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End of Japanese community

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Re: End of Japanese community

#301

Post by aleph_minus_one »

iAMkenough wrote: post #116
jahsome wrote: post #10

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.

I also agree. For me it was “sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel…” “Sorry for your feelings” comes off as dismissive and avoiding taking ownership for the lost work and years of volunteer contributions.

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831614 jack1243star pointed out the possibility that English might not be Kiki's first language and they perhaps even have used ChatGPT to make the comment sound more polite.

Re: End of Japanese community

#302

Post by surfingdino »

mcny wrote: post #205

Doing this in production directly without even trying it on staging feels very wrong.

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#303

Post by myaccountonhn »

Stranger43 wrote: post #169

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…

I think it's in the organization as well. They had really good outreach programs and educational content (though I think that's now gutted) that talked about tech ethics, but their product just follows the same bad behavior.

Re: End of Japanese community

#304

Post by anal_reactor »

crazygringo wrote: post #31
jahsome wrote: post #10

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.

Why? It seems like someone who has no awareness of the problem, who wants to learn more about the problem, and the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails. When software goes wrong, you need as much information as possible to figure it how to fix it.

The thing about English language is that, just like Japanese, it's highly contextual and has different constructs for expressing different level of respect. The problem is, English speakers are completely unaware of this, so either they get it right based on intuition, or they fuck up. In this case, the guy used "I'm your superior and you'll do what I say" mode, while the appropriate mode would've been "oh shit I'm sorry how do I fix this".

Re: End of Japanese community

#305

Post by CalRobert »

avhception wrote: post #295
vintermann wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows? Everyone whose native language is not English knows. Seriously, people with this attitude should be forced to run their browser and mail client with a plugin to run everything through a couple of machine translation roundtrips. Give it two months, and I guarantee you'll understand.

My first language is German, but I've got most of my devices set to English. Because of that, Youtube started machine-translating German video titles and audio into English at random. The audio quality is just bad, everything sounds muffled. And the translations are often complete garbage. I absolutely detest this "feature".

I’m in the Netherlands and I get ads for Bol.com on YouTube now with narration that would be more appropriate to Fitter, Happier. I’m surprised advertisers are ok with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tepztGLNYcE

Re: End of Japanese community

#306

Post by atoav »

hazn wrote: post #272
nozilla wrote: post #252

> 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 resp…

Why is it condescending and patronzing? I read it as a person trying to understand the situation.

Well. Too late. Now that they go you want to talk? If I was the one who finally had enough why the fuck would I want to talk to something I turned my back to?

There were very clear statements of what will happen and why. First acknowledge those, express you are sorry for what happened and hint some mea culpa and how you plan to solve it.

Only then if you feel the need to talk realize that you are the one begging them, not the other way around.

Re: End of Japanese community

#307

Post by surfingdino »

yawnxyz wrote: post #137
jacquesm wrote: post #77

> 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…

sounds like it's almost an AI response? I can't believe a person responds that way

A few years in corporate managerial role will turn you into a bot.

Re: End of Japanese community

#308

Post by port11 »

jesterson wrote: post #299
port11 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The response was condescending and very… American. The call ensures what, that you'll be more receiving to their grievances? That nothing is on the record? A lot of people don't want to jump in calls, ever. The initial response should've validated that the community feels slighted, that they should've brought them onboard for the decision making, etc. Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start.

Ok, how the perfect reaction would be if you were at charge? I understand people have sympathy inclination to victims, so everyone would assume the victim is good and other side is bad. I have worked long enough with japanese people knowing they can throw unpredictable tantrums. As a manager, what would be your best course of action to deal with similar situation?

Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start, as I've said.

Life doesn't always have to be from the perspective from “a manager”, these are community volunteers doing untold hours of unpaid work. Just be a person, whose acquaintance is upset you replaced their handmade postcard with an AI-generated one.

Re: End of Japanese community

#309

Post by 1over137 »

nilslindemann wrote: post #267
nozilla wrote: post #252

> 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 resp…

I just read someone asking someone else for a phone call.

Speaking a second language live is much harder than taking your time and writing something.

Re: End of Japanese community

#310

Post by detaro »

janmalec wrote: post #282
nozilla wrote: post #252

> 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 resp…

How would you form this response to make it less condensending and patronizing? I won't judge if it is patronizing or not because I'm not very good at this kind of thing but would like to understand the issue.

a) don't apologize for the other persons feelings, but for your actions that lead to it

b) don't look like you are trying to take the conversation out of the community space it's happening in and/or hiding details by going to a private call (you can offer a call, but it shouldn't be the expectation)

c) Acknowledge the concrete complaints made. Are you truly "struggling to understand" what someone means when they complain that it didn't happen in a staging environment first?

d) a-c also lead to "don't sound like any cookie-cutter PR response to a complaint ever, people have learned those are not genuine". Especially if you are a project that makes a big deal out of its community interacting with said community.

e) ideally announce some concrete first step, e.g. pausing the bot

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