I've also found that they have gotten a lot more restrictive with new card offers likely because of the massive influencer industry encouraging churning etc...
I try to keep it simple: I have the $95/year Chase Preferred. I definitely get way more than $95 every year in rewards. It's also helpful for auto converting currency when abroad (the fees add up like crazy if you let individual services do this for you.)
I'm currently in Paris on a flight I booked with points but I use this card basically exclusively for all my expenses (except ones that have to be paid with cash/bank acct)
I recently tried to get one of these higher tier cards like the Reserve just for the lounge access and even though I have near perfect credit and longtime customer they wouldn't give me the joining bonus. It's not worth it overall, especially with these changes.
Idk I switched to Firefox earlier this year and it's honestly been really painless. Not sure why a CAPTCHA would trigger based on browser ID when those are so easily spoofed. Why would someone be running a bot on a less popular browser? I have not noticed any change.
The one thing I do notice is that on some very poorly built websites there will be a bug and it's because they haven't checked in Firefox or because I am blocking things that are no longer blockable on Chrome, but this is rare.
For me it's those horrible cloudflare and recaptcha things. I get them soooo much. And also that stupid cloudflare "We're checking if you're human" page.
I am on Linux though. Perhaps Firefox on Windows or Mac fares better. But these problems are from the last year or two and don't happen in chromium also on Linux.
Seriously. When I look at the modern state of front-end development, it's actually fucking bonkers to me. Stuff like Lighthouse has caused people to reach for optimizations that are completely absurd.
This might make an arbitrary number go up in test suites, at the cost of massively increasing build complexity and reducing ease of working on the project all for very minimal if any improvement for the hypothetical end user (who will be subject to much greater forces out of the developer's control like their network speed)
I see so much stuff like this, then regularly see websites that are riddled with what I would consider to be very basic user interface and state management errors. It's absolutely infuriating.
Yup. Give people a number or stat to obsess over and they'll obsess over it (while ignoring the more meaningful work like stability and fixing real, user-facing bugs).
Over-obsession with KPIs/arbitrary numbers is one of the side-effects of managerial culture that badly needs to die.
It’s just a few meaningful numbers like 0 accessibility errors, A+ for the securityheaders, flawless result on webkolls 5july net plus below 1 second loading time on pagespeed mobile. Once that has been achieved obsessing over stabilizing a flaky bloat pudding while patching over bugs aka features that annoy any user will have died.
I know... to be fair, I did test this for my use cases on older phones with throttled slower connections and it did improve the UX but I get what you're saying, I think it also depends on your target audience, who cares if your site is poorly graded by Lighthouse if your user base has high end devices in places with great internet? not even google cares since the Core Web Vitals show up in green
Southwest is not "the leader" of anything. They're struggling. If they were doing well there would be no motivation to add these changes. They lost 231 million dollars last quarter.
I personally stopped flying Southwest years ago when someone blatantly cut in line while boarding (like a whole section earlier) and I told the gate agent and he rolled his eyes at me and said "we're all trying to get going" I think their seating and check in system is dumb especially when they set up this elaborate system where you have to rush to check in exactly 24 hours before then get mad when you expect them to enforce it.
As a person who had never flown SWA until a few years ago, they have become my go-to airline for most domestic travel.
I flew business for years on Continental, then United, then when I stopped flying for work in 2012, I started flying for pleasure a lot more. I still kept flying United because that was where all my rewards and perks were. When I stopped getting my automatic upgrade to business/first and had to fly the ever worsening economy class, I switched to SWA for everything domestic. I pay for the ticket that comes with "early bird" check-in, because I'm not going to remember to check in, and my flights always come out way cheaper. On a particularly full flight, I might upgrade to A1-15 for my wife or I, so that one of us can stake a decent row.
There have been people who try to cut in line, and usually they back down after you inspect their boarding pass and politely remind them that C group is after A and B. Sometimes they listen. Other times they they pretend to be dense, and other passengers my badger them to remove themselves. If they stay, then they stay. One person cutting in line isn't the end of the world. Especially if you are already part of the A boarding group.
On United, when flying longer distances that I will want more comfort (from business class offerings), I see they usually have a gate attendant doing line sweeps to make sure everyone is lined up correctly either for their fancy 1MM+ miles club, military, or Group 1. They are less likely to enforce Group 2's (or whatever comes after).
So all-in-all, I think SWA does a fine job at minmaxing (for the customer) price and convenience, while United (and I'm sure most legacy full-service airlines) are more about max-maxing.
That's what I don't quite get. I'm really wary of a "from scratch" web browser at this point. I looked at their project and their main selling point is that they're building both the rendering engine and the JS runtime from scratch "Driven by a web standards first approach" - what exactly does that mean? Firefox has always had that approach and web standards are more complex than they've ever been. I don't understand why not using code from other browsers is supposed to be a selling point when all the major browsers have open source rendering engines and runtimes and there's independent runtimes being built like Bun that they could use.
We're talking decades of features they have to support - unless they're planning on strategically dropping support for older unused/deprecated parts of the standard? Even in 2008 Google made the decision to use Webkit for their browser because they understood what an enormous undertaking it would be to write their own rendering engine. That was 16 years ago.
> I don't understand why not using code from other browsers is supposed to be a selling point when all the major browsers have open source rendering engines and runtimes and there's independent runtimes being built like Bun that they could use.
Th selling point is to have multiple implementations of browser engines. Currently we have three (gecko, webkit and blink, where blink is based on webkit and webkit is based on khtml). If you consider how much of the modern world is based on browsing standards it seems pretty self-evident to not have it depend on a few corporations.
Bun is a wrapper around JavaScriptCore (the JS engine used for webkit just like v8 is used for blink or node), so not at all an independent JS runtime and is not at all a browser.
> We're talking decades of features they have to support
If this is proven not to work because the standard has grow too big as you imply then we should absolutely look into either dropping old standards or slowing the pace we introduce new standards. This project is a litmus test for the web.
I jumped off and started using Svelte but have now found looking at job listings all the non tech companies are still using Angular and all the startups/tech centric companies are using Next.js.
I feel like from an employability perspective I shot myself in the foot, but I also dislike both of those frameworks. So maybe I should just quit being a front-end developer and try to retrain as something else.
I like Svelte too, but take another look at Angular. Your memories of Angular 9 don't match up anymore. It's A LOT more streamlined now with so much less boilerplate than before. And signals.
That said, transitioning to some backend or infrastructure focus never hurt anyone. It's good to see problems from different perspectives and roles. No one ever got fired for knowing too much SQL.
I think it's funny that we're constantly reckoning with the issues that venture capital causes to various things in tech on a website that's funded and maintained by a venture capital fund.
It can't be all bad, right? More and more, it seems like VC is the only way you can go in tech unless you have a really specific business model.
I try to keep it simple: I have the $95/year Chase Preferred. I definitely get way more than $95 every year in rewards. It's also helpful for auto converting currency when abroad (the fees add up like crazy if you let individual services do this for you.)
I'm currently in Paris on a flight I booked with points but I use this card basically exclusively for all my expenses (except ones that have to be paid with cash/bank acct)
I recently tried to get one of these higher tier cards like the Reserve just for the lounge access and even though I have near perfect credit and longtime customer they wouldn't give me the joining bonus. It's not worth it overall, especially with these changes.