iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

Sounds like they ran into similar technical issues as @baatl.mastod.one (which hasn't functioned for months, and, frankly, is unlikely to ever work again)

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 02/05/2024

sorry that the labeler has been down so much for the last couple weeks—just made a change on the server that should hopefully fix this

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 24/04/2024

skipping the initial premise of this post to say "a higher rate limit on labels"

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 24/04/2024

can't wait to see how many people start reporting GIFs for "no alt text"

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 19/04/2024

looks like we're almost there, the delay is now under an hour

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Reposted by Mandai Baatl

Cats of Yore @catsofyore.bsky.social · 19/04/2024

Posting this again because a lot of people said they found it helpful! Guide to ALT text: www.perkins.org/resource/how...

ALT text copied and pasted from the linked website: An infographic titled “How To Write Alt Text” featuring a photo of a capybara. Parts of alt text are divided by color, including identify who, expression, description, colour, and interesting features. The finished description reads “A capybara looking relaxed in a hot spa. Yellow yuzu fruits are floating in the water, and one is balanced on the top of the capybara’s head.”

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 18/04/2024

looks like we're down to about 8 hours now, progress I guess

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 18/04/2024

@baatl.mastod.one runs on a Hetzner CPX11 which costs €3.85 (4.11 USD) a month and is shared with a few other other labeling services. right now we use something like 0.1% of our 20TB bandwith, not sure how checking images would impact that

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 15/04/2024

just bumped the minimum follower threshold up 150%, we'll see if that helps the autolabeler get caught up

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 15/04/2024

if you check an account that regularly posts images without alt text like @restaurant-bot.bsky.social you can gauge what our current lag time is like: looks like right now it's somewhere around 12 hours

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 15/04/2024

I appreciate the sentiment, but @baatl.mastod.one's policy is to stick to categories with as little subjective judgment as possible. (Also, just labeling the posts without alt text currently takes, literally, over 100% of our labeler's available bandwidth at the moment)

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 15/04/2024

sorry about this - the influx of new activity on Bluesky in the last week has caused increased delays in our label processing

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 12/04/2024

due to rate limits it's not actually possible to label every post on Bluesky right now. ask me how I know this

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 05/04/2024

just noticed the @baatl.mastod.one autolabeling service has been down since Tuesday; just restarted it, looking into the root cause now

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 28/03/2024

Ups! Terima kasih telah menunjukkan hal ini—label pada akun di tangkapan layar ini diterapkan secara tidak sengaja (kebijakan layanan adalah hanya memberi label pada postingan, bukan akun).

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 26/03/2024

this explains why I had to manually start the service every time I rebooted the server for the last few days to solve the crashes at midnight UTC 🥴

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 26/03/2024

just realized I forgot to `systemctl enable` the autolabeling service for @baatl.mastod.one, if anyone was wondering what was behind this morning's downtime

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Reposted by Mandai Baatl

Cat, With A Sea 🌊 @temptingcate.bsky.social · 25/03/2024

those of us subbed to labels, this is what we see when folks don’t add alt-text to their images so maybe start using it yeah?

cropped screenshot of the warning label ‘no alt text’ with option to show

the label is ‘bad accessibility’

so basically it’s bad if you don’t use alt-text

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Reposted by Mandai Baatl

Accessibility Awareness @a11yawareness.bsky.social · 25/03/2024

People who want to make the web accessible need to understand the many different ways that people with disabilities use the web. This W3C resource offers a good introduction to how disabled people navigate the web, and barriers they commonly encounter. www.w3.org/WAI/people-u...

w3.org

How People with Disabilities Use the Web

Introduces how people with disabilities, including people with age-related impairments, use the Web.

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 25/03/2024

stuff like this is why I removed the term "extended characters" from the definition of Unicode Abuse

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 24/03/2024

just take a look at how quickly the network's mutated and evolved just over the course of the last year: lots of things that started one way had to change and adapt over time, the generational shifts of the system taking turns with those of the app's users

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 24/03/2024

there's a possibility that some of this can be offloaded to Ozone, but that's kind of the thing: this stuff is all so new that whole pieces of it are still liable to change dramatically, even just in the next few months, potentially based on what things happen with these early labelers like BAATL

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 24/03/2024

there's a bit more complexity and overhead involved when a post can appear more than once (specifically, how to avoid clogging the label queue with the same post multiple times), and right now we're facing a problem where the service crashes every night at midnight UTC, so these issues take priority

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 24/03/2024

but yeah, we only process posts when they appear in the firehose, ie. when they were initially posted. while it *could* be possible to reevaluate quotes and reposts (which would also address posts that predate the labeler), that'll have to come after we've got it able to handle incoming posts alone

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 23/03/2024

a post only has to get labeled once for that label to apply in all reposts and quote posts. quote posts with images themselves... I think get overlooked, actually, I just realized

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 23/03/2024

I started out setting it to 30 last night, but that still leaves it overloaded enough that post labels from over nine hours ago are still stuck in buffering; I'll probably have to bump the cutoff to posters with at least a hundred followers or so if we want any hope of catching up to current posts

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 23/03/2024

still working to reconcile lag with @baatl.mastod.one's automatic labeling against bsky's API throttling; for the time being, if you see a post without alt text that isn't labeled, it's either (a) the user doesn't have enough followers, or (b) I didn't set the minimum follower count high enough

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 23/03/2024

this is what the "Mismatched Alt Text" label on @baatl.mastod.one was made to address

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 23/03/2024

the service has applied something like 270,000 labels so far

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 22/03/2024

Jaz mentioned something about having deployed a patch to defuse a "ticking time-bomb of labels eating into RAM"

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 22/03/2024

some of that might be my fault, sorry about that

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 22/03/2024

I'll consider it once we've got a volume of reports coming in that would necessitate it: right now we've submitted so many no-alt-text labels that our system appears to have crashed completely

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 22/03/2024

well, so far it has been applied zero times

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 22/03/2024

it's broken right now, looking into a fix

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 22/03/2024

the "Mismatched" label is applied manually

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

“I’m not typing all that lol” would be labeled "Mismatched Alt Text" under the current labeling guidelines, since it technically conveys *something* (but nothing about the content of the image).

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

(and yes, "alt text" is one of the junk alt texts we check for 😀)

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

The literal definition in the code is alt text that is, stripped of articles (like "the") and punctuation, a word from a very short list of "non-descriptors", like "image" or "lol". If it provides even the slightest hint of what an image's content is (like "dog"), it's considered "not junk".

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

It looks like we're producing labels at around a rate of one per second right now (so about 86k/day), so it's actually not that drastic a difference! (It *is*, however, enough to hit the current 50k/day ceiling Bluesky set up as a safeguard.)

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

Our initial estimate for expected activity, based on figures from eight months ago, determined we were likely to hit at least 45k labels a day, and there was a little miscommunication around how that wouldn't run into the kind of rate limiting that would *refuse* the labels (it just slows them down)

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

no: the automatic labels are currently being applied as quickly as Bluesky allows them to be accepted, in the order they immediately appeared in the firehose (please do not report images for manual labeling, all our moderator actions are subject to the same queuing delay)

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

What I meant by "stop you from sharing" is that this makes it so you can't miss when *other* users neglect to include alt text, so you don't wind up unintentionally reposting inaccessible images.

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

That's true for ensuring your own posts don't get labeled (so long as you also don't give them a cop out fake description like "picture" or "the meme"), but not everybody uses that setting. This labeler compensates for that.

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

the script is running now (you can see why we were concerned about hitting the rate limits)

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Mandai Baatl @baatl.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

And, if you want to stop yourself from sharing posts that aren't accessible, you can subscribe to the @baatl.mastod.one moderation service and set it to warn you whenever an image doesn't have alt text

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