dimmke (u/dimmke) - Readit News

dimmke commented on The Problem with Rewards Credit Cards theatlantic.com/culture/a... · Posted by u/zeroonetwothree

dimmke · a month ago

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.

dimmke commented on Let me pay for Firefox discourse.mozilla.org/t/l... · Posted by u/csmantle

wkat4242 · a month ago

But they're not. Firefox market share has tumbled and I'm getting more and more captchas because my browser is now so rare it's considered "suspicious". It's not a flaw in the product itself but it does affect its usability. Marketshare of at least 5-10% is crucial to be on the radar of web devs. Especially because the competition besides Safari is basically all one single browser because they share the engine.

dimmke · a month ago

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.

dimmke commented on Critical CSS critical-css-extractor.ki... · Posted by u/stevenpotts

oneeyedpigeon · 4 months ago

Feels like premature optimisation to me. Are there really cases where the CSS is so complex or the page loads so many resources that this effort is worthwhile? Maybe with the most complex web apps, I guess, but for almost all cases, I would have thought writing clean CSS, HTML, and JavaScript would render this unnecessary or even counterproductive.

dimmke · 4 months ago

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.

dimmke commented on Models of Ice Skating for the Development of Robotic Ice Skating Gaits [pdf] (2020) www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pu... · Posted by u/nill0

scrollaway · 4 months ago

As a figure skater and AI engineer, that venn diagram of my life doesn't often overlap.

That was an interesting paper but I'm confused as to what they actually tried to achieve. I'm also confused how they achieve any turning in a model that has infinite friction on one side and zero friction on the other. My brain is having trouble understanding how such a model could ever achieve anything other than a straight line.

dimmke · 4 months ago

Hello fellow figure skater! This is a fun intersection to find on HN

dimmke commented on Jeff Bezos' management rules are slowly unraveling inside Amazon fortune.com/2024/07/31/am... · Posted by u/ecliptik

wormlord · a year ago

Something that seems to be implicit in modern day criticisms of Amazon is the idea that it succeeded because of its leadership principles.

I'm not saying that's not true, but we shouldn't take it at face value that Amazon's internal values drove its success. The values stuff seemed to me to be mostly propaganda when I was onboarding at Amazon.

Could it just be basic market forces that caused Amazon to grow, attracting the best talent due to high compensation, which caused a (to borrow terminology from Bezos) "virtuous cycle"?

People talk about Amazon's corporate culture in a way that I don't see them talk about Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Which makes me inclined to believe that it's mostly hocum used to justify where they ended up, instead of just attributing it to being in the right place at the right time.

dimmke · a year ago

Thank you for saying this. If you look at Amazon's history, it's basically buying most of their competitors.

dimmke commented on Southwest Airlines Is Ditching Open Seating on Flights wsj.com/business/airlines... · Posted by u/cwwc

mchannon · a year ago

As someone who used to take two WN flights a week, I dislike these changes, and I predict they won’t last, if they ever take effect at all.

The CEO’s “research” appears shambolic and dumbs down what engenders such loyalty to Southwest. Next thing you’ll know they’ll add 777’s, ERJ’s, and A320’s to the bestiary, because it’s also what the other airlines do. Southwest became the leader because they led and went their own way instead of followed.

At the end of the day, 90% of Southwest fliers choose Southwest because of price and availability. Embiggening the boarding process with boarding zones won’t sell more seats, particularly middle seats.

The 10% of business travelers who choose Southwest crave its no-fuss “Greyhound of the skies” approach, and these will be the most turned off.

CEO pay is like telling your driver to redline the engine all he wants. He’ll outperform the competition (with significant personal upside) until he blows the engine (and gets replaced a few years later, having earned billions).

dimmke · a year ago

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.

Fuck Southwest

dimmke commented on I'm funding Ladybird because I can't fund Firefox jackkelly.name/blog/archi... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

1oooqooq · a year ago

You can tell they are a fly by night meme enterprise for not starting from a Mozilla fork.

Be realistic. For all bad mozilla foundation/corporation/toppahs did, the code is still open source and relatively free. If even something called IceWeasel almost had a shot at forking, the bar is pretty low.

dimmke · a year ago

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.

dimmke commented on Understanding React Compiler tonyalicea.dev/blog/under... · Posted by u/kiyanwang

willsmith72 · a year ago

It's just a frontend framework.

If you already have fundamental web dev knowledge, you'll be able to switch between them easily.

That's why I like Remix. It's react + web fundamentals. I'm happy to jump into a Vue, svelte, angular project. It's not all that different

dimmke · a year ago

Yeah, obviously however if you don't have previous experience with a framework in your résumé, they're going to choose the people that do.

dimmke commented on Understanding React Compiler tonyalicea.dev/blog/under... · Posted by u/kiyanwang

meiraleal · a year ago

For almost 10 years, the core react developers would repeat incessantly: React is a library, not a framework.

In the past 2 or 3 years, they just "gave" up, turned it into the biggest most bloated framework in the frontend area while the official Web APIs in the browsers evolved so much that React is actually completely useless and now it is completely useless with a compiler.

I'm wondering if that was actually the reason they pivoted to this Frankstein? The loss of relevance as a frontend library.

Anyway, I jumped off the bandwagon and don't have a say in this fight anymore. But I'm doing my part advising every Junior Developer to not make the mistake of choosing React today.

dimmke · a year ago

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.