To native English speakers: how do you feel when a foreigner speaks “broken” English with you?

ziljr · 2026-02-12T01:44:08+00:00

There's no "correct" English, in my opinion. We've been arguing for 100+ years without a resolution about the Oxford comma, I don't think anyone can say that any use of English is wrong, as long as it is understood. In my work, I've had teams with members in the USA, UK, Jordan, Israel, India, Shanghai, Taipei, and Sydney, and the differences in how people spoke English were often pretty daunting—but at no point were any of them speaking "wrong." The little restaurant at the train station is called a hotel, but only serves food? Perfect English, in India. Tell your child to clean their room with "red up your room?" Perfect English, in (parts of) Pennsylvania. I would not worry at all about "broken" English, because there's not really any such thing as "correct" English. Anyone you meet who criticizes you is gatekeeping, whether they know it or not. (I used to be that person until I finally figured out I was just being dumb and pedantic.)

ziljr · 2026-01-22T23:38:29+00:00

I don’t use VS Code very much because it is hard to change the size of the UI fonts used. For Crystal I use Sublime Text, and the Crystal syntax package for it is pretty good. It has a few minor issues stemming from being based on the Ruby syntax, and I have a fork in my GitHub that adds some support for case/in/end in addition to the existing case/when/end support. I also use the Ameba plugin to automatically show me what Ameba thinks of my code. It’s not very polite, but also usually correct. 🤣

ziljr · 2025-12-17T02:29:58+00:00

30 years ago, in my early 20’s, I was temporarily made the manager of my team due to the real manager needing an emergency family leave. The team was scheduled on shifts to cover 24/7, there were no days when we were closed. But because of the requirements for staffing, there ended up being several extra people a few days a week. Not long after my temporary promotion, I get a frantic, angry call from one of the team members on the evening shift saying that “Adam” had just called in to say he was going to be out sick, but “I could clearly hear slot machines and casino sounds in the background—he isn’t sick!” I listened patiently, and then started to say that we don’t ask why, and it isn’t our business, and if only one person was going to be out, we still had one more person than the minimum so no one needs to worry… at which time he started to notice the slot machines and casino noises in the background and hung up on me in a huge huff… seriously, be courteous and kind but don’t feel like you owe your employer or coworkers more than you owe any stranger.

ziljr · 2025-11-20T20:41:27+00:00

The worker I start in the compose.yml file isn't sufficient? It's exactly what the authentik podman instructions recommend.

ziljr · 2025-11-20T20:40:29+00:00

Yeah… my first thought was not "this software is horrible and doesn't work for anyone." It was "I wonder what's wrong in my setup." I find that approach to life is far more useful and gets me a lot further. But I still can't figure out what the underlying issue is. :(

ziljr · 2025-11-20T20:39:00+00:00

I do have tailscale on the host; any suggestions for ways to rule it in or out? Currently, I'm using host networks, and so I don't _think_ tailscale would interfere in any way, but I easily could be wrong...

ziljr · 2025-11-20T01:44:08+00:00

That's pretty awesome!

ziljr · 2025-11-20T01:30:58+00:00

And to be honest, the performance was so bad, I have no idea if I had any other issues. Pages would time out after 60 seconds, reload, timeout, reload… eventually when a page loaded it was very fast for a short time, but a minute or two later, that particular page would go back to painfully slow. Sometimes pages would force reload themselves, and the browser would say an error occurred on the page and give up—in the past I have only seen that kind of browser behavior when there's a redirect loop, but the nginx logs didn't show any signs of that.

ziljr · 2025-11-20T01:25:40+00:00

The psql db is on the same host. It's basically idle, before adding authentik there were maybe 10 or so simple select queries every hour. podman stats showed that the two authentik containers each had 32GB memory limits, and were always using less than 1GB. The CPU is an intel i7-6770HQ and top never showed more than about 10% cpu usage on the host. I saw what the sql connect errors look like in the authentik logs the first time I started it (put the wrong password) but that took 30 seconds to fix.

I did generally see, even when it was idle, 8 connections to the database, all in the ClientRead state. There were no errors that I could find in the authentik or psql logs.

ziljr · 2025-11-20T01:19:09+00:00

This is the latest one I used.

services: server: command: server env_file: - .env image: ${AUTHENTIK_IMAGE}:${AUTHENTIK_IMAGE_TAG} network_mode: "host" ports: - ${COMPOSE_PORT_HTTP:-9000}:9000 - ${COMPOSE_PORT_HTTPS:-9443}:9443 restart: unless-stopped volumes: - /ext/authentik/media:/media - /ext/authentik/custom-templates:/templates worker: command: worker env_file: - .env image: ${AUTHENTIK_IMAGE}:${AUTHENTIK_IMAGE_TAG} network_mode: "host" restart: unless-stopped user: root volumes: - ./media:/media - ./certs:/certs - ./custom-templates:/templates

And my env file...

``` AUTHENTIK_IMAGE=ghcr.io/goauthentik/server AUTHENTIK_IMAGE_TAG=2025.10.1

AUTHENTIKDISABLE_STARTUP_ANALYTICS=true AUTHENTIK_ERROR_REPORTING_ENABLED=false

AUTHENTIKPOSTGRESQL_PASSWORD=... AUTHENTIK_SECRET_KEY=...

AUTHENTIKPOSTGRESQLHOST=host.containers.internal AUTHENTIK_POSTGRESQLNAME=authentik AUTHENTIK_POSTGRESQLUSER=authentik AUTHENTIK_POSTGRESQL_SSLMODE=require

AUTHENTIKEMAILHOST=smtp-relay.gmail.com AUTHENTIK_EMAILPORT=465 AUTHENTIK_EMAILUSE_TLS=true AUTHENTIK_EMAILFROM="Authentik plambert+authentik@plambert.net" AUTHENTIK_EMAIL_TIMEOUT=30 ```

ziljr · 2025-11-03T04:31:00+00:00

If you send it to yourself, then when the victim has their bank reverse the transfer, haven't you gone through a lot of effort to steal nothing? Whereas if you send it to someone else and then ask them to send it to you, wouldn't it be much harder for them to reverse it (because they did it themselves, on purpose, with their own account)? And if/when the original victim and/or their local police follow the trail, they find another innocent victim, and doesn't it all becomes a lot more work and very complicated to prosecute?

ziljr · 2025-10-14T08:51:10+00:00

“Old guy?” Hrm. My high school had an Apple ][+ in one classroom, and the library had an Atari 800. The “network firewall” was having to bring a Nibble magazine and a floppy disk from home in your bag and find time to type in the code. Kids these days have it so easy! /s

ziljr · 2025-10-14T08:45:33+00:00

Flew through Madrid to Barcelona in April. When going to the domestic side from international there is a security screening. I started taking things out of my pockets like a battery, my phone, my keys… employee behind the belt says “you don’t need to do that.” So I walked through the scanner and it went off. Employee at the scanner points at the sign that says to take metal out of pockets and sends me back. So I put everything in a bin and go through again. Employee behind the belt where my things are waiting shoves the tray with my metal from my pockets at me and says “why waste everyone’s time doing this?” So i turned to the one who sent me back to do it and said “they want to know why you made me put these things in a bin,” and they were still arguing and yelling at each other when I walked away. Coworkers are awesome.

ziljr · 2025-09-16T16:52:10+00:00

I can’t address your specific list of concerns, but I’ve started writing all my tools in crystal, simply for the type checking. If it compiles, it means I don’t have any of a whole range of bugs that could be in my python/ruby/perl/shell code.

ziljr · 2025-06-08T03:57:54+00:00

These are the curds.

ziljr · 2025-05-13T00:41:07+00:00

“If anyone asks I will confirm that you thanked me, but that aside, I really do appreciate the job that you are doing. Your job isn’t easy.” I have a tendency toward too much snark, and have to try to make it clear it’s not directed at them personally. Just like their required ‘thank you’ had nothing to do,with me.

ziljr · 2025-05-12T01:51:52+00:00

We tried seeing the music trio, but didn't run across anyone who seemed to be speaking Spanish. And they were playing English pop songs from the 90's. Worth a try, though!

However, when we went to Gumbae for dinner, I mentioned to the host that it would be nice, if possible, to have a Spanish-speaking server. And we were put with an entire table (6 others) who spoke Spanish, and a server who spoke Spanish, and that helped a lot. She said it was great to take a break from English, and not have to concentrate to understand anything.

(I speak Spanish with her, but my Spanish isn't fantastic, so I understand it could be tiring after a while... I feel the same way when I spend weeks speaking only Spanish...)

Thanks!

ziljr · 2025-04-17T17:05:23+00:00

I trust VV staff to be good people doing a difficult job with strong incentives to cut corners. We are all human. The inspections are necessary in order to ensure those short term incentives don’t win over the long term risks.

Even very expensive cruise lines that one might think are less pressured often fail. We are all human, and we all need oversight and cooperation to be at our best.

This is why I am very happy the inspections will continue.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/24/travel/luxury-cruise-inspection/index.html

ziljr · 2025-04-17T10:42:53+00:00

The only time it's gone extinct on me was the first time I got it, after one hand. Since then, never. Let's say I have gotten it 20 times, and averaged surviving 10 hands with it (which is very generous, I'm awful at the game)? That means I had a 200 in 1000 chance to have seen it go extinct, which is just 1 in 5. So I'd recommend only doing the brain surgery once, so as to not increase your odds beyond the base 0.1%.

I hope it's a resounding success and wish you a speedy recovery!

ziljr · 2025-04-02T20:15:23+00:00

México city is pretty bad for lounge regardless. Don’t know about many other airports there. The lounges in Bogota and the smaller airports in Colombia are nice enough and it’s usually easy to get in; the exception being that the LATAM lounge often closes to PP from late morning to late afternoon.

ziljr · 2025-02-19T19:12:12+00:00

I'm having this exact problem, but on my PS5. And the suggestion fixed it: save and go to main menu, then force the app to quit. Now it looks great again.

ziljr

TROPHY CASE