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End of Japanese community

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Re: End of Japanese community

#171

Post by Symbiote »

krick wrote: post #142
jogu wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if just this individual is upset, or if he's speaking on behalf of the entire community he's the leader of. I think it's clear that Mozilla wants machine translation to take a bigger role in producing localized content, and this new process will be a large shift in the way things have been done. I think it's fair for Mozilla to do this, but I also think it's fair for the maintainer to be upset with this…

There is no such person as "Mozilla". There is Kiki, a "Support Community Manager", probably a relatively low-level worker (but it doesn't matter much if she is actually has some weight in the organization). So, you are Kiki. You just saw that message. What do you do now? Just ignore it? Do not respond anything and immediately call the CEO and try to convince him/her that he/she must order to disable that auto-transl…

Kiki's profile says "Mozilla Staff", "Staff" and "SUMO Administrators".

Re: End of Japanese community

#172

Post by cubefox »

latentsea wrote: post #34
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'm a native English speaker fluent in Japanese, recently moved to Japan this year. The one that really gets me lately is YouTube now automatically dubbing over content in Japanese that was originally in English. It's... so uncanny.

Yeah, that is a massive problem. This can't be disabled by the user, only be the channel owner. It's awful. The only solution is switching the YouTube UI language to English, to get the original English audio track. But then, presumably, all other languages would get machine translated into English. There is nothing one can do.

Re: End of Japanese community

#173

Post by thaumasiotes »

davidclark wrote: post #38
chao- wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 wi…

> 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.

There might be an element of personality there. I was texting with a real estate agent (for apartment rental, not purchase) in China once, when he decided that as long as we were talking he might as well call me. He didn't bother mentioning this to me beforehand.

Of course, all I could do was hang up on him. It's not like I could understand what he said. And I don't think that was especially difficult to foresee.

So he wasted some time and seriously annoyed me in the most predictable way possible. Why? Not for any reason specific to the situation. Maybe there's emphatic training somewhere that says "always call". Or maybe the type of people who become salesmen have a deep, deep instinct to call.

Re: End of Japanese community

#174

Post by arjie »

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".

Re: End of Japanese community

#175

Post by dmitrygr »

chao- wrote: post #26
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 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?

After you fuck up and before you ask to discuss the matter, you APOLOGIZE!

Re: End of Japanese community

#176

Post by benatkin »

kentm wrote: post #152
crazygringo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Turning off the machine translation and reverting all the changes it made seems pretty actionable to me. They can turn it back on when issues are addressed.

Indeed. Turning it off would still satisfy marsf's requests:

- 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.

Before fixing it and re-enabling it in some capacity, they could work with marsf to find a solution.

Re: End of Japanese community

#177

Post by ssivark »

rtpg wrote: post #101
krick wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Peter Drucker has an interesting analysis of the "American" -vs- "Japanese" styles of decision-making + alignment, presenting a complementary perspective: https://www.joaomordomo.com/files/books/ebooks/Peter%20Druck...

IMHO the only correct way to measure the effectiveness of decision making is from the quality of executed outcomes. It is somewhat nonsensical to sever decisions from execution, and claim that decisions have been made rapidly if the decision doesn't lend itself to crisp execution. Without that, decisions are merely intentions.

Re: End of Japanese community

#179

Post by iAMkenough »

jwpapi wrote: post #40
kaveh_h wrote: post #17

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.

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 c…

Pretty black and white to me.

Mozilla destroyed decades of work on a production server without even discussing it with the passionate volunteers that provided them free labor for decades. Didn’t even evaluate on a staging server to check for quality issues.

The AI isn’t the focus of the issue. The management decision to disregard and disrespect their own unpaid contributors and their organization’s history is a clear indication of Mozilla’s current and future priorities.

Re: End of Japanese community

#180

Post by StarGrit »

jffry wrote: post #46
chao- wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"I'm sorry for how you feel about it" isn't exactly an empathetic opening stance

It is a passive aggressive dismissal.
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