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The only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model. Every single

The only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model. Every single normal person, when presented with a "translate" button either know it's going online, or don't care about it. Begging the purists to run away from Firefox at this point so they can stop wasting everyone's time. Your demands for examplarity and whining about money not going ONLY to firefox and jerking yourselves on Servo was not enough, now you want to restrict the browser to owners of an RTX5080 if they want to use it?

pessimizer 10d ago
You're talking out of your ass. It is so ironic that "normal people don't care about privacy, just you nerds" is an HN meme. Everybody I know cares, often in an extreme way, and I barely hang out with technical people in real life. I've met people so irrational and nontechnical about modern invasions of privacy that they think that it is being driven by demons. The reason this is a meme on HN is because tons of HN posters are people who spend a lot of effort trying to invade people's privacy and to come up with new ways of concealing that fact. Virtually every sleazebag trying to hide things in ToSes, updates, and telemetry has been an HN poster. And they're pretending that they speak for normal people, because they are scumbags, think normal people are animals that will do anything that they can get away with and don't care about any boundary, and that therefore 1) they themselves are normal, and 2) normal people deserve whatever happens to them. This is what comes from making know-nothing Libertarianism/Objectivism a mainstream ideology, ironically at the same moment that Alan Greenspan, a direct Rand acolyte, was admitting that it had failed while the world economy was sliding into the toilet. Intellectual Libertarianism/Objectivism had failed, but the dumb kind had yet to properly rise. I don't know anything except you nerds are worried about nothing, I'm going to do it because I can and nobody is going to tell me what to do, nobody normal cares about this, and if they do let them try and stop me, why do you care anyway... Please just do it and stop talking, you don't have anything to say. I hope all of you end up in cells next to SBF.
- walrus01 10d ago
  I do not fundamentally disagree with you but it's also an extremely well known phenomenon that average non tech users, in the aggregate of millions of people, will click almost any "yes/I agree/continue/Next" step on a software installer or new user sign up workflow for anything, without reading the ToS. People blithly sign up for all sorts of cloud based things and services without understanding their full ramifications all the time. People such as you are describing and rightfully criticizing are knowingly taking advantage of that. Indeed it's how a lot of malware gets installed too. The person you're responding to is pointing out that a lot of people at the surface level do only appear to care about the results. They put something into google translate, it works, they gets results they are pleased with, they don't put a lot of thought into the fact that the data is going to an external service. That's not an inaccurate description of how a lot of people use their computers these days. The fact that people will click yes/agree/OK on almost anything is how Windows computers got Bonzi Buddy installed on them back in the day, and now it's continued into the cloud-everything era.
  - graemep 10d ago
    > it's also an extremely well known phenomenon that average non tech users, in the aggregate of millions of people, will click almost any "yes/I agree/continue/Next" step on a software installer or new user sign up workflow for anything, without reading the ToS. People blithly sign up for all sorts of cloud based things and services without understanding their full ramifications all the time. I would put a lot of that down to learned helplessness. A lot of non-tech people tell me that "they already know" and that it is impossible to avoid. I have been told I am naive to think its possible to keep data private.
  - gremlinunderway 9d ago
    It's almost as if outside the tech bubbles most people don't understand the tech or implications. HN posters who live and breath in this space are so smug to pretend this esoteric knowledge about networking identifiers or fingerprinting is simple and that anyone can get it. These are the same people who will throw their hands up on any other esoteric topic and give up on it equally. For example, tech people so easily decry how "stupid" the law and legal jurisprudence is (because obviously if they don't understand it, it must be bullshit) but see zero irony in being smug pretentious assholes to regular people who didn't happen to major in computer science. We shouldn't all have to be PhDs in law and jurisprudence to trust a legal system to look after our interests just like we shouldn't all have to be computer scientists to trust that technical stewards are not exploiting people's lack of knowledge. Sick of this mentality. Oh these people are sheep idiots who don't understand the EULA euphemisms of "improved user experience " means adtech and behavioural tracking.
smsm42 10d ago
You realize that people that don't care won't even know what Firefox is? Being a niche player and scaring away niche people is the most stupid strategy possible.
- tyre 10d ago
  Being a small player and throwing away any hope of expanding your user base by building for people who will complain no matter what you do is, well, something!
  - ImPostingOnHN 10d ago
    neglecting existing customers in an attempt to gain larger market share is certainly a play
    - well_ackshually 10d ago
      Ah yes, the customers of Mozilla, who are certainly paying users and not just people whining and saying BACK IN MY DAYS IN THE LAST MILLENIUM IT WAS DIFFERENT. Get over it gramps, things are changing. Mozilla spent ten years trying to mostly appeal to these people by staying very conservative, and it got them nothing but abuse and harassment from people not realising that staying stuck in the past is a death sentence for Mozilla. You want to save Mozilla, burn down Google first. The ecosystem in which they are evolving isn't driven by them.
      - walrus01 10d ago
        > You want to save Mozilla, burn down Google first. Uhhh... 85% of mozilla's revenue comes from Google via the search deal. In a theoretical scenario where a genie waved a magic wand tomorrow and google went "poof", disappearing, mozilla would be in a dire emergency for lack of revenue.
        well_ackshually 10d ago
        It would. But Mozilla has zero long term survival chance in the current ecosystem. The economics are just not there, there cannot be more than one big browser in the way this system works.
JumpCrisscross 10d ago
> only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model This is an untested assumption in Silicon Valley. I suspect Apple is going to eat a lot of folks’ lunches.

pessimizer 10d ago

You're talking out of your ass. It is so ironic that "normal people don't care about privacy, just you nerds" is an HN meme. Everybody I know cares, often in an extreme way, and I barely hang out with technical people in real life. I've met people so irrational and nontechnical about modern invasions of privacy that they think that it is being driven by demons. The reason this is a meme on HN is because tons of HN posters are people who spend a lot of effort trying to invade people's privacy and to come up with new ways of concealing that fact. Virtually every sleazebag trying to hide things in ToSes, updates, and telemetry has been an HN poster. And they're pretending that they speak for normal people, because they are scumbags, think normal people are animals that will do anything that they can get away with and don't care about any boundary, and that therefore 1) they themselves are normal, and 2) normal people deserve whatever happens to them. This is what comes from making know-nothing Libertarianism/Objectivism a mainstream ideology, ironically at the same moment that Alan Greenspan, a direct Rand acolyte, was admitting that it had failed while the world economy was sliding into the toilet. Intellectual Libertarianism/Objectivism had failed, but the dumb kind had yet to properly rise. I don't know anything except you nerds are worried about nothing, I'm going to do it because I can and nobody is going to tell me what to do, nobody normal cares about this, and if they do let them try and stop me, why do you care anyway... Please just do it and stop talking, you don't have anything to say. I hope all of you end up in cells next to SBF.

walrus01 10d ago
I do not fundamentally disagree with you but it's also an extremely well known phenomenon that average non tech users, in the aggregate of millions of people, will click almost any "yes/I agree/continue/Next" step on a software installer or new user sign up workflow for anything, without reading the ToS. People blithly sign up for all sorts of cloud based things and services without understanding their full ramifications all the time. People such as you are describing and rightfully criticizing are knowingly taking advantage of that. Indeed it's how a lot of malware gets installed too. The person you're responding to is pointing out that a lot of people at the surface level do only appear to care about the results. They put something into google translate, it works, they gets results they are pleased with, they don't put a lot of thought into the fact that the data is going to an external service. That's not an inaccurate description of how a lot of people use their computers these days. The fact that people will click yes/agree/OK on almost anything is how Windows computers got Bonzi Buddy installed on them back in the day, and now it's continued into the cloud-everything era.
- graemep 10d ago
  > it's also an extremely well known phenomenon that average non tech users, in the aggregate of millions of people, will click almost any "yes/I agree/continue/Next" step on a software installer or new user sign up workflow for anything, without reading the ToS. People blithly sign up for all sorts of cloud based things and services without understanding their full ramifications all the time. I would put a lot of that down to learned helplessness. A lot of non-tech people tell me that "they already know" and that it is impossible to avoid. I have been told I am naive to think its possible to keep data private.
- gremlinunderway 9d ago
  It's almost as if outside the tech bubbles most people don't understand the tech or implications. HN posters who live and breath in this space are so smug to pretend this esoteric knowledge about networking identifiers or fingerprinting is simple and that anyone can get it. These are the same people who will throw their hands up on any other esoteric topic and give up on it equally. For example, tech people so easily decry how "stupid" the law and legal jurisprudence is (because obviously if they don't understand it, it must be bullshit) but see zero irony in being smug pretentious assholes to regular people who didn't happen to major in computer science. We shouldn't all have to be PhDs in law and jurisprudence to trust a legal system to look after our interests just like we shouldn't all have to be computer scientists to trust that technical stewards are not exploiting people's lack of knowledge. Sick of this mentality. Oh these people are sheep idiots who don't understand the EULA euphemisms of "improved user experience " means adtech and behavioural tracking.

smsm42 10d ago

You realize that people that don't care won't even know what Firefox is? Being a niche player and scaring away niche people is the most stupid strategy possible.

tyre 10d ago
Being a small player and throwing away any hope of expanding your user base by building for people who will complain no matter what you do is, well, something!
- ImPostingOnHN 10d ago
  neglecting existing customers in an attempt to gain larger market share is certainly a play
  - well_ackshually 10d ago
    Ah yes, the customers of Mozilla, who are certainly paying users and not just people whining and saying BACK IN MY DAYS IN THE LAST MILLENIUM IT WAS DIFFERENT. Get over it gramps, things are changing. Mozilla spent ten years trying to mostly appeal to these people by staying very conservative, and it got them nothing but abuse and harassment from people not realising that staying stuck in the past is a death sentence for Mozilla. You want to save Mozilla, burn down Google first. The ecosystem in which they are evolving isn't driven by them.
    - walrus01 10d ago
      > You want to save Mozilla, burn down Google first. Uhhh... 85% of mozilla's revenue comes from Google via the search deal. In a theoretical scenario where a genie waved a magic wand tomorrow and google went "poof", disappearing, mozilla would be in a dire emergency for lack of revenue.
      - well_ackshually 10d ago
        It would. But Mozilla has zero long term survival chance in the current ecosystem. The economics are just not there, there cannot be more than one big browser in the way this system works.

JumpCrisscross 10d ago

> only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model This is an untested assumption in Silicon Valley. I suspect Apple is going to eat a lot of folks’ lunches.