Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

End of Japanese community

support.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 820 posts

Re: End of Japanese community

#101

Post by rtpg »

krick wrote: post #72
ekianjo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nemawashi Long time in Japan too, I would not consider newamashi as being Japan's strengths.

I can imagine what you mean, but since I am not in Japan, it would be interesting why you feel that way.

long and slow consensus building that weighs existing stakeholder's opinions heavily vs doing "the right thing" from the outset. So you move slowly and end up having very annoying conversations and compromises instead of just pushing something through. And the formal process is just a formality anyways, so then anyone not in the informal chatter just gets to experience the capriciousness anyways

The sort of consensus building ultimately involves having to do stuff to make people's opinions feel taken care of, even if their concerns are outright wrong. And you end up having to make some awkward deals.

Like with all this "Japanese business culture" stuff though, I feel like it's pretty universal in some degrees or another everywhere. Who's out there just doing things without getting _any_ form of backchannel checking first? Who wants to be surprised at random announcements from people you're working with? Apart from Musk types.

But of course some people are very comfortable just ripping the band aid off and putting people in awkward spots, because "of course" they have the right opinion and plan already.

Why context matters in judging whether some practice is good or not.

Re: End of Japanese community

#102

Post by pengaru »

alwa wrote: post #13
adeptima wrote: post #7

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

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 ha…

We Americans call this garnering buy-in.

Re: End of Japanese community

#103

Post by jack1243star »

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.

Seems that this is exactly what Mozilla did? And Microsoft, and Reddit, etc.

Re: End of Japanese community

#104

Post by ezoe »

sakompella wrote: post #97
panny wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sumob…

this is not how CC / FOSS licenses work. if this is how FOSS worked not a soul would use it

It's a disappointing that after decades of free software movement, people can't understand this basic fact about license and the concept of "free".

And the fact 20+ years Mozilla contributor didn't understand it too. You can't restrict the usage to things you don't like it under CC.

Re: End of Japanese community

#105

Post by gpm »

sakompella wrote: post #97
panny wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sumob…

this is not how CC / FOSS licenses work. if this is how FOSS worked not a soul would use it

I don't think it's at all clear that some foss licenses (MIT for instance) are irrevocable. Not in the US, and certainly not in any possible relevant country... It's not clear that they are revocable either. As I understand the law it at least in part rests on the question of whether there was consideration in exchange for the license, which might even make it a case by case analysis.

CC licenses (and some other foss licenses, e.g. Apache 2.0) are explicitly irrevocable... which is probably enough for US law though I still wonder to some degree if there isn't some country that would take issue with that term... especially a country which recognizes "Moral rights".

Some other FOSS licenses (GPL for instance) contain explicit terms allowing revocation under certain circumstances (but otherwise claim to be irrevocable).

Re: End of Japanese community

#106

Post by crazygringo »

rtpg wrote: post #89
crazygringo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. - No apology - No "we stopped the bot for now" "We're sorry for how you feel" is enterprise for "we think you're whining". Maybe not what the person meant but ho…

> - 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" in Indonesia. It's not from the Mozilla CEO or the leader of the project. They surely don't have the power to stop the bot. But what they can do is find it more over a call, and then who to escalate it to. Then maybe it does get turned off before it's fixed or changed.

You seem to be confusing someone in customer support with someone who holds power over entire projects. I don't understand how you think a customer support person should be able to just turn off software across the globe in response to a single short message on a forum with few details.

Re: End of Japanese community

#107

Post by ezoe »

pnathan wrote: post #99
ezoe wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

There are some discussion if the whole concept of "license" fits under Japanese law. I think it's understood as "a contract to allow the usage of otherwise restricted work by copyright etc under conditions"

But I'm not a lawyer so I don't know and in real business, they casually use the word "license" in Japan. But in my opinion, everything is contract under Japanese law.

Re: End of Japanese community

#108

Post by totetsu »

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 can help with that its a benefit.

Re: End of Japanese community

#109

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

jogu wrote: post #57
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…

I've really disliked Reddit's auto-translation. I'm bilingual (English & Japanese) and when I search for things only to get an auto-translated reddit thread it really is bizarre. The references, flow of the conversation, etc. are all just off and it feels weird.

Bilingual English and Spanish here and I absolutely hate this.

I can read both just fine. Platforms defaulting to always showing one or things like youtube auto-translating titles all to English or all to Spanish is frustrating because I always have to do the math in my head as to "Why does this thing I'm reading sound weird as hell" and realize its because it was lost in translation.

Hell, I watch creators/consume content where the creator or writer themself speaks/writes interchangeably in both languages often within the same sentence because Spanglish is very common, and that just destroys most of these automated generators brains.

Re: End of Japanese community

#110

Post by netsharc »

Waterluvian wrote: post #71
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’m not sure those who speak like that are equipped to understand how offensive their words and tone can be. It suggests a decision can be reversed with a quick call, which questions one’s choices or conviction. As if to suggest the choice was made without considerable thought and care. It’s such an unserious tone to a moment that’s very serious to the other.

The first sentence of the top reply ("quick call") was already cunty:

> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel ...

That may seem like an apology, but it's more a dismissing their issue as "that's a you problem".

Post reply on HN