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End of Japanese community

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Re: End of Japanese community

#631

Post by crazygringo »

tsimionescu wrote: post #571
crazygringo wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is NOT the leader of the new transition tool! This is just a customer service manager in Indonesia who is trying to gather more information. The steps that you describe might well be taken after the "quick call" gathers more information and figures out the people to escalate it to. You are being entirely unreasonable in what you are demanding. This isn't a response from the Mozilla CEO. This is sometime in custo…

If she doesn't have responsibility for this, she just shouldn't respond. The transition team should have responded. Or, she could have responded with "I'm contacting the transition team leader to escalate your issues as soon as possible" or similar. There is absolutely no excuse for responding to someone who has announced that they are quitting over very explicit grievances with "let's hop on a call to get some detai…

To escalate, you need to have a better idea of the issues to know who to escalate to. Plus this is turning into a personal issue (quitting) so a forum isn't appropriate for that part. Asking to talk on the phone is a perfectly reasonable, appropriate, and sensitive way to find out more and figure out how to most helpfully address things. A phone call is the first step in escalation. I honestly don't understand your negative read here. Things don't get 100% addressed immediately in a single exchange. Communication is a back and forth process and this is an entirely appropriate initial response from a customer service manager.

Re: End of Japanese community

#632

Post by burnermore »

Can someone please remind what the community coordinators were called long back? I remember they were part of releases, had power and responsibility.

There was an exodus of them around 2015/16 times.

Does anyone remember anyone's post?

Re: End of Japanese community

#633

Post by AlexandrB »

stephenlf wrote: post #525
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #515

I'm not sure why I clicked on this beyond just knowing it was going to be another Mozilla trainwreck and not being able to look away. But what was truly stunning to me was this comment thread. There are people here actually defending the following response: > 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 t…

Talking face-to-face is absolutely the right response, though. Would you have preferred a canned apology?

Talking face-to-face about what though? Apparently it's about "what you're struggling with", not "what we fucked up". There's a complete inability to admit any fault in this message, so the conversation is already primed to be bullshit. I would expect such a conversation to be a waste of my time and would never agree to it.

Re: End of Japanese community

#634

Post by overfeed »

crazygringo wrote: post #49
thwarted wrote: post #21

What is the logic behind adding machine translation for content that already had a seemingly robust, enthusiastic, and motivated (volunteer?) community maintaining the translations? The "saves money" rationale to deploy LLM/MT automation doesn't make sense when its volunteers are contributing because they want to. This is kind of community and participation destruction wrought by the introduction of LLMs/MT has a ser…

There's probably a bunch of untranslated or badly translated content worldwide, so this was rolled out to help with that, without realizing it would overwrite higher-quality translation. It probably made a lot of sense in certain contexts, and certain side effects weren't predicted, or it just has bugs that need fixing. Presumably nothing malicious or stupid. But just ironing out the kinks.

> But just ironing out the kinks.

"Ironing out the kinks" in production on live data is stupid.

Re: End of Japanese community

#635

Post by crazygringo »

throw_a_grenade wrote: post #126
crazygringo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Even if not a high level, then s/he had to learn that style of communication from peers in the corp, and the tone is set by managers. It's entirely OK to blame someone who has title “Manager”.

The style of communication seems perfectly fine to me. It's acknowledging there's a problem, apologizing as much as they can before they have the real facts, and offering to communicate over the phone to figure out what's really going on. I honestly don't know what more you want from someone who is a customer service manager. Not the leader of the team who built the translation product.

Re: End of Japanese community

#636

Post by crazygringo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #168
crazygringo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, b…

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

Sorry, you're wrong. Intercultural communication is very much a core skill for the CEO of a global organization. They're expected to know how to communicate appropriately so some international deal doesn't get torpedoed due to a faux pas.

> The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan

Right. So on that, we agree.

Re: End of Japanese community

#637

Post by stackedinserter »

He sounded pathetic, especially "therefore I declare" that's just ridiculous.

Boss, I declare that you must remove all my code from all our products effective today, because of that coop that easily replaced my 20 years experience and I'm upset about.

Re: End of Japanese community

#638

Post by MichaelZuo »

btilly wrote: post #620
kstenerud wrote: post #369

I know that everyone has already given their opinions about what kinds of people are involved and their motivations, but this is really about two fallible humans, one listing grievances and another asking to open a communication channel. That's it. Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text (a notoriously difficult medium to establish emotio…

In my experience, long-term volunteers like this don't just up and quit without having already made multiple attempts at communicating first. The fact that those attempts are not detailed in a public "I quit" message, doesn't mean that those attempts didn't exist. In my further experience, people with titles like "Senior Community Manager" (the title of Kiki, the person trying to "open communication") do not generall…

Yeah it seems fake, if it’s not already the number 1 priority for all the relevant decision makers at Mozilla by the second week of proven on the record disastrous changes… then none of them have any credibility left such that a community manager could make a difference. Regardless of how genuine or concerned they may be.

Even the most charitable interpretation would still implicate at least a few dozen at Mozilla to be deceivers and/or intriguers or turning a blind eye to it.

Re: End of Japanese community

#639

Post by stackedinserter »

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

[flagged]

Re: End of Japanese community

#640

Post by pessimizer »

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!?

A lot of languages require a lot more context to speak and understand than others. English is a very low-context language, at least in formal registers - it just gets very wordy and very specific, and it helps that it is very analytic and isolating, with a massive vocabulary.

But for e.g. Spanish, if a bare subjunctive verb (making the verb "" something like "could ," "should ," or "would " without specifying) is used in a sentence, there's no way to know from that sentence who or what that subjunctive is being applied to. The unwritten rule is: 1) if it's obvious who or what you've been talking about, then it applies to that person or thing, 2) if there are two or more things it could be about, then you should figure out a way to add more information to specify which, and finally 3) if there are no good candidates, the person is referring to themselves.

I've heard that there's a lot more of that in Japanese, a language that I don't think really has personal pronouns at all. For example, iirc when you refer to an emotional state and don't specify who you're talking about, it's automatically assumed that you're talking about yourself. I'm not too familiar with Japanese, but languages are simply different from each other, they're not substitution ciphers.

LLMs have trouble staying aware of the context as things go on even for a fairly short time, and in some languages, the meaning of the conversation infects every utterance. Seems a little similar to how LLMs are bad at lifetimes in Rust. I'm sure they'll gradually get better.

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