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ares623 6 hours ago

This is rich

> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.

The post literally starts with a list of grievances. Maybe ask the AI for an executive summary and the key points.

henearkr 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In the replying posts, there is mention of a discovered bug that could have resulted in most of the reported problems.

It is normal to want to discuss in order to check if that was the bug, in which case fixing the bug would have solved the issues.

pseudalopex 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some grievances were vague. It doesn't follow our translation guidelines. What specific guidelines did it not follow? It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost. What was not localized?

Mozilla's response should not be limited to clarifying these grievances. But it could have been all the staff member who responded could do.

sitharus 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Those would be the guidelines that all translation contributors are expected to follow, which are given to all prospective translators.

It sounds like Mozilla just turned on the machine without consulting the human translators to see if the machine actually worked in a useful manner.

pseudalopex 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It sounds like Mozilla just turned on the machine without consulting the human translators to see if the machine actually worked in a useful manner.

Yes. And someone should make a real apology. But learning what the machine did wrong is part of fixing a machine.

sitharus 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, that's why you engage with the people doing the work first and run it on a staging environment to see what would be overwritten. You test until it's working well enough to enhance the effort done by the translators.

danielscrubs 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, in this era Im not entirely sure the quality aspect is even considered. CEO wants AI? Then he will get it, so that the next earnings call can be bombastic!

Saving zero dollars and making the product worse is not important, only that there doesn’t seem to be a browser monopoly is.

numpad0 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And the fact that they didn't strongly suggests that they knew.

pseudalopex 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And someone should make a real apology. Which I said.

shaky-carrousel 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An apology? Mozilla is incapable of taking responsibility. What they will do is blaming someone else, probably the translators.

littlestymaar an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What, you mean that US companies should ask their local branches before pushing changes in every countries? /s

This happens all the time, in every US company I know. It's as if the Americans where entirely oblivious to the fact that the rest of the world exists.

op00to 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Specifically which guidelines? Not a URL. Not hand wavey “oh you know the guidelines”. A text list of the guidelines that are not followed.

exe34 an hour ago | parent [-]

It might be more helpful to point out which guidelines it did follow. Humans are expected to read and obey these things - so presumably whoever deployed them will be aware and can demonstrate that they were followed.

totetsu 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These ones? https://github.com/mozilla-japan/translation/wiki/L10N-Guide...

Looking through that wiki there seems to be a lot of things that ML would get wrong.

pseudalopex 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I edited my comment to clarify I hope. Imagining what it could have done wrong and knowing what it did wrong are different.

tsimionescu 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you expect someone who has just watched a bot replace 20 years of their work, with no prior consultation or review, to now write a detailed post about how translations by the bot are not specifically wrong?

The core issue here is the way the bot was deployed. The fact that they had the poor taste to make it auto-replace articles written by their own volunteers is idiotic and disrespectful in the extreme. A new bot should work entirely in the back end, sending proposals for translations to the volunteers, who can choose to accept them or ignore them. Once the rate of acceptance is very high, for a specific individual language, then you might consider automating further.

And yes, this effort needs to be done for each language separately. Just because the bot works well in Italian doesn't in any way guarantee that it will work well in Japanese. Machine translation quality varies wildly by language, this is a well known and obvious fact.

shaky-carrousel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This is Mozilla as usual, arrogant and tone deaf.

numpad0 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

lmao. This is a "research team and five years" task with current state of LLM.

pmontra an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, but now that's the answer to questions like "how do we deploy AI without pissing off our communities?"

bw86 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

For reference: https://xkcd.com/1425/

crazygringo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't know why you're being downvoted, you're exactly right.

The person replying is probably not an expert in this. But they want to get more details so they can figure out how to get it to the right people with more information.

This is how it's supposed to work.

ApolloFortyNine 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Same reason people here are taking "let's jump on a call" as some personal attack.

Some people just like drama.

Especially when AI is involved, the anti-AI team feels like they need to step up to the plate.

pastage 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I wonder if you and the person who replied really understands how you feel when you have been part of something over 20 years and see it destroyed by tone deaf changes to text. I have no idea how Sumobot works, but it is easy to see how Mozilla or an organization with top down "ship-it-fast" incentives can trample a community led project. This is really not a question of AI, the same thing happens with professional translators.

I have had to cooperate with coporate

kuschku 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Tools should work for their users. In this case, the bot should work (and be controlled by) the localization teams for each language.

If the bot has the power to overrule the volunteer translation teams, the entire power structure is wrong from the get go.

exe34 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Same reason people here are taking "let's jump on a call" as some personal attack. Some people just like drama.

No, some of us can see into the future, because it flows from the past. When management shits on 20 years of work and breaks everything after not listening to your warnings, they don't suddenly start listening and understanding out of nowhere.

BoredPositron 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The market fit of your words matter and the non apology "sorry you feel that way" doesn't help. It's one of those gnarly phrases that only get used if you feel the need to act but in reality don't want to. Maybe the person is sincere his words are tainted by the overuse in shady corp responses. If you are engaging with your community you need to know this otherwise you'll always look like a clown.

krick 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's really a dumb complaint. Sure, nobody is happy with the situation, but what do you propose a better reaction should be? Ignore the guy? Immediately drop whatever they think is a good idea (even though it may be not — it's still a matter of perspective, and somebody surely thinks it was a good idea) because somebody was pissed off by it, hoping that maybe at least he may change his mind and continue business as usual after that?

Or maybe an offer to set up a call and talk about the problem and possible solutions in person is not such a bad move after all? Seriously, I don't see how you can be mad at the fact that a representative of an organization wants to discuss the actual problem with an actual member of the community for a change, instead of just writing the usual "sorry but not sorry" corporate bullshit message and call it a day. Maybe it won't solve anything and they won't find a common ground anyway, but still, I cannot imagine a more honest attempt at trying.

kuschku 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

One of the primary complaints was that an unmonitored bot has the power to override years of work done by volunteer translation teams.

First you have to stop the destruction. Then you can talk about how to make the bot work for humans, instead of against them.

f33d5173 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They had specific complaints. Either say, "we're willing to work to change the things that you're complaining about", or say, "sorry, we're not going to change those things". The wishy washy bullshit they did is effectively ignoring the guy. They're ignoring everything the person said. And it definitely comes across as "sorry not sorry" corporate bullshit.

exe34 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Revert the changes and then hop on a call to figure out how to do it right next time.

"Explain what's wrong and how to fix it" is the wrong approach. if you need it explained to you what was broken, then you're not the expert here, just the local tinpot dictator.