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 company to keep you paying in good will.

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jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

- No prior communications.

- No discussion about what uses the contributed information was being put to.

- No discussion about the release and the parameters around the operation of the bot.

- No discussion about whether or not this was a desirable in the first place (with the community, not just internally).

- Flippant tone to someone who is clearly severely insulted.

If it was a paid job and you treated the person who did it like this it would already be beyond rude, if it is a volunteer group then it is more than enough to throw in the towel. This isn't gray.

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vintermann 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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avhception an hour ago | parent [-]

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".

	▲	rtpg 24 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		the wild thing is you _know_ there are so many people at YouTube who speak multiple languages and have issues with this. What engineering team is only filled with single-language-speaking people, especially at a prestige-y place like Google?
	▲	CalRobert 36 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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

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Symbiote 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators.

The Japanese translation community leader knows, as will many members of that community, and other Japanese speakers.

This is not difficult.

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pseudalopex 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Mozilla is painted bad here, but who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators.

Mozilla should have discussed this with the translators in advance at least.

> What if the reduced financial pressure allows Mozilla to focus more on privacy and less on ads.

My impression was marsf was a volunteer.

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iAMkenough 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.