20 ms·

End of Japanese community

• barbazoo 11mo ago
  > They are all happened on the product server, not on staging server. I understand that this is mass destruction of our work and explicit violation to the Mozilla mission, allowed officially. Could this have been a mistake rather than a malicious act?
  • alcide 11mo ago
    Mozilla has offered to call the OP, too. I’m curious on the outcome.
    • benatkin 11mo ago
      They said sorry for how you feel about it which is insincere and unhelpful.
      • Incipient 11mo ago
        My partner has been picking me up on the specifics of wording. Is there a slightly different phrasing that would make this better, or is it the sentiment that's crap? "I'm sorry for how these changes impacted you"? Personally just the sentiment feels insincere to me haha.
        • pseudalopex 11mo ago
          The sentiment is more important. But I'm sorry for how you feel suggests to many people the sole problem was their feelings. I'm sorry for how these changes impacted you suggests the changes could have been wrong.
        • mewse-hn 11mo ago
          I don't think it's the specific phrasing. They could have said "I'll contact you by email to try and understand your concerns" and it's still dodging the explicit, concrete list of grievances. However, "let's hop on a call" is just additionally dismissive.
        • 4bpp 11mo ago
          Two things stand out, besides what has been already mentioned. * The infantile corporate-cutesy wording "hop on a call" is not appropriate when talking to somebody who feels that you deeply wronged them. It has the same vibes as cheery "Remember: At Juicero, we are all one big family!" signatures on termination notices, and Corporate Memphis. * In the first sentence, Kiki says "about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced". Why is this level of detail shoehorned in? Everyone in that conversation already knows what it is about. It's as if Kiki can't resist the temptation to inject an ad/brag about their recently introduced workflow for any drive-by readers. "I'm sorry you were dissatisfied with your Apple(R) iPlunger X(TM), which is now available at major retailers for only $599!"
        • petre 11mo ago
          The response was likely also written by AI so there is no point analyzing it. It just ads insult to injury.
        • kentm 11mo ago
          Don’t use passive voice in an apology. “We’re sorry that we made the change without consulting your team or considering your circumstances.” The change did not fall out of thin air. It was something they did. If they do not own it explicitly then it’s insincere full stop.
      • crazygringo 11mo ago
        How? They don't know what exactly has gone wrong. All they can say sorry for is for how the person is feeling. Then they want to get on a call to learn more. Which is the start of helping. The response is as sincere and helpful as it could be for an initial response from someone who wants to figure out what the problem is.
        • rileymat2 11mo ago
          But he lists the problems? Pretty unambiguously.
          • crazygringo 11mo ago
            The problems are nowhere near actionable. A lot more information is needed. E.g. literally the first bullet: "It doesn't follow our translation guidelines". OK -- where are those guidelines? Is there a way to get it to follow them, like another commenter says works? Does the person need help following the process for that? Or is there a bug? Etc. These are the things a call can clarify. It's the necessary first step, so why are people complaining?
            • BrenBarn 11mo ago
              They are actionable by entirely canceling the machine translation operations in that community,
            • handoflixue 11mo ago
              > where are those guidelines? It's entirely possible that such information is well-known to everyone involved in the translation community. I would consider it outright insulting if someone who ostensibly "wants to help" doesn't know basic information like that - if the people making decisions about SumoBot are NOT aware of basic information like "where to find the local translation guidelines" then they are presumably not qualified to release a tool like SumoBot in the first place.
              • kentm 11mo ago
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • layer8 11mo ago
    The third, more likely option is that it was a careless act. Clearly a mistake in any case.
    • small_scombrus 11mo ago
      What's the saying? > Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
      • bob1029 11mo ago
        At some point the rate of stupidity becomes suspicious again.
  • omoikane 11mo ago
    If this was a mistake, the proper response might have been "sorry, we applied automation in error, those changes have been rolled back while we fix the process that allowed it to happen". And not "call with us to talk about this further".
    • move-on-by 11mo ago
      At the very least, ‘we will discuss how this could of been handled differently’, not I’m sorry you feel this way.
  • detaro 11mo ago
    Then say so if someone complains about it? "Shoot, we accidentally ran it in the wrong mode, sorry about that, I'll look into someone fixing it ASAP" is a lot better than "We're sorry for how you feel".
  • drtgh 11mo ago
    By one side, we all know[1] that automated translations are always inaccurate, and this is specially deep with translations into languages like Japanese. On the other hand, we all know that LLMs are guaranteed to introduce an error in the result, therefore always needs human supervision. Also there are other details like the 72 hours timeframe they comment... Therefore, to me, introducing LLMs without designing them just as an usable tool (UI/UX) to support the work -of the volunteer community- doesn't sound like a mistake, but sounds like an "I don't care at all, get out of the way". [1] who speaks more than one language at least.
  • charlieyu1 11mo ago
    The damage is done when the mistake was allowed to happen.
• ares623 11mo ago
  This is rich > We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with. The post literally starts with a list of grievances. Maybe ask the AI for an executive summary and the key points.
  • pseudalopex 11mo ago
    Some grievances were vague. It doesn't follow our translation guidelines. What specific guidelines did it not follow? It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost. What was not localized? Mozilla's response should not be limited to clarifying these grievances. But it could have been all the staff member who responded could do.
    • totetsu 11mo ago
      These ones? https://github.com/mozilla-japan/translation/wiki/L10N-Guideline https://github.com/mozilla-japan/translation/wiki/L10N-Guide... Looking through that wiki there seems to be a lot of things that ML would get wrong.
      • pseudalopex 11mo ago
        I edited my comment to clarify I hope. Imagining what it could have done wrong and knowing what it did wrong are different.
        • tsimionescu 11mo ago
          Do you expect someone who has just watched a bot replace 20 years of their work, with no prior consultation or review, to now write a detailed post about how translations by the bot are not specifically wrong? The core issue here is the way the bot was deployed. The fact that they had the poor taste to make it auto-replace articles written by their own volunteers is idiotic and disrespectful in the extreme. A new bot should work entirely in the back end, sending proposals for translations to the volunteers, who can choose to accept them or ignore them. Once the rate of acceptance is very high, for a specific individual language, then you might consider automating further. And yes, this effort needs to be done for each language separately. Just because the bot works well in Italian doesn't in any way guarantee that it will work well in Japanese. Machine translation quality varies wildly by language, this is a well known and obvious fact.
• adeptima 11mo ago
  10+ years in Japan. The message here is much deeper from my perspective. “Let’s jump on the call” is not the solution. The guy was stripped off of his face. I love Japan for being human. Small business bar or restaurant with 3 tables. Not everything should be streamlined for a quick call solution… the process was pushed on his head. Google nemawashi decision making process
  • alwa 11mo ago
    I did as you suggested with respect to “nemawashi.” I read about that and “ringi,” and I’m glad I did. Even to get just the gist of what I’m sure is a thin interpretation: that nemawashi refers to a “laying-the-groundwork” process of circulating a proposal between peer-level counterparts, before formalizing it and proposing to act on it. Much less crashing in with it in the form of a “SumoBot,” as Mozilla seems to have done to its non-English communities… (with the disclaimer that I have zero insight into Mozilla’s process here outside of this writer’s account). It puts a name to a considerate consensus-based way to approach change, that seems humane (and effective) in any culture—leave it to the Japanese to have a specific term for it…
    • martin_henk 11mo ago
      common sense... no real need for digging into japanese culture and so on. really no idea why Mozilla is so disrespectful to it's volunteers. well, that sweet 400m a year from Google... no need for volunteers anymore, eh
      • alwa 11mo ago
        For sure. Common sense <> common, etc… although it does seem relevant that it was specifically a Japanese-language sub-community who were reacting here. I have to say it feels like a really familiar, NGO-flavored disrespect, though: “we’re doing this favor for underrepresented language communities,” regardless of whether they want/need it or not. “There’s only X number of you having to shoulder the load in XX sub-community, don’t you want us to impose a bunch of ‘help’?” Well, no, if the choice is between a formidable volume of slop and a smaller but well-executed volume of volunteer labor-of-love… (…I say as a person very much without all sides of the story, and shooting from the hip a bit. I don’t mean to impugn anybody’s intentions, and I imagine at the end of the day we’re all on the same side here.)
• ants_everywhere 11mo ago
  > I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs. > I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs. It's Mozilla's data... > explicit violation to the Mozilla mission I'm not sure what this is referring to. I don't see any explicit violation of Mozilla.org's mission. If anything it seems consistent with that mission to provide universal translation with quick turnaround.
• jahsome 11mo ago
  I'm not really able to understand the finer details but I think I picked up enough to get the broad strokes. Really though, all I needed to see was the phrase "jump on a quick call" to form an irrationally strong opinion. That phrase instantly warms my entire body with rage.
  • chao- 11mo ago
    I am fascinated by the nuanced opinions people have about word choice. What phrase would you use to ask someone to discuss a matter, but which you feel would be more appropriate for this kind of situation?
    • OsrsNeedsf2P 11mo ago
      There is nothing you can do, because you already traded away the community for your AI project and money. The same corpo goons who don't see anything past their slop projects are the one who use the "jump on a quick call" lingo
    • stonogo 11mo ago
      Asking someone to "hop on a call" is phrasing you use with someone you are close with, not someone whose work you've just destroyed and is no longer interested in a relationship with you. The fact that the preceding apology was absolutely awful does not help. "I'm sorry for how you feel" is wrong, since nobody asked them to react to "feelings" but the clearly delineated problems with the automation that Mozilla rolled out. Asking to discuss something like this over synchronous voice comms is basically asking to go off the record and handle things privately. Sometimes that's appropriate, but if that's what the correspondant wanted they would have asked for it. These three things combine to tell anyone who is paying attention that this is damage control, not meaningful engagement, and it's offensive to act this way toward someone who has put this much time into your project.
    • davidclark 11mo ago
      My guess would be the anger comes from implication that is a possible solution at all. This type of “hop on a call” request is not usually actually designed to “truly understand what you're struggling with.” (words from the post) Instead it is usually a PR tactic. The goal of the call requester is to get your acquiescence. Most people are less likely to be confrontational and stand up for themselves when presented with a human - voice, video, or in person. So, the context of a call makes it much more likely for marsf to backpedal from their strongly presented opinion without gaining anything. This is a common sleazy sales tactic. The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed. It is also used in PR and HR situations to grind out dissenters, so it comes off in this context as corporate and impersonal.
• kaveh_h 11mo ago
  Some people do these type of contribution or charity work not just to do some good but also to feel some autonomy and mastery in a world were much of the regular top down driven drudgery work does not provide much of that feeling. These people are canaries in the coal mine. I expect more people feel a loss of purpose and rise of anxiety and depression in the world.
  • jwpapi 11mo ago
    Yeah I’m not even sure it’s easy to decide which side is in the right here and it’s not as simple as people think it is. Mozilla is painted bad here, but who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators. What if the reduced financial pressure allows Mozilla to focus more on privacy and less on ads. Unfortunately these things are really gray, but you really can’t expect a company to keep you paying in good will.
    • pseudalopex 11mo ago
      > Mozilla is painted bad here, but who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators. Mozilla should have discussed this with the translators in advance at least. > What if the reduced financial pressure allows Mozilla to focus more on privacy and less on ads. My impression was marsf was a volunteer.
    • jacquesm 11mo ago
      > I’m not even sure it’s easy to decide which side is in the right here and it’s not as simple as people think it is. - No prior communications. - No discussion about what uses the contributed information was being put to. - No discussion about the release and the parameters around the operation of the bot. - No discussion about whether or not this was a desirable in the first place (with the community, not just internally). - Flippant tone to someone who is clearly severely insulted. If it was a paid job and you treated the person who did it like this it would already be beyond rude, if it is a volunteer group then it is more than enough to throw in the towel. This isn't gray.
• gyomu 11mo ago
  As a multilingual/multicultural human it’s been pretty weird witnessing what AI translation has been doing to regional languages & cultures on the internet in the last few years. Sure we had machine translation before, but it was still a little off. Now the latest language models get us 99.9% there, so they are judged good enough to deploy at scale. What results is a weird twilight zone where everything is in your language, except it feels kind of wrong and doesn’t really communicate in ways specific to the culture from which the language is. You’re in France, you search for something, a thread pops up with everyone interacting in French - seems reasonable enough, but it just reads kind of weird? Then a message is entirely out of place, and you realize that you’re reading an English language thread translated to French. Or your mom sends you a screenshot of a Facebook thread in her native language that has her worked up - and reading it, you realize it’s an LLM translation of something that should have no bearing on her. Same with various support pages on websites - it all reads mostly fine until you hit a weird sentence where the LLM messed up and then you’re transported back to the reality that what you’re reading was not authored by anyone who can actually operate in that language/culture. There’s a lot of nuance in language beyond the words - how you express disagreement in English is not how you express disagreement in Japanese, how you address the reader in French is not the same as in Korean, etc. Machine translation flattens all modes of expression into a weird culturally en-US biased soup (because that’s where the companies are headquartered and where the language models are trained). I have no illusions that this trend will reverse - high quality translation work is skill and time consuming, and thanks to LLMs anyone on Earth can now localize anything they want in any language they want for ~free in ~0 time. The weirdest part is seeing this bubble up to the real world. I’ve been hearing young people use turns of phrases/expressions that I recognize as distinctly American, except not in English. The classic linguist response to this, which I subscribe to, is “no language is fixed, language is ever evolving in response to various external cultural pressures“. Which is true. But it doesn’t make our post-LLM language landscape any less weird.
  • daemoens 11mo ago
    Do you have any examples of American expressions young generations are using in French?
• thwarted 11mo ago
  What is the logic behind adding machine translation for content that already had a seemingly robust, enthusiastic, and motivated (volunteer?) community maintaining the translations? The "saves money" rationale to deploy LLM/MT automation doesn't make sense when its volunteers are contributing because they want to. This is kind of community and participation destruction wrought by the introduction of LLMs/MT has a serious impact because it undermines the people who are actually willing to do the work. It was presumably costing nothing (or very little) to have the community maintain this content, but the change has cost a significant amount of goodwill. If the Japanese SUMO community wanted to use MT, it should be their sole decision, baring any issues with their stewardship in general. This is someone else saying "look, with this great new automation, you don't need to spend time anymore doing «thing you want to do»". Huh? How does that make any sense to force on anyone?
  • stonogo 11mo ago
    Mozilla has invested heavily in this technology, and whatever project manager is running it needs more checkboxes in the results column of their next request for a raise. In other words, "business alignment."
    • o11c 11mo ago
      In particular, "the content is useful" is not a checkbox. "The content is produced by this technology" is, and overwriting hand-curated content is an obvious action.
    • dheatov 11mo ago
      Less competent PMs are shoving capital A and capital I everywhere in panic mode, getting even more anxious as every failure exposes and deplatforms them even more. They couldve spent time to understand the problem domain and think more, if theyre not already busy fabricating a resume to sneak into The Actual Big Tech.
  • Brian_K_White 11mo ago
    I bet it's nothing more than they prefer a machine they can just use and get no lip, rather than have to deal with humans they have to treat like humans and ask nicely and meet half way on countless issues and pretend to care about etc.
• getnormality 11mo ago
  I'm sorry for how you feel about us kicking you in the balls. Would you like to hop on a quick call to chat about this further? Just a quick lil call. Quick lil ol' callerino. Hoppity hip hop.
  • themafia 11mo ago
    "We want to better understand the issues your balls are going through right now."
    • mikelovenotwar 11mo ago
      "..and how we can help you engage further with our automated ball kicking machine we used on you without consent.."
  • move-on-by 11mo ago
    Yeah, the “I’m sorry you feel this way” response really irked me too. There are so many different ways to respond that would have been more appropriate and conveyed the same message.
    • mns 11mo ago
      The “I’m sorry you feel this way” is the first thing you learn from that HR workshop about communication when you get a promotion where you have to manage people. The thing is that having a lot of people working in corporate environments, where you constantly need to be political and backstab others to achieve some task you've been given, this is the norm, so for many this is normal, the type of stuff where they say: I'm just trying to be helpful and constructive, but for anyone not having time for this corporate double-speak, this seems rude and condescending.
      • move-on-by 11mo ago
        I understand this is corporate double-speak, trying to signal empathy without admitting any fault. But it’s the fact that it is double speak that is so irking. It might be appropriate in manger/subordinate/HR conversations - but in this context it just adds insult to injury (IMO).
• shusaku 11mo ago
  It’s a shame because “improve an off the shelf llm ti translate in line with this large dataset we prepared” is precisely the kind of project people love to work on. It could have been a chance to immortalize the hard work they did up until now.
  • ehnto 11mo ago
    Is it? I don't think you quite understood the issue. This issue is specifically centred around the human element of the work and organisation. The translators were doing good work, they wanted to continue that work. Why it's important that the work done is by a human is probably only partially about quality of output and likely more about authenticity of output. The human element is not recorded in the final translation output, but it is important to people that they know something was processed by a human who had heart and the right intentions.
    • ninkendo 11mo ago
      > The human element is not recorded in the final translation output, but it is important to people that they know something was processed by a human who had heart and the right intentions Not that I entirely disagree with the conclusion here, but… It feels like that same sentiment can be used to justify all sorts of shitty translation output, like a dialog saying cutesy “let’s get you signed in”, or having dialogs with “got it” on the button label. Sure, it’s so “human” and has “heart”, but also enrages me to my very core and makes me want to find whoever wrote it and punch them in the face as hard as I can. I would like much less “human” in my software translations, to be honest. Give me dry, clear, unambiguous descriptions of what’s happening please. If an LLM can do that and strike a consistent tone, I don’t really care much at all about the human element going into it.
      • ehnto 11mo ago
        Oh I wasn't really referring to tone or language like that, I also don't particularly like it and prefer concise clear language. While LLMs can totally achieve that, I want to know a human decided to do it that way. At some point this mindset is going to look very silly, and perhaps even more so for software. But ultimately it's a human feeling to want that and humans are also not deterministic or logical.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• dravenCore 11mo ago
  It’s sad to see a community built with love for 20 years end like this. AI should help people, not replace the heart behind their work.
  • stackedinserter 11mo ago
    Why is one person resigning == end of community?
• jogu 11mo ago
  I've been studying Japanese for 15+ years and have really come to loathe machine translations from English. While generally the meaning gets across, they're very unnatural and often use words in contexts that sound weird or are just flat out wrong.
  • hinkley 11mo ago
    Often doesn't go great the other way either.
• ezoe 11mo ago
  When the machine automation quality became okay enough, this conflict of interest happens. His demand of not using his existing work for AI training is nonsense. Because the entire article is stated: > Portions of this content are ©1998–2025 by individual mozilla.org contributors. Content available under a Creative Commons license. Didn't he agree on that? So, this contributor revealed he doesn't understand the license his work is published under. As such, Mozilla must refuse his contribution because he don't understand the idea behind Creative Commons license. His wish granted I guess.
  • panny 11mo ago
    You can rescind a license. If you own a property, it is yours. Even if you licensed it to someone, you own it and you can kick someone off. They can later address you for a breach of license, but it's still your property. You own it. If mozilla wants to tell him that his work was valuable and therefore has grounds to sue him for rescinding the license, they will have a lot of difficulty proving that after their sumobot summarily deleted years of it for no good reason at a whim. Good for him. He should probably consider suing them for destruction of his work.
    • ezoe 11mo ago
      Once your work is published under Creative Commons license, it is irreversible. No matter you have a copyright or not. You can't undo it the fact at one point you published your work in one of Creative Commons license(there are multiple incompatible Creative Commons licenses so it's bit complicated). You can make updated version of your work to non-CC, but the version you published under CC is CC.
      • pnathan 11mo ago
        I would be curious if that is how Japanese courts would view it. They may not consider that a valid way. Or they might. But different jurisdictions vary.
        • ezoe 11mo ago
• jacquesm 11mo ago
  > I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with. Talk about being tone deaf. This was so incredibly rude. No consult, no request whether they wanted this or not. Mozilla keeps finding new ways to shoot itself in the foot, these are probably some of the most loyal people that you could wish for, that's a precious resource if there ever was one. And to add insult to injury they want to them 'hop on a call' and to 'trully[sic] understand what you're struggling with' even though they just spelled it out as clear as day.
  • yawnxyz 11mo ago
    sounds like it's almost an AI response? I can't believe a person responds that way
    • skrebbel 11mo ago
      AI wouldnt misspell “truly”. It’s a human.
      • jacquesm 11mo ago
        Two observations: You are probably right. But if a random spelling error would allow a person to get away with using AI in professional communications then you can expect that pattern to show up all over the place. I'm trying to imagine the prompt here. "Hey, ChatGPT, it looks like our org fucked up and now a hotheaded volunteer makes us look like idiots. Please generate a flippant response that pretends to show we care and meanwhile ticks them off even further. Oh, and I don't want my boss to know I'm using AI to generate this response, so make it good this time, and make it look human."
        • skrebbel 11mo ago
          I so deeply hope that a prompt like that was used here.
• chris_wot 11mo ago
  The level of arrogance it took to do this is quite simply stunning.
• numpad0 11mo ago
  Isn't it fascinating that despite `while true; do claude --yolo` over a weekend being all it takes to port some project across platforms, LLMs completely fall apart when it comes to speaking grammatical and natural Japanese? Free tier Gemini CLI literally writes Android app for me by just endlessly wondering in English. AGI's here. And it struggles with Japanese. How!?
  • jameson 11mo ago
    > struggles with Japanese It doesn't mention mistranslating, so it's difficult to know the root of the problem is AI "struggling". > It doesn't follow our translation guidelines. > It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost. I believe this is the root of the problem. There are define processes and guidelines, and LLM isn't following it. Whether these guidelines were prompted or not is unclear but regardless it should've been verified by the community leaders before it's GA'ed
    • numpad0 11mo ago
      That's not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that LLMs just can't constitute a punctually Japanese understanding of text like that guideline and speak in Japanese with native fluency no matter what. I just know this from knowing both sides of English-Japanese language pair. And I find that somewhat fascinating in a sense.
      • ChadNauseam 11mo ago
        Wow. That's crazy. I would be very interested in a blog post on this subject if you ever wrote one. I wonder how this affects the perception of LLMs in Japan
      • MountainTheme12 11mo ago
        I'm surprised by that. I use ChatGPT for communication with Japanese clients and I was mistaken for a native speaker more than once. I make almost no corrections other than changing the punctuation from western to fullwidth, although to be fair it's mostly simple and technical language.
• OhMeadhbh 11mo ago
  I worked on adding TLS 1.1 and 1.2 support to firefox back in the day, and the whole process left me so disappointed I asked to be removed from the list of contributors. I wish mozilla all the best, but it's not an especially well run organization and this post gives another example of why.
  • port11 11mo ago
    I submitted 2 patches during an 2018 open night to bring in more volunteers in Berlin. The actual folk there were amazing, but the review process, tooling, and bureaucracy was so upsetting that I never bothered again. I'm not sure the fixes were approved, and it wouldn't be surprising if these open nights don't convince many to contribute.
    • OhMeadhbh 11mo ago
      Yeah. That sounds about right. I have nothing but good things to say about my peers. Management, on the other hand, was pretty bad.
      • port11 11mo ago
        Sorry to hear. I've never met a Mozilla person I didn't feel inspired by, especially those working on the TC of Ecma and anyone trying to steer the standards. You folk build good stuff, just have poor leadership.
• whyryoulikethis 11mo ago
  Am I taking crazy pills or is this entire thread full of some insane reaches
  • whyryoulikethis 11mo ago
    [dead]
  • veryemartguy 11mo ago
    [flagged]
• Stranger43 11mo ago
  I think a fundamental lack of understanding/humility is the core of this conflict along with Mozilla's long and storied history of creating controversies/problems out of thin air. The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too. Firefox is a good browser but is prevented from capitalizing on the skepticism the consumers feel toward the tech sector by Mozilla using the exact same language and dark UI pattern to promote things like pocket that the user-base never asked for, and jump on to the lets enforce the use of AI everywhere that's driving discontent within the proprietary ecosystems, and this is yet another example of this class of behavior from the Mozilla leadership.
  • lopis 11mo ago
    It's the mismstch of expectations that causes good communities to create drama. If this was Google, no one would care, as one expects Google to just do what is best for the business. But with companies like Mozilla we expect a bit better. But the truth is they are barely better and the leadership plays by the same rulebook.
    • small_scombrus 11mo ago
      People did used to have decent expectations for Google back when they at least pretended to care about the "Do no evil" tagline
      • matt89 11mo ago
        Indeed but it feels like a lifetime ago. I miss those days where I would look up to google and their products, as something new, cool and "not-evil".
        • hitarpetar 11mo ago
          it's always been marketing
• arjie 11mo ago
  I understand the matter in theory, but I don't understand the matter in practice. Clicking through on the user, I couldn't identify any machine-translated overwrites of his work. What is an example of this? And if the community that manages the site objects, why not apply a batch temporary revert, and then re-run once/if everything is solved. This is a trivial operation for me to do on MediaWiki with a bot, so it must be straightforward to do here too. I think "Ask forgiveness, not permission" is fine in order to move things forward, but you do have "ask forgiveness".
  • toyg 11mo ago
    > "Ask forgiveness, not permission" is fine in order to move things forward No, in a community of peers that's a great way to burn goodwill, particularly among volunteers. One should "ask forgiveness" when managing upwards, and "ask permission" when managing across or downwards. That's what you do if you respect people.
• witnessme 11mo ago
  The same feeling non-native English speakers have battling native English speaker bias
• Giorgi 11mo ago
  It looks like companies are doubling down on shitty AI bots to cut their costs even though it is backfiring terribly, like in Facebook case where they spent billions on their AI and all it did - just banned millions of their core userbase (and still banning). Looks like we will see more companies imploding because they relay to much on subpar AI.
• insane_dreamer 11mo ago
  Shocking that Mozilla would roll out a bot - in production - without coordinating with the team that's been doing the work for years so far. Very bad look.
• mcny 11mo ago
  Doing this in production directly without even trying it on staging feels very wrong.
  • surfingdino 11mo ago
    I used to work with manager who told us to "have balls, deploy straight to prod" We spend a month cleaning this up. The other time when another manager demanded I "run this script" from the iphone he shoved in my face a whole warehouse went down in Ireland a month before Christmas and the Police were involved. There is an irrational push to deploy AI everywhere for no reason whatsoever. It, well the LLM part of it, is bad tech and all those "AI success stories" are pure hot air.
• zkmon 11mo ago
  Going by title, I thought this is about low birth rate and accumulation of old people in Japan. Is that silly me or click-bait title.
  • throwaway290 11mo ago
    It originally had better title mentioning AI and all but someone edited it
• yigalirani 11mo ago
  If i was this guy, i would take all the translations and move them to his own independent site with proper promotion so that Japanese speaker can find it easily
  • thomassmith65 11mo ago
    I'd just begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure: https://ladybird.org/#gi https://ladybird.org/#gi
    • reddalo 11mo ago
      I'm happy that somebody is trying to create a new browser -- even though some people say it's impossible nowadays. But FUTO sponsoring that project gives bad vibes.
      • skrebbel 11mo ago
        Why? You’re referring to tue club that makes Immich, right? What’s so bad about them?
        • reddalo 11mo ago
          I also love Immich, but it seems like there's some controversy about FUTO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45666239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45666239
          • skrebbel 11mo ago
            Appreciate the response. I read the Devault rant. It’s not clear to me that the guy behind FUTO is actively evil, seems more like he’s trying his best and still figuring that whole “being a semi public figure funding stuff” thing out. Drew’s position that interacting with people with bad opinions makes you evil by association doesn’t strike me as mainstream (or future-proof for that matter).
• rand17 11mo ago
  I call this the AI theater. If a company can (still) look good AND decrease dealing with pesky flesh and bone humans, that's not collateral, that's a win. On the surface you act caring, concerned, rendering investors and HR both happy while you decrease "human complexity" - then you are winning the AI game. Mozilla always wanted to join the big boys, but while yearning for their soft power status the yearn bore the fruits of a rotten soul they will also have to embrace. There is no light without shadows and AI's shadows are drawn long and deep.
• geenat 11mo ago
  KB = Knowledge Base MT = Machine Translation In this context.
• curiousgal 11mo ago
  I am browsing the website on Firefox and Reader Mode does not work. Peak irony.
• Jean-Papoulos 11mo ago
  Imagine having human volunteers do the work for you, than paying an AI to overwrite their work without communicating this with them (no validation of any sort it seems). And once they quit you corporate-speak to them "let's hop on a call to understand your frustrations!" in response to a post where they outline precisely their frustrations. Disgusting behavior.
  • eptcyka 11mo ago
    To top it off, it's corpospeak from what ultimately is an org that exists becuase of an open source project.
• denkmoon 11mo ago
  Ladybird and other browser alternatives cannot come fast enough. Every other week we've got a thread here about some stupid move Mozilla have made, I can't remember the last time I heard positive news about Mozilla.
  • shaky-carrousel 11mo ago
    It's bad when the only positive thing one can say about them is that they're not Google/Microsoft.
  • OvbiousError 11mo ago
    There is a very loud part of HN that strongly dislikes mozilla/firefox. It's disproportionate imo, I don't understand why they're singled out so often.
    • Levitz 11mo ago
      Speaking for myself, it's really irritating to support a chrome alternative precisely because it's a chrome alternative and have it constantly shoot itself in the foot. It sucks that I can't even attempt to convince someone to use it beyond "it's not Google", and data privacy. The vast majority of users won't ever give a damn about either of those by themselves.
      • pessimizer 11mo ago
        A dozen years ago I was installing it on every computer I touched for more than a few minutes. Now I can't recommend it to anyone convincingly, especially because what I have to do to it to keep it as usable as it is for me (and what people see when they see me using it) is nothing that I could expect anyone normal to put up with. I honestly don't even want to use it at all without Debian standing between me and them. But the sad part is all the hassle I go through gets it to about 80% of where it was a dozen years ago. A lot less crashy, though, I'll have to give them that - although everything is less crashy now. But they haven't destroyed the browser. That's in a way even sadder: they decide every day to wake up and be bad, when any day they could decide to be better. Instead they've entered the modern massive predatory nonprofit space. Which usually is a vehicle for insiders to get rich off government grants, but Firefox have chosen the even eviller alternative of running interference for google as a product. Any day they could choose to center the user and the health of the internet again. Every day they choose not to. They're just a valve that keeps paranoid and aware techies from going berserk and seriously competing against chrome, and that keeps antitrust away from google (not that there's anything for big business to to fear with horrible Obama judges like Amit Mehta on the bench.) It's their only serious source of income.
• danieltanfh95 11mo ago
  It's funny how Japanese contributors often go nuclear whenever things don't go their way instead of communicating etc. Bugs happen. this is tech. open communication is always the way to go before escalation. we see the same phenomenon in git, ruby etc etc etc. Ironically, Japanese work culture encourages over-communication. It seems that open-source is considered a counter-culture that they want to escape japanese work culture from.
  • djantje 11mo ago
    Yes, lets dismiss Japanese culture..
    • danieltanfh95 11mo ago
      This isn't dismissing, this is respecting that this is a risk factor in involving Japanese contributors.
      • iamevn 11mo ago
        Please reread what you wrote and try to see if you can see how it comes off as at least culturally insensitive if not outright racist.
        • pezezin 11mo ago
          I live in Japan so I have seen what danieltanfh95 describes many times in person. Japanese people at work seem to have infinite patience with whatever random bullshit their company will ask for, but outside of work they get easily frustrated when things don't go the way they expect.
  • Ezhik 11mo ago
    >In October 22, the sumobot was introduced to Japanese KB articles. I cannot accept its behavior and no words. [...] It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications. How exactly did you manage to place the blame for no communication on Japanese contributors here given the actual complaint in question?
• nozilla 11mo ago
  > Hi Marsf, > I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with. > My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time. Let me know how that sound! What a horribly condescending and patronising response. If I'd received this it would just further vindicate my decision to quit.
  • nilslindemann 11mo ago
    I just read someone asking someone else for a phone call.
    • 1over137 11mo ago
      Speaking a second language live is much harder than taking your time and writing something.
      • xxs 11mo ago
        That's not necessary true. Regardless the response is totally trash and the timezone (US west coast) likely doesn't help, either Also I'd expect if a person volunteers as translator they'd be pretty decent at speaking.
        • aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
          > Also I'd expect if a person volunteers as translator they'd be pretty decent at speaking. Translators (of texts) are not interpreters.
          • xxs 11mo ago
            To learn nuances, spoken language is quite important. I am not a translator and English is not my 1st language (technically) - I'd have no issues 'hopping' on a call.
• jasonkester 11mo ago
  Can anybody provide some context for this? I can’t parse what’s going on from the post or the comments here, and there’s no navigation on that page to anywhere but “support “ It sounds like something is happening. What is it?
  • haunter 11mo ago
    Machine translated KB articles are destroying the japanese translations made by humans (and probably other languages too) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387?last=89611 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387...
    • gwd 11mo ago
      > If the MT-generated revision isn't reviewed within a set timeframe (which will be communicated later), it will be automatically approved and published, clearly labeled to indicate that it was translated by AI translation was used. The complaint seems to indicate this "set timeframe" was 72 hours. Add to the fact that there's decent likelihood of an avalanche of articles "that haven't been updated in 6 months", this seems pretty ridiculous to have put into place before at least getting sign-off from senior maintainers that the translations were of sufficient quality.
• surfingdino 11mo ago
  A similar thing is going on at Amazon. Their AI is rewriting perfectly good product descriptions provided by manufacturers and I noticed that I stopped buying there, because I cannot find out what it is that I am buying or how much of it I am buying. I started shopping at sites that sell same products, but do not change manufacturers' descriptions. I have a feeling that post AI bubble we'll be doing a lot of manual cleanup of information "improved" by AI.
• djdjsjejb 11mo ago
  mozilla never had a sound business model to sustain its operation anyways, everything they do is just a stunt to make a living out of people's belief and naivety on how it operates. it's a grift of an organization and it reflects in the simplest ways like this.
• emaro 11mo ago
  Mozilla is more and more disappointing. Always talking about making an internet for everyone, community, bla bla. But then they don't even talk to their own community contributors before changing their workflow. And when someone speaks up, they get the most corporate reply possible.
• kstenerud 11mo ago
  I know that everyone has already given their opinions about what kinds of people are involved and their motivations, but this is really about two fallible humans, one listing grievances and another asking to open a communication channel. That's it. Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text (a notoriously difficult medium to establish emotional communication over). Regardless of how nice or not-nice the text may sound to the various cultures that have weighed in so far, the right thing to do is talk voice/video and hash out what the problems are, and work together to come up with a solution that will satisfy everyone. That's what communication is about.
  • whilenot-dev 11mo ago
    This isn't about communication though, it's about community. Mozilla just introduced a bot to overtake community efforts. > another asking to open a communication channel. The other person is asking to open a private communication channel. OT, but where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from lately?
    • kstenerud 11mo ago
      Community is also about communication. In fact, that's a primary aspect of a community. Yeah, Mozilla introduced a bot that's stomping on things. Are they malicious? Twirling neatly waxed mustaches as they cackle gleefully as the little ants scurry about in a panic? Or is this a case of humans doing what humans do: Screwing things up. The first step is to open communications, and the most effective form of communication is face-to-face (the way we've evolved to do it). Getting to the bottom of the issue in 1-1 communication with a representative of the community should be the common approach when complex problems arise, because then you can be sure that you're on the same wavelength before you do your mass communication with the rest of the community. Saves a TON of time and heartache and ill feelings.
      • whilenot-dev 11mo ago
        Community is all about open communication, and cultivating it through active participation. There is no need to take further first steps here, as support.mozilla.org is the open platform that community agreed upon. For face-to-face communications there seems to be All Hands meetings, as mentioned by Michele. This communication in particular is about how one member is sharing their "discomfort" of the non-communicated automation efforts done by Mozilla, and is also expressing their resulting action - leaving that community. Please don't conflate the efforts of institutions (Mozilla) with the ones of communities (SUMO). Transparency is a big factor that marks their difference. So yes, community is also about communication.
• bfkwlfkjf 11mo ago
  What actually happened? What's his complaint?
  • detaro 11mo ago
    How did you read the post and miss the complaint?
    • bfkwlfkjf 11mo ago
      Because I don't understand what he's saying. Something happened that he didn't like, but I can't tell what. > the sumobot was introduced to Japanese KB articles. I dont know what a sumobot is, I don't know what Japanese KB articles are, I don't know why it's bad to have both together.
• Copenjin 11mo ago
  So, they had people working for free for years and didn't think to involve them in a process where they could have been stil "useful"? But I think they already clarified how much they care about people doing translations since they defaulted to the robo-translation. Which to me is complete nonsense considering how superior the human translations must be. As a human with a brain, I would have just translated automatically the missing pages leaving to them the option of replacing/fixing them. Also they should have been thanked many times for all their hard work.
• lloydatkinson 11mo ago
  Another delightfully awful Mozilla problem
• braiamp 11mo ago
  Note, and this is very important: marsf posted this at 2am pacific time. Kiki responded at 6am (I don't know it's timezone, but presuming anywhere in the US, it is literally the earliest it could have responded). Then afterwards, marsf have posted a response publicly. So, we don't know what happened since then. There have been 1 day and a half-ish and coordinating between timezones is interesting, to say the least.
• sirwhinesalot 11mo ago
  I'm not sure why I clicked on this beyond just knowing it was going to be another Mozilla trainwreck and not being able to look away. But what was truly stunning to me was this comment thread. There are people here actually defending the following response: > I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? This is horrifically patronizing after someone's volunteer work was effectively destroyed (as laid out in the list of grievances), but there are people here asking "how is it patronizing? seems perfectly reasonable to me". It's one of those "they live among us" moments, where you realize that you're surrounded by psychopaths. It's not even malice, they're not intentionally being assholes, they just have no empathy.
  • stephenlf 11mo ago
    Talking face-to-face is absolutely the right response, though. Would you have preferred a canned apology?
    • malvim 11mo ago
      The “right” response is owning your mistake, apologizing, rolling back AND talking face to face. Patronizing “sorry you got your feelings hurt” responses are pretty much canned apologies.
    • __s 11mo ago
      1. Turn off bot 2. Revert bot's changes 3. Ask to have call for feedback, while expressing fault for deploying bot to prod without collaboration & conceding to making this bot opt-in (They may not have power to do 1 & 2, but that's a sign of an org not empowering their support team)
    • sirwhinesalot 11mo ago
      "I'm sorry you feel that way" is a canned non-apology, worse than a canned apology. At least a canned apology admits fault. I wouldn't want to get into a call with someone with that attitude. If I'm quitting because no consideration was given to me or my work, and the first response I get shows no consideration to me, my work, or even acknowledge my list of grievances, a "quick call" is the last thing I feel like getting on. In fact, even that word, "quick", is insulting, because there's no way this is getting fixed with a "quick" call. "Quick call" implies the grievances are minor. More insults.
• antiloper 11mo ago
  Enshittification will continue until market share improves.
• ErigmolCt 11mo ago
  This should be a wake-up call for any org trying to "AI-ify" community-driven work
• superkuh 11mo ago
  I'm sure they'll be as open and communicative with the community as they were when their baked-in CA TLS certs for the add-ons expired and everyone not using $latest's add-ons got disabled. Which is to say they'll explicitly shut down the comment threads where people are discussing it over and over and then set up a non-commentable blog post where they ignore everything. And leave the problem in place to repeat in the future.
• adolph 11mo ago
  File under “nominative determinism” Google “sumobot;” ai summary says: A sumobot is a robot designed to push an opponent out of a circular arena, similar to human sumo wrestling.
• techsystems 11mo ago
  Floorp is a fork by Japanese developer, though his English is not perfect. It removes all backwards compatibility to speed things up, competing vs. Thorium to be best performing browser, if anyone's interested.
• throw7 11mo ago
  Saying "I'm sorry for how you feel..." is the most condescending way to begin. Then a "let's jump on a con call"... oh... why would I do that when I just told you? smh.
• verytrivial 11mo ago
  Small meta observation: Gemini Flash 2.5 summarises this discussion as a problem with how ML was used and it's flaws, whereas Gemini Pro 2.5 emphasizes that it mainly a cultural communication problem. Both topics are here, but "fast Vs slow thought" sees different things.
• burnermore 11mo ago
  Can someone please remind what the community coordinators were called long back? I remember they were part of releases, had power and responsibility. There was an exodus of them around 2015/16 times. Does anyone remember anyone's post?
• stackedinserter 11mo ago
  He sounded pathetic, especially "therefore I declare" that's just ridiculous. Boss, I declare that you must remove all my code from all our products effective today, because of that coop that easily replaced my 20 years experience and I'm upset about.
• sameerds 11mo ago
  > Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with. That has the same vibes as a customer support helpline that has no intention to actually help.
  • WA 11mo ago
    > I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel Especially coupled with this non-apology.
    • ryandrake 11mo ago
      Corporations are never sorry for their actions, they're always sorry about how you feel.
  • wussboy 11mo ago
    "Your call is important to us." But, not important enough to actually hire enough people to answer it.
  • dublinben 11mo ago
    That’s corporate for “would you like to discuss this off the record away from public view?” Especially with a non-native English speaker who may be more comfortable expressing themselves in writing asynchronously.
    • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      Absolutely. Rule #1, always leave a paper trail when talking with companies. The social contract is long broken, there is no room for "off the record".
  • jameslk 11mo ago
    It may be viewed that way, but it’s also useful to empathize with someone and get more detail/nuance that can’t be conveyed simply over text. Especially when someone is not happy. I usually do the same thing when the medium is text and someone is not happy. Tone conveys a lot of useful information. Even better if you can see a person and their body language. I don’t think the cynical view of the staff person’s intentions is fair, though I don’t know the person’s history nor do I have dog in this fight.
• 8cvor6j844qw_d6 11mo ago
  Reading the comments and replies here makes me wonder if I might have unintentionally stepped on some toes at work, especially across different cultures and people with different "takes" on English. I've also been on the receiving end (written communication) but given that we get along pretty well in-person, I chalked that up to our different writing "style".
  • makeitdouble 11mo ago
    I see your POV, but fundamentally the issue here is Mozilla screwing with their AI bot, and some employee jumping in to do some communication after everyone's already pissed. Sure the Mozilla employee could use better phrasing and have a more considerate approach, but it comes out so worse because the situation is already critically bad. People will give the benefit of the doubt when they see genuine care in the actual actions and a decent track record.
• skywhopper 11mo ago
  Context in another thread on that site gives a lot of background and a lot of community pushback that was clearly ignored: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387?last=89612 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387...
• DocTomoe 11mo ago
  When you've seen this over and over again, you notice the pattern. Marsf’s declaration will stand as a warning, yet not a turning point. The Japanese community will fade into quiet dignity, its pages archived and replaced by machine-rendered text that sounds correct but says nothing alive. A few veterans like Michele will remain, mending sentences by candlelight, until exhaustion or disillusion drives them away too. Within Mozilla, the story will become legend told in conference calls - “remember when the Japanese translators quit over the bot?” Some manager will sigh, another will nod, and the project will move on. In a year, SumoBot will be improved, made less intrusive, and marketed as community-enhanced translation. What will endure is not the bot or the bureaucracy, but that farewell note - an act of witness that proved people still care enough to walk away. If Shakespeare wrote the final scene, it would close not on victory or defeat, but on silence: a hall of empty chairs, lit by the blue glow of screens that still translate into nothingness.
• hulitu 11mo ago
  > End of Japanese community Hurray ! Finally AI is eliminating the need for junior (and, it seems from the post, also senior) developers. /s
• discoutdynamite 11mo ago
  This almost deserves to be nominated for the AI darwin awards. "Volunteer community destroyed and leadership self-exiled because someone at corporate thought thier machine translation was better than native speakers, of one of the world's most notoriously difficult languages." I would bet money that Japan has thier own yearly "business fail awards" and this is gonna wind up there. "Just hop on a quick call, never mind the time zone!"
• ExtraRoulette 11mo ago
  Late to the discussion here, but the path to make things right (to me) is to reverse the changes. Why doesn't Mozilla do that?