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• Post #4501016

  Came across the Spanish word "decepción", learned it didn’t mean what I thought it meant, and found myself disappointed at the deception.

• Post #4471932

  The embroidery art on the new Nidoran♀ Pokémon card is really something. This is the debut card illustration by the embroidery artist tayu (not counting their prior illustration contest submission).

• Post #4471893

• Post #4470589

  It’s HTML day! What will you make today? If you’ve been putting off learning HTML, today is a great day to dive in. Just pull up @bw@social.lol’s wonderful HTML for People and you’ll be building websites in no time at all. https://htmlforpeople.com

• Post #4448143

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@AltTextHealthCheck/117059833458537602 Thanks to everyone who’s added alt text to images recently. It’s making a difference!

• Post #4448066

  You don’t need an LLM in order to work with natural language. Intent classification and entity extraction are still solid methods for parsing inputs! Here’s an example of how the DNS Kitchen “Super Duper Easy Mode” will work (except it’ll be in a browser; I’m just testing my parser in the terminal here). Just ~500 lines of PHP can understand requests related to all DNS record types. And no LLMs anywhere!

• Post #4447749

  Office Hours time! https://home.omg.lol/office-hours

• Post #4424795

  @fleuron@mas.to Great question. OCR is super handy for stuff like this (just double-check the output to avoid any funny typos). If the goal is for everyone to "see" the table and all of its content, then yeah, you're gonna want to describe it as well. The way I would do it is to OCR the text, and then add the description around that. For example, when I run OCR on that image, I get a pretty gnarly mess of output, but at least the content is all there. And it's pretty easy to d...

• Post #4424594

  @fleuron@mas.to Yeah, I think that’s right! But on the last point, I think there’s room to use your own judgement. If the text in an image is the entire point of the image, then yes, you should share all of that content in the alt text. But if there’s only some text that really “matters” in the context of what’s being shared, you can just describe the image and share that part of the text. An example of that might be a photo of a page from a dictionary. The intent of the image is to share a sing...

• Post #4424566

  If there are ten people in a room all writing alt text for the same image, the result will always be ten different versions of alt text. And that’s OK! There is no perfect or “correct” alt text. It’s an act of compassion, not an academic exercise. You can put more heart into it than thought, and it’ll still come out great. ❤️

• Post #4423871

  @numericcitizen well, why aren’t you? Genuinely curious. @maique@social.lol

• Post #4406696

  I wrote a guide to alt text! Maybe it’ll help someone? https://alt-text.social.lol/guide

• Post #4393321

  Everything that you could possibly need to know about Dave Winer's rss.chat project can be summed up by the fact that there isn't a single line of code dedicated to moderation, reporting, content removal, blocking, muting, filters, or any trust & safety considerations at all. If you're building (or, in Dave's case, asking Claude to build) a way for people to connect with one another on the internet in 2026 and not designing the entire thing around trust & safety, you&#39...

• Post #4393299

  @cat@fed.cat.scot That's an interesting idea, but I think when something is presented as a check-the-box or compliance activity, that's where you wind up getting really low quality stuff. And where alt text is concerned, that defeats the entire point. If this was framed as just a simple hoop to jump through (simply requiring the presence of alt text), then some people would inevitably just type *something* there to satisfy the requirement and move on. Ultimately, the issue here isn't...

• Post #4393188

  Still working on some more resources related to alt text, but here’s a little tool you can use to see how your media posts appear to people using assistive technology: https://alt-text.social.lol/check-up Try running it on your own account and see how things come out. Do you feel like your alt text is offering a good experience? If that’s the entirety of how someone saw your images, do you think they’d walk away with the right information?

• Post #4392898

  @cygnoir@social.lol Oh no! That's a missed opportunity for sure, from an app standpoint. And I know none of us have a lot of extra time in our day to fiddle with stuff that should work smoothly in the first place, but one thing you could always do is copy your alt text before posting to some.pics, then cross-post to Mastodon the way you normally would (via the share sheet or whatever you wish), and then pop over and edit the Mastodon post and paste the alt text you just copied into the media...

• Post #4392896

  @sybrand@social.lol I'm working on a tool and a guide, and hopefully those will help! But honestly, you don't really need to think too hard about it. There are definitely ways to write great alt text, but *any* alt text is better than none at all. Here's one approach: before you post an image, look at it for a moment. Then close your eyes and think about how you'd describe it to someone. What are the most important parts? Describe those first. What do you want people to know abo...

• Post #4392775

  @srgower@ottawa.place Shame can actually be a pretty productive motivator, though. Like when you just now shamed me for expressing disappointment about alt text usage and not offering a complementary educational resource. You got through to me! (And before you try to tell me that it wasn’t your intention to shame me… it wasn’t my intention to shame anyone else, either. I said that our alt text usage was sad, and said that not using alt text excludes people. 🙂)

• Post #4392637

  @sarajw@front-end.social I have plans for the equivalent of an angry reminder, but this one will show up in people’s inboxes. 😆

• Post #4392628

  @srgower@ottawa.place Yes! There are a bunch of good resources out there, though they all differ a little (since this is more art than science). I’ll see if I can find one that I can happily recommend or I’ll make my own. 😄

• Post #4392627

  @mihobu@social.lol The goal is for everyone to make their content accessible, at the time they post. And if everyone did that, we’d be at 100% all the time regardless of the measurement window. 😄

• Post #4392619

  @maique@social.lol You rock, maique! 🤩

• Post #4392611

  @andycarolan@social.lol Thank you!! 😍

• Post #4392574

  @kpl@social.lol Heh, it’s OK to not post images! All that matters is that we have alt text on any image or video that we share, so we can share with everyone equally.

• Post #4392553

  This is pretty sad, social.lol folks. It only takes a moment to write some alt text, and it makes your media accessible to everyone. We have multiple visually impaired members and you’re just excluding them entirely. :prami_sad: I’d like to think we don’t need a hard rule to get people to do the right thing, but maybe we do? In any case, I’ll probably start to reach out to people who aren’t adding alt text over the next few days. https://mastodon.social/@AltTextHealthCheck/117042846608811957

• Post #4381040

  If you use @echofeed@hub.7622.me to crosspost stuff from the omglolverse and noticed things not working quite as expected, that was entirely my fault! I broke the thing I had in place that prevented EchoFeed from being subjected to the same treatment as the teeming masses of bots and scrapers out there, and it didn’t have full access to omg.lol content. It’s fixed now, and everything is flowing as intended. Very, very sorry for the bump there. :prami_sad:

• Post #4369362

  Still have some bugs to iron out (especially with syntax highlighting), but DNS Kitchen’s new zone file editor is getting closer to production!

• Post #4355624

  Fastmail’s EU data storage option is now available! They’ve published a blog post with all of the info on how it works: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmail-offers-eu-data-region/ Save 20% off your first year of Fastmail when you sign up via https://fastmail.com/omglol 💌

• Post #4334052

  Mrs. Neatnik and I are celebrating 23 years of marriage today! 💞

• Post #4321269

  A quick round-up of various omg.lol service patches over the past week: - elk.social.lol ➡️ 1.0.1 - source.tube ➡️ 16.0.2 - runner-1.source.tube ➡️ v12.13.2 - discourse.lol ➡️ v2026.8.0-latest.1 +3