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End of Japanese community

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Re: End of Japanese community

#161

Post by jameson »

numpad0 wrote: post #147

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!?

> 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

Re: End of Japanese community

#162

Post by numpad0 »

totetsu wrote: post #108
gyomu wrote: post #18

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 la…

FWIW I recently was watching something that i did not realise had been auto translated from Chinese to English. It was kind of a technical topic, but still it seemed perfectly natural. It struck me that .. as much as conflict hawks and clash of culture theorists might want to do their best to construct an enemy, if we get past the disorientation of language barriers, then mostly people are the same. If AI translation…

The Standard Chinese language was always known to be oddly syntactically close to US English. No one calls it an Indo-European language, but they sometimes feel closer together than English and French on surface levels. Japanese is not like that - even human translations between anything to/from Japanese sound translated.

Re: End of Japanese community

#163

Post by electroly »

gpm wrote: post #128
crazygringo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - No apology - No "we stopped the bot for now" "We're sorry for how you feel" is enterprise for "we think you're whining". Anyways the point is just that one side of this relationship here clearly cares about the problem way less, and _even when presented with that fact_, does not even pretend to be actually sorry for the damage they are causing. This is just a single initial reply from a "community support manager…

Huh, if you click through their link the person responding is also a "sumo administrator" and it's "sumobot" causing the issues. It seems entirely likely they are personally directly responsible for it. Regardless they are representing the company. If they aren't the right person to respond - they should not have responded and kicked it up the chain/over the fence to the right person - instead of responding by offeri…

"SUMO" = SUpport.MOzilla.org. It's the name for the entire Mozilla support organization; everybody involved in the linked discussion is in this organization. It doesn't seem like this person is related to the bot. They are a "Locale Leader" for Indonesia, which is the same position this poster is resigning from (but for Japan). They seem to be peers.

Re: End of Japanese community

#164

Post by hunter2_ »

alwa wrote: post #127
TheJoeMan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of internet RFC’s… like by the time they are formally published, no the author is not interested in your “comment”.

…and, for that matter, there was an earlier draft phase where the author was R’ing For your C. And you could have jumped in then and been more-or-less welcome.

Sounds like RFC ought to be the name of that draft phase, rather than a name encompassing all phases, especially not the final phase in which C's are no longer R'd.

Re: End of Japanese community

#165

Post by gpm »

electroly wrote: post #163
gpm wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, if you click through their link the person responding is also a "sumo administrator" and it's "sumobot" causing the issues. It seems entirely likely they are personally directly responsible for it. Regardless they are representing the company. If they aren't the right person to respond - they should not have responded and kicked it up the chain/over the fence to the right person - instead of responding by offeri…

"SUMO" = SUpport.MOzilla.org. It's the name for the entire Mozilla support organization; everybody involved in the linked discussion is in this organization. It doesn't seem like this person is related to the bot. They are a "Locale Leader" for Indonesia, which is the same position this poster is resigning from (but for Japan). They seem to be peers.

So I'm a complete outsider, but they do not appear to be in the same position as the poster. They are marked as "Mozilla Staff" and "SUMO Administrator" (amongst many other things), neither of which the complainant is marked as.

It is true both they and the person they are responding to are marked as "SUMO Locale Leaders"... but it seems rather clear from the context that is not the role they are inhabiting in their (non) apology and request for a "quick call" with the complainant.

The language they use is certainly not the language a peer would be expected to use either.

Re: End of Japanese community

#166

Post by OhMeadhbh »

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#168

Post by thaumasiotes »

crazygringo wrote: post #90
kerakaali wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails I don't disagree with your statement, but I read the sentence: "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?" with a similar gross reaction as the OP comment did. Reading that in response to Marsf's original message of airing grievances and feelings of disrespect towards his work felt entire…

> felt entirely tone-deaf and corporate in nature. Especially in context of this being in response to the Japanese team The person is a "Support Community Manager" in Indonesia if you click on their link. They're not the CEO of Mozilla who is supposed to be an expert in intercultural communication. I think you're being kind of harsh on someone who is presumably not high-level and just trying to do their job and get m…

> The person is a "Support Community Manager" in Indonesia if you click on their link. They're not the CEO of Mozilla who is supposed to be an expert in intercultural communication.

This is completely backwards. The CEO is not expected to manage intercultural communication. You know whose job that is? The community manager.

The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan, but managing local contributors is absolutely a job for the community manager and not the CEO.

Re: End of Japanese community

#169

Post by Stranger43 »

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#170

Post by josefx »

crazygringo wrote: post #53
jogu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my read, the software didn't go wrong. It did exactly what they intended it to -- machine translations replaced handwritten translations provided by community volunteers. Seems like a pretty big middle finger to those volunteers. The lead realized that Mozilla doesn't care about their opinion (they did this without discussing with them) nor do they care about the work they were doing (by replacing their work wit…

Those are a huge number of assumptions you're making, absolutely none of which are in the post. Generally speaking, orgs aren't trying to replace high-quality human translations with lower-quality machine translations. They are often trying to put machine translations in where there are no translations, though. Getting the balance right requires fine-tuning. And fine-tuning requires a quick call to start to better un…

> Generally speaking, orgs aren't trying to replace high-quality human translations with lower-quality machine translations.

How would you handle updates to an article? Would you blindly replace all existing translations or would you notify the maintainers and wait for them to get around to it?

I wouldn't be surprised if orgs blindly opted for the first, which also means that a single spelling correction would be enough to overwrite days of work.

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