancing that QQQ does, and I figure that the headache of tax time is a "Tom in 11 months from now"'s problem :)
Some tax software nowadays will allow you to simply upload the tax documents with all the transactions and it will tabulate everything for you, so I don't think it will be too hard for me.
I'll admit that there's primarily just kind of a coolness factor to be able to say that I ripped off and copied QQQ without any fees, but I do genuinely like the idea that I can avoid companies that I think are terrible in the process.
QQQ gets the leverage from, among other things, swap agreements and futures. I don’t think what you have could be reasonably considered “pseudo-QQQ”. It’s like copying a cake recipe, but leaving out the flour and eggs because they are too expensive.
I am in the "false confidence" stage of Dunning Kruger Syndrome for finance stuff, so I personally would do swap agreements, but I'm not an average case.
I mean, even still, my point stays the same; if you have access to their strategies, I don't see why you can't just get the MCP to directly mimic that.
It’s achievable. It’s called “direct indexing”, and there are some extra costs associated with it, so for most investors, I think it is cheaper to get QQQ. You can flip that around with tax loss harvesting but I don’t understand that strategy and I can’t explain it.
You also don’t need AI to do this. Before AI, the main barrier to direct indexing was the amount of capital you need. That is still true.
I have enough capital to where I can do everything with the incremental share threshold of Interactive Brokers; as such I don't have to deal with the fees associated with normal direct indexing.
Too late to edit my comment, but some of the responses here were right; this is a actually a bad idea, at least with the naive way I was describing it. There's a lot more tax stuff that you avoid with ETFs compared to the makeshift thing I'm describing.
@dang if possible can you add this to my comment because I genuinely do not want to mislead anyone and have them repeat my mistakes.
You’re absolutely right! It can be frustrating talking to an AI—especially when you’re expecting a human. Let’s try again, this time I’ll make sure to be a person :rocket:
In all seriousness, I agree. It’s getting to this depressing point where I write code with AI, the code is reviewed by AI, the end user is AI. I don’t really know what the point is anymore.
Donald Trump made a fake school where he was telling single moms to max out their credit cards so that they could eventually take a photo in front of a cardboard cutout. This would be for like $5-10 grand
Single moms historically don't have tons of extra money, and Trump was ostensibly a billionaire.
Not the OP, but having been in many similar interviews, I feel like it's an easy trap to fall into, especially if you've not developed a good bit of curmudgeonly cynicism.
At least when I've done these interviews, they will be extremely friendly, and they will at least act interested in everything you have to say. It's very easy to overshare when you think the audience is actually interested in what you have to say.
I have a two way tie for the worst interviews I've ever had, for very different reasons.
First, in 2023 I interviewed for a startup as a lead architect.
They had me do some virtual whiteboard stuff, and so I was drawing rectangles and cylinders and mentioning things like "database" and "message queues" as generically as I could.
They would interrupt me and say stuff like "Which message queue? Where do you download that?". The interview went on for a long time, with many bizarrely-specific questions for a whiteboard interview, but I figured that it was just their way to make sure that candidates didn't bullshit them by handwaving away important details.
They did make me an offer a few days later, but not for as much as I wanted. That's fine, no hard feelings over that.
But then a week later the CEO emails me asking for technical help on a question. I was on the train when I got it. I don't remember the exact question but it was something to do with RabbitMQ and Redis, and it was pretty easy, so I just typed out a quick answer to my phone and replied without even really thinking about it. Then another half-hour later he responds back to my reply asking for more detail on everything.
After his last reply I sent a response like "I am happy enough to continue this conversation but I'm afraid I will need to start billing the time it takes for me to reply. Give me a call and we can discuss the rate.
He didn't reply.
And then I realized something: this company was using interviews as unpaid consulting. That's why they were asking for bizarrely-specific stuff during the interview, and that's why the CEO was still trying to get free consulting out of me even afterward.
Really pissed me off, and I am very glad I didn't accept their offer. I am generally a person who is happy to help answer technical questions for free [1], but I felt like my trusting nature was kind of weaponized.
---------
Second was last year at a big bank.
I was really excited for this job, so I showed up to the interview in my best (and only) suit, made sure everything looked nice, and had studied for many of the technical questions I thought they were likely to ask the previous night.
Off to a bad start, it was one of the hottest days in NYC of the year, and I sweat a lot by nature, so in combination with the full suit, by the time I got to the building I was already kind of drenched in sweat.
Once I get in, they start giving me some conceptual algorithm questions on the whiteboard. I don't remember the exact question, but I remember they asked the runtime complexity of my solution and I said "Looks like O(n + log m) where n is the length of list A and m is the length of list B". One of the interviewers very confidently corrects me an says "You got your n and m backward".
I look at the board, go through my solution, and, no, I actually hadn't gotten the variables backward.
I have no idea what you're supposed to do in a situation where you're right and the interviewer is wrong [2], so I just do a trace through my solution and explain that, no, my variables were appropriately assigned. He still confidently "corrected" me again.
At this point I really don't know what I'm supposed to do, because I'm not going to just lie and say "oh you're right", but if I'm wrong, then I do want to know why so I don't repeat the mistake in the future. So I ask him "Ok, let's trace through this again because I really don't think my understanding is wrong here".
It was this bizarre gaslighting experience, because he would agree with every premise of why I thought the answer was O(n + log m), and every reasoning step along the way, but then still insisted I got the answer wrong. I do really know my Big O complexity, I have been doing this for a very long time, so eventually I just said something like "I guess we need to agree to disagree" because my time for that interview was almost up.
Then there was another interview immediately afterward. The interviewer started asking me very specific questions about Java Spring MVC (like about which annotations to use and whatnot)
Now, I don't have Java Spring on my resume, I haven't touched Java Spring in more than a decade, and Java Spring was not in the job listing. I didn't even consider studying Spring MVC because the listing didn't even mention that this would be web-based.
So I tell the guy something like "umm, I don't really know Spring. I know how a web request works so I'm happy to answer conceptual questions on the whiteboard, but I'm afraid I would have to learn the specific syntax".
And he responded "Well this is not a junior role. You shouldn't have to learn."
So of course I get the specific Spring questions wrong, and fine, if they wanted a person who knew Spring, that's ok, even if they should have put that in the job posting.
But then he asked me to, on the whiteboard, design a basic web request where there was a global counter [3]. I use an AtomicLong, which to my understanding is what pretty much every human who writes Java uses for counters.
He asked me why I used an AtomicLong, and I said "because it's what everyone uses, and because it doesn't block and because compare and swap for a small surface area like that is pretty cheap".
The guy then, corrected me, and told me to use a mutex. I said "I don't think a mutex is necessary here, if it's just a counter I think an atomic is fine."
He was very insistent, and told me to rewrite it with a mutex, and at this point I am starting to question my own competence, so I yield and just rewrite it with a ReentrantLock, which he again "corrected" me saying that I should use `synchronized`, and at that I push back and say "no, ReentrantLock is fine".
I left the interview feeling like a moron; I was so sure about this stuff before, but maybe I didn't have the understanding I thought I did.
I'm friends with a few graybeard C and C++ programmers on Discord, so when I got home I told them the questions and asked them how they'd solve them, and they solved the problems in the same way I would have.
Then I realized that this interviewer, who was principal level, didn't know what an atomic was, and I think he also had no idea how to use ReentrantLock, and so when I used them he just assumed I was wrong. Moron.
[1] And that's still true; feel free to email me if you want to geek out about software :)
[2] And it seems like the answer I get for that varies between each person. I'm not sure anyone knows.
[3] With, to be clear, no further arithmetic or anything being applied to it, before someone asks.
> Off to a bad start, it was one of the hottest days in NYC of the year, and I sweat a lot by nature, so in combination with the full suit, by the time I got to the building I was already kind of drenched in sweat.
You'd need a Summer-weight suit for this to be at-all comfortable. "High-twist wool" and "unlined" or "half-lined" are your search terms. Silk-wool blends also OK. Other fabric options for warm weather open up in some contexts (linen and linen/wool/silk/cotton blends, warm-weather cotton weaves like seersucker, maybe even rayon though that's a bit niche) but probably not if you're looking to dress for an interview at a bank in New York. Part of why suits are in-practice expensive and inconvenient (and why only-occasional wearers judge them unpleasant to wear—not unreasonably, given their exposure to them) is that you need at-minimum one set for moderate-and-lower temps ("three-season"), and another set for hot days.
I have one unlined high-twist wool navy blazer that's so cool it's actually kind of a problem because offices often have their AC cranked up on hot days. I end up needing an overcoat or second, winter-weight jacket indoors, LOL. Hold the thing up to a light and it looks like a star field seen from outside the Earth's atmosphere, dark with endless dots of light, so air goes right through it.
I've only been running NixOS (in any serious capacity) for three years, but I have installed it on every computer that I am allowed to install it on now.
It has been the most headache-free Linux I've used, simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff. The fact that rollbacks are trivial and snapshots are automatic, and since everything is declarative in a text file anyway, I am way braver. If I do something like screw up the video driver, or the wifi driver or make it so the system doesn't boot anymore, all I need to do is reboot and choose a previous generation.
> simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff.
The main reason of a LTS distribution is not having to play around and fix stuff. Install something once, and it keeps running without any changes, but still gets security updates.
Yeah, but I find that particularly with laptops, even with LTS releases, there's almost always something you need to fix.
For example, there's a weird quirk with my laptop that if I am using a USB keyboard and stop typing for more than a minute, it "powers down", and if when I start typing again it misses the first four or five characters, which is very annoying.
The solution involved putting a few boot parameters and then it works fine and as expected, but I would be reluctant to do that with Ubuntu or really any non-NixOS distro, because if I screw up a boot param I get into a situation where the computer won't, you know, boot, meaning I'm stuck screwing around with grub commands and trying to fix things, which is annoying. With NixOS, if I screw things up it's like a minute of rebooting and choosing the old generation.
Not to mention that if you have a non-declarative OS, it can be hard to know what exactly is on the computer. When I ran an Ubuntu LTS server, I eventually had installed dozens of packages that I don't think were being used but it was hard to know for sure which ones were necessary and which ones weren't. When I'm using NixOS all the packages are unambiguously in the configuration.nix. "Uninstalling" a program (including its transitive dependencies) is just removing that package out of the configuration.nix and rebuilding.
I have nothing against LTS releases, but I do think that at least for laptops (which can have kind of arcane hardware quirks) it's better to use NixOS.
I would never put a LTS system on a general purpose desktop.
This would only make sense for some corporate environments, where the hardware purchases are aligned with the driver support of the LTS distribution. And even then it's questionable.
LTS distributions are mainly used on servers or on (network) appliances.
I have four old 24gb Nvidia cards. They're not great but they're not useless either. The problem is that I haven't really figured out a good way to actually use them.
Genuine question; would anyone here recommend any specific motherboard to best utilize these cards?
Depends what you want to do and which cards you have, but usually going with any older (3rd gen+) threadripper pro setup will give you a lot of pcie lanes.
I myself run with gigabyte trx40 aorus xtreme, but since it's regular threadripper (not pro) with 4 GPUs 2 of them will run at x16 and two of them at x8 speeds
It actually won't have "had" any experiences though. Yes, it can aggregate stuff from blog posts and reviews and marketing material. That's hardly the same thing.
It goes far beyond blogs and marketing posts, but sure.
Keep asking forums generic easy questions instead of AI. That way you can get one barely helpful reply, when AI could give you more details about the subject than you'd have time to read or ability to memorize.
I feel like you're trying to paint me as some Luddite, like I'm against using AI, or that I don't know about it. I know how to use AI just fine. I use Claude all the time. I'm not opposed to asking it, and in fact I had even before you made your glorified "Let me Google That For You" comment.
I just thought I might get an interesting or unique perspective someone here.
Ok look I'm sorry I've been harping on you for probably no good reason. It's honestly just my way of evangelizing the concept of solving your problems with AI, because honestly I see that 95% of problems my friends and I have are easily solvable by AI but we just aren't used to using it for everything.
When I worked at BigCo [1], we were interviewing a candidate for a position. He was pretty good, and we were in the process of making him an offer, but he was asking for more money and trying to negotiate his salary higher.
I don't have an issue with this, BigCo has plenty of money, but other people, including a manager, were complaining. They felt that this is a good job and he shouldn't be doing this for the money.
I, not realizing that this was controversial, said "yeah, but come on, we all do this for the money."
Some people got defensive, explaining that they love the job. I responded "sure, it's good to like your job and your coworkers, I'm not trying to discourage that, but if BigCo stopped paying you then you'd probably stop showing up for work. At least I would hope so."
They kind of begrudgingly agreed, and the day went on as normal. The next day, I have an impromptu meeting scheduled with my manager's manager, explaining that I have a "bad attitude" and he mentioned that specific comment as a reason that this meeting was being called.
Now, to be fair, at the time I did have a bad attitude (in no small part due to at-the-time-undiagnosed sleep apnea), but the fact that I got in trouble for mentioning something that is objectively true really confused me. We weren't working for a charity, we weren't trying to cure cancer, we were working for a for-profit corporation. Of course we were doing it for the money, just like the corporation hired us so that they could make more money.
But I guess people just like to believe a collective lie.
[1] I'm sure you might be able to go through history and find the specific BigCo, and that is fine, but I politely ask that you don't post it here in relation to this comment.
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