> Maybe "open a communication channel" is what Mozilla should have done BEFORE they turned on this thing.

This right here is the crux of the matter. But it seems to be how Mozilla operates. They frequently show a lack of awareness and consideration towards their long time supporters. I doubt this particular incident will lead to any changes, but I really wish they'd do some introspection...

Community is also about communication. In fact, that's a primary aspect of a community.

Yeah, Mozilla introduced a bot that's stomping on things. Are they malicious? Twirling neatly waxed mustaches as they cackle gleefully as the little ants scurry about in a panic?

Or is this a case of humans doing what humans do: Screwing things up.

The first step is to open communications, and the most effective form of communication is face-to-face (the way we've evolved to do it).

Getting to the bottom of the issue in 1-1 communication with a representative of the community should be the common approach when complex problems arise, because then you can be sure that you're on the same wavelength before you do your mass communication with the rest of the community. Saves a TON of time and heartache and ill feelings.

> where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from

Unironically, AI trends.

Dude, if someone is saying "hey we will pack up, we have nothing to do here" out of the blue, I would like a more nuanced conversation that written text could not hope to convey. We are humans and while reading is perfectly capable of relying information, it's unable to rely intention accurately. There's ton of information that is conveyed by the inflection of voice, demeanor, body language, etc.

People did used to have decent expectations for Google back when they at least pretended to care about the "Do no evil" tagline

But why does it have to be the case that the leadership of an opensource project have to emulate the desperation and authoritarianism of a potentially stagnant tech sector.

I don't think it's malevolence from the mozilla leadership team but more that if you hang around people who have bet their lifesaving on the success of cloud based LLMs, being cautious and making their use "optional" might begin to sound like a really controversial position even if that's actually what the users/community want from Mozilla.

Firefox market share have been declining and it's not easy to point to any obvious technical problem, so the reason for the decline is likely that the Mozilla corporation keep messing up the narrative by acting like just another Silicon Valley tech firm.

ehh this reads a bit like the hn comments complaining about sites that don’t work with js disabled

like what percent of firefox users do you think actually care about this?

There is still the conspiracy theory that Mozilla is mostly a sock puppet by Google by now, mostly kept alive so Google can say that Chrome is not a monopoly.

Behavior like this doesn't do a lot to dispel that theory.

Hasn't crashed for me once and I use it daily.

Speaking for myself, it's really irritating to support a chrome alternative precisely because it's a chrome alternative and have it constantly shoot itself in the foot.

It sucks that I can't even attempt to convince someone to use it beyond "it's not Google", and data privacy. The vast majority of users won't ever give a damn about either of those by themselves.

Gobbling up hundreds of millions of dollars to finance non-core missions and fat director bonuses while you sack the Servo development team might be a cause.

common sense... no real need for digging into japanese culture and so on. really no idea why Mozilla is so disrespectful to it's volunteers. well, that sweet 400m a year from Google... no need for volunteers anymore, eh

That reminds me of internet RFC’s… like by the time they are formally published, no the author is not interested in your “comment”.

We Americans call this garnering buy-in.

I predict that these times of excessive trust in AI during decision making will be written in history books at some point of time. Providing that there will be books at all.

I already suspect that Duolingo destroyed real people's recording of Spanish conversations and replaced them with AI. For example I can quite often hear continental Spanish accent which has never been taught to me before (as I started with Duolingo as a freshman) - it used to be always American Spanish accent. Wrongly cut conversions is another matter.

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

The response was condescending and very… American. The call ensures what, that you'll be more receiving to their grievances? That nothing is on the record? A lot of people don't want to jump in calls, ever. The initial response should've validated that the community feels slighted, that they should've brought them onboard for the decision making, etc.

Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start.

Written communication is usually better and allows for more clarity, investigation, preparation, careful thought, and exploring of solutions. When it's not better it's usually because one party doesn't like to read or write and so avoids it as much as they can.

> If you have a better solution to correct an error or solve a problem than having a call/meeting and openly discuss situation and possible resolutions - I would love to know about that.

I do, actually. You first read what the other person wrote. Then your response will take whatever they wrote into account. If they did not expressed themselves clearly, you explain what it is that you do not understand. The "We want to make sure we truly understand what you're struggling with." is wholly inappropriate if the only reason you do not understand is that you did not read what they wrote.

Second, you dont suggest the other person is struggling with something, unless they are actually struggling with something. The original post does not show someone struggling at all.

Tl;dr if you want to "openly discuss situation and possible resolutions" you dont start by ignoring what the other person wrote. This response makes it very clear that manager does not intend to openly discuss the situation or possible resolutions, the manager is not taking the complaint seriously at all.

Creative Commons License was created without any AI in mind.

And

> Licensees may copy, distribute, display, perform and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they GIVE THE AUTHOR or licensor THE CREDITS

Is the AI published under the same CC license, with attribution?

Not like a dick like he did. No lets jump into a quick call while ignoring everything OP said. It's clear a quick call will not solve this. Turn off the AI roll back all the shit it caused is the bare minimum.

i wouldnt have insulted them by invalidating their feelings like an asshole to start. i would have read the post all the way through to understand it. i would id problems to fix in prod. i would then reach out privately and offerr to pay for their time to answer any further questions

Are you saying they were hard to understand or badly written? Because to me they seem to be crystal clear explanation of issues. I also did not concluded that the leaving person is "struggling" or generally need help.

Given that the bug is a well-known and inherent flaw of the technology used, I don't understand what good this would do. It's not enough to say "whoops, we didn't think the machine would do the thing the machine is known to do".

To fix the bug the architecture of the feature would have to be different, and that was completely obvious from the start.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After this, the common ground can only be that they translate something else. Overriding human translations for some crap done with LLM that is obviously inferior... are they ok?

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.

The standard for fixing something this broken is stop the bot, revert the rollout, revert changes to pages affected, then attempt to figure out what went wrong. Even if you haven't done it yet, announce the revert steps, FFS.

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.

Exactly, never accept a switch to a private place when you're trying to gather attention on public matters. It could and it will be used against you later on.

Also a call is a place where we'll try and grind you down until you agree with us.

Just record the needing, have an ai transcription service take notes. Then there’s a record.

I think it's because it's almost never accompanied by "we may have fucked up, please help us understand how to fix it now and in the future".

It's almost always (like this time) "I'm sorry you feel that way, please spend more of your free time<EOF>", and sometimes (like this time) "[we're doing it anyway but maybe we'll make some changes]".

It feels insulting because it is insulting. The decision has been made, they just want to not feel bad about you being insulted.

> As if to suggest the choice was made without considerable thought and care.

I guess it acts as a mirror of sorts though, because that's precisely how this decision appears to have been made in the first place. But it's clear that whoever represents Mozilla there is already assuming the fault lies with the person that just got kicked.

> It suggests a decision can be reversed with a quick call

Oh no, both parties understand that the call isn't open to the possibility of changing the decision, it's just to manage the emotions of the person who's being run over by it.

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".

>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 how anyone is going to read it.

The original sin here is Mozilla just enabling this without any input from the active translation community.

This isn't a new problem, loads of Japanese translations from tech companies have been garbage for a while. People sticking things into machine translation, translators missing context so having absolutely nothing to go on. Circle CI, when they announced their Japan office, put out a statement that was _clearly_ written in English first, then translated without any effort of localization. Plenty of UIs just have "wrong text" in actions. etc etc.

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.

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 with machine translations). A "quick call" doesn't solve this.

But he fairly in depth described the problem and his reasoning for why it is a problem. There's nothing really to "jump on a quick call" about without actually first addressing the issues. Plus it just sounds, for lack of a better term, retarded. First off, in comparison to basically any other communication, calls aren't quick. Much less the one that you have to schedule around time zones. Calls require focused attention which if you are used to multi-tasking are a huge drain. Secondly I don't really feel like going too deep, but the use of the verb jump is like a bludgeon to the frontal lobe of anyone that's had to spend time listening to buzzword heavy C-suite speeches when they could have been doing their actual work.

Very bill lumbergh energy.

> the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails

I don't disagree with your statement, but I read the sentence: "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?" with a similar gross reaction as the OP comment did.

Reading that in response to Marsf's original message of airing grievances and feelings of disrespect towards his work felt entirely tone-deaf and corporate in nature. Especially in context of this being in response to the Japanese team, where Japanese business communication norms are often at odds with the American standard.

You might think that this method of communication is inefficient, but the heart of the matter seems that the Japanese team finds the very emphasis on efficiency as disrespectful when it comes at the cost of the human element of respect.

"quick call?" in corporatespeak means "I believe our disagreement to be a minor misunderstanding that can be clarified in a few minutes of conversation"

In a company you should never ever "quick call" someone (especially on a group forum) who has presented a genuine list of grievances against whatever you're doing, unless you're subtly trying to pull rank to override those grievances.

The thing about English language is that, just like Japanese, it's highly contextual and has different constructs for expressing different level of respect. The problem is, English speakers are completely unaware of this, so either they get it right based on intuition, or they fuck up. In this case, the guy used "I'm your superior and you'll do what I say" mode, while the appropriate mode would've been "oh shit I'm sorry how do I fix this".

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 with a human - voice, video, or in person. So, the context of a call makes it much more likely for marsf to backpedal from their strongly presented opinion without gaining anything.

This is a common sleazy sales tactic. 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. It is also used in PR and HR situations to grind out dissenters, so it comes off in this context as corporate and impersonal.

'We're sorry you feel this way' implies that this is the fault of the person that feels that way, not of the party that made them feel that way. Given the very clear message this was entirely uncalled for. This is not the kind of feeling that goes away by being talked down to like that, it might go away after a reversal of a very bad policy decision and a very sincere apology about a mistake that was made and even then the damage is severe enough that I would not be surprised if the person that was slighted decided to stick to their decision.

'I'm sorry for how you feel' is in the same class as 'I'm sorry if my words hurt you'. They are both classes of non-apologies.

'I'm sorry that our actions caused such distress' come a bit closer to being a true apology.

Importantly, 'if' was changed to 'that'.

I suspect GP has had negative experiences with that specific phrase, "hop on a [quick] call", hence their "irrational rage". I also hate seeing that phrase at work:

1. "Hop" and "quick" suggests very simple matters, so to text-based people like me it doesn't really make sense why we wouldn't be able to resolve this matter asynchronously over text.

1b. Alternatively, the matter isn't actually trivial, so we should've had a proper meeting with other stakeholders instead of the caller debating me solo in a "quick" call.

2. I'm in the middle of something important or just hit my stride, and the caller is completely derailing my train of thought instead of just scheduling a meeting.

2b. The worst outcome is when I agree to "hop on", but the caller has gone AFK within 5 minutes of sending their invitation, so I'm just quietly seething by myself in the call.

3. The caller and I can't understand each other's accents so I'm trying to accommodate for the both of us by communicating through text, and I find it difficult to bring this incompatibility up without getting fired. I also had a caller who always whispered at his laptop mic so I had to turn up the subwoofers to have a chance of understanding him.

But we should point out that "quick" doesn't exist in Kiki's message. I think that goes back to point #1 about how the specific word "hop" can imply that the issue is trivial. Or maybe we're all going insane over unnecessary ad-hoc meetings.

Unrelated: I hate to appear anti-remote work, but I've noticed that remote workers tend to send more of these ad-hoc invitations, even more than getting tapped on the shoulder in the office. Are you all doing well out there?

It’s really not a word choice thing (though it’s definitely the favorite word choice of orgs who are committed to not doing anything about it).

It’s that the complaint is descriptive on 5 or so actual problems and a couple of impacts that stem from them and the response doesn’t address any of them, it just looks like an attempt to take this issue out of the public space.

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

The right thing to do is undo what you did and then ask to talk about it. There is nothing the person can say to make up for the destructive effects they took.

> 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?

The only thing to ask for here are some clarifications and expanded explanations so that the original text does not get misunderstood. If the Mozilla representative does see such potential points he can perfectly ask for them publicly.

I mean, almost anything would be better. But here's my swing:

  > I'm so sorry about this. We definitely screwed up here and want to
  > fix things. We want to chat to you in a call if you're able?
  > We will stop changing things, issue a moratorium on AI while we
  > figure things out. You and communities like yours are central to
  > our entire existence and purpose at Mozilla.

Asking someone to "hop on a call" is phrasing you use with someone you are close with, not someone whose work you've just destroyed and is no longer interested in a relationship with you.

The fact that the preceding apology was absolutely awful does not help. "I'm sorry for how you feel" is wrong, since nobody asked them to react to "feelings" but the clearly delineated problems with the automation that Mozilla rolled out.

Asking to discuss something like this over synchronous voice comms is basically asking to go off the record and handle things privately. Sometimes that's appropriate, but if that's what the correspondant wanted they would have asked for it.

These three things combine to tell anyone who is paying attention that this is damage control, not meaningful engagement, and it's offensive to act this way toward someone who has put this much time into your project.

There is nothing you can do, because you already traded away the community for your AI project and money. The same corpo goons who don't see anything past their slop projects are the one who use the "jump on a quick call" lingo

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

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831614 jack1243star pointed out the possibility that English might not be Kiki's first language and they perhaps even have used ChatGPT to make the comment sound more polite.

"I'm sorry you feel that way" is a canned non-apology, worse than a canned apology. At least a canned apology admits fault.

I wouldn't want to get into a call with someone with that attitude. If I'm quitting because no consideration was given to me or my work, and the first response I get shows no consideration to me, my work, or even acknowledge my list of grievances, a "quick call" is the last thing I feel like getting on.

In fact, even that word, "quick", is insulting, because there's no way this is getting fixed with a "quick" call. "Quick call" implies the grievances are minor. More insults.

1. Turn off bot

2. Revert bot's changes

3. Ask to have call for feedback, while expressing fault for deploying bot to prod without collaboration & conceding to making this bot opt-in

(They may not have power to do 1 & 2, but that's a sign of an org not empowering their support team)

The “right” response is owning your mistake, apologizing, rolling back AND talking face to face.

Patronizing “sorry you got your feelings hurt” responses are pretty much canned apologies.

As a native English speaker, I don't see it as condescending either. Yes it's a bit "corporate" in tone, but that is not uncommon at all in large human organisations (not just for-profit corporations but also government, NGOs, political orgs, etc). Also the reality is that "hopping on a call" can often help to resolve problems that would otherwise devolve into months of bikeshedding on mailing lists. Which is often entertaining but rarely very useful.

But it's Mozilla. There is a segment of the community that will be pissed off by everything they do. Check the username of the person you're replying to.

> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced.

English is also not my mother tongue, but this translates to "I'm sorry you feel like that, but we don't care or change anything, can I call you to convince you into doing things our way while completely being off the record?" in my mind.

This is forceful and rude in my culture, but it's very rude and a no-no in Japanese culture AFAIK.

If the person wanted to help genuinely, I'd expect to read something like "I'm sorry you feel like this. I read your comments but I want to clarify some points so I can transfer these up the chain with utmost clarity. We might have made some mistakes and don't want to leave you out in the cold".

If this were some small bug report, even from someone pretty ticked off, I'd agree.

But this is a response to someone who has just announced that they are quitting an organization they had spent 20 years of their life volunteering for, because of the disrespect they have felt from the org. This is not a "hop on a call" moment. This is a "please accept to meet so I can apologize in person, and see if we can repair this" moment, preferably after acknowledging the disrespect.

Given that the written complaint already had a list of ways Mozilla had stepped on the toes of those volunteers, expressing regret about their feelings without at least acknowledging that Mozilla's actions might have been rash is very condescending indeed. These volunteers are adding value to M's product for free and they are very angry and threatening to leave and this is your response? Basically saying "I'm sorry you're being such big babies, do you want some tissues?"...

"I'm sorry for how you feel" is widely accepted as a non-apology in English. Sincere apologies show awareness of how one's actions led to the situation that would require the apology.

Not a native speaker, but to me it reads as canned or AI generated response that acknowledges nothing in the post besides there being some kind of tiny disagreement. I don't see how "I'm sorry for how you feel about this" can be inteprented as anything other than "I'm not at fault, and I'm sorry I'll have to spend time pacifying you".

Feels extremely disrespectful.

> As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this.

To be fair, Dutch culture is known for its directness[0] and for not interpreting even the harshest criticism as offensive, so I'm not sure I would trust your judgment on this… :-D

That being said, as a fellow European, I concur.

[0]: There was a great video on this a while back, which I don't seem to be able to find right now. https://www.tiktok.com/@letsdoubledutch/video/73822692756517... seems close enough, though.

As a native English speaker, "I'm sorry for how you feel" is patronizing. Genuine apologies acknowledge mistakes rather than invalidate feelings.

As somebody from your Neighboring country, its really comes over as condescending...

"I'm sorry for how you feel" is the definition of non-appology...

Hey, even the AI overlords agree on this...

> The phrase "I'm sorry for how you feel" is often perceived as a non-apology because it shifts blame to the other person's emotions instead of taking responsibility for one's actions. Instead of a genuine apology, it can sound like you're sorry they are upset rather than sorry for your behavior, and it can imply their feelings are the problem. A true apology acknowledges your role and expresses sincere regret for the pain you caused.

In Dutch its something like "Het spijt me, hoe u hierover voelt" ... See the issue, the first part is a apology, that is then reflected to the other person.

"We want to make sure we truly understand what you're struggling with." ...

We do not understand why *you are struggling with this*. For us its perfectly normal, so why are you having a issue with this.

So in Dutch its something like "We willen echt verstaan, waarom u moeite hebt hiermee". Aka, sending the issue back to the other person.

See the issue how both parts flow and shift the issue to the other person. This is not a English language issue because the same way of writing is also done in Dutch if you want to do a non-apology with a dose of gaslighting.

I never see anybody write like this, beyond those that have the intention to rile people up. Its gaslighting 101 ...

Also from The Netherlands, this is 100% condescending and patronising to me. I read this as corporate-speak for "go fuck yourself". Let's go through it line-by-line:

> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced.

"We have zero regrets about the changes we made and have no intention of making any changes - the problem is how you feel about them".

> Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?

"I can't be bothered to engage with the points you already raised. You can do some venting in a Teams call, but we don't want there to be a record so we can't be held to any promises we might accidentally make."

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

"You are the problem: you haven't embraced our glorious changes yet. Accept our "help" to adapt to your new reality, or get out"

So no, that's not what you'd write if you genuinely wanted to help: that's what you write when you want to get rid of someone who is bothering you.

If they genuinely wanted to help, the response would've read something more like this:

> Dear marsf, > It is shocking to me to learn that our recent rollout of sumobot has caused enough friction to make a 20-year veteran of our community quit. Our intention has always been, and will always be, to use new technology like sumobot to help our communities - not harm them. Reading your report, we have clearly failed at that. > To prevent it from doing additional damage, we have chosen to pause sumobot for the moment. We still believe that it can become a valuable tool, but it'll remain paused until we have discussed its modes of operation and the impact it has on the way you contribute with representatives of the various communities. We'll work out an approach over the following weeks. > I hope this is sufficient for now to change your mind about leaving - people like you are essential to open-source applications like Firefox. If you wish to discuss it face-to-face, my team and I am more than happy to hop on a call with you to make sure we are doing the right thing.

I'm from the United States and I read the exact same thing that you did. Somebody really trying to help. Zero condescending or patronizing behavior. It seems like somebody doing their best to reach out and get in contact and yeah I agree completely that hell I could have written this myself. And probably have something like that before. I don't understand what culture would find that condescending at all.

I don't think there is something inherently patronizing about this. But this tone seems like the most generic possible American corporate faux-friendly tone.

In order to sound truly friendly, one has to break the script

I think what the grand parent meant is that the staff doesn't acknowledge issues - instead, clearly says that this is how _they_ feel, points out that changes were "only recently introduced", and says that is interested in learning what they are struggling with, again, not acknowledging issues with the process or bot, instead wording as if this is marsf issue.

Personally, I don't think this is that bad. This is a public thread and he's Mozilla staff - the wording has to be clinical. The worse part is the _recently introduced_ bit, but I would look over it.

I'm from the Netherlands as well and I wouldn't interpret this as condescending but as disingenuous corporate BS-speak where someone is doing damage control by showing "how much they value your opinion". And in the end not doing anything at all with your concerns.

"I'm sorry" can mean "I am apologizing" but often it instead means "I feel bad". It depends on context which applies.

"I'm sorry for how you feel" without more explanation often sounds like "The thing that makes me feel bad in this situation is your reaction to it". It can come across as blaming the person for the feelings, regretting not being able to control others' feelings better, or dismissing the root causes of the feelings and any agency in them.

It's a bad apology because of the ambiguity, though passive aggressive types like that aspect. It's honestly a bad way to sympathize as well.

As somebody from Spain, I concur.

yeah nah mate, it is 100% tone deaf - does not reflect the frustration of the OP

you don't reply like this to just open forum

lazy ass business world reply

you get in touch ASAP and personally, if you really want to keep them

It's a combination of inability to read anything longer than a tweet and not wanting to put anything on record.

Because so much nuance can be lost in writing, especially if both parties are working in a second language. There is a lot of value in actually talking to someone, especially in a fraught situation like this. Hearing the other person express genuine concern can do a lot to overcome the anger. Otherwise we tend to build up stories in our head about what the other person “really means” and those stories tend to be wildly negative.

Decisions are not fixed. Changing the situation, could revert the decision. Why should someone silently accept a situation, when simple communication could improve the world for everyone involved? That seems like a very ignorant mindset.

I'm not part of Mozilla or any of the communities and I understood the situation by reading the damn post, on the first time.

In the follow-up, any words concerning how the person feels, words on how to talk about this further, and wanting to truly understand what he just wrote in plain and simple terms simply reek strongly of "we really won't change anything, we've made our decision, we are disagree with you but we want you to agree with what we're already doing".

I can hear the exact same tone in exact similar situations with various customer service reps, HR, corporate smooth-talkers, public officials/politicians where the decision is already written in stone and they just pretend they're listening to the customers/employees/citizens affected to quiet down the criticism.

The person gives a clear, detailed answer in the post about their problems > "We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with"

To me that's very condescending, like someone who reads but doesn't understand

Borderline AI response

And personally offering a call is like a sidestep "lets move this problem out of the public discourse" which is especially funny considering it's about a forum

Basically, this response doesn't acknowledge any of the concerns marsf mentioned.

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

He's not talking about what he feels - but a very real change, detrimental change of workflow. Simply not addressed.

In addition to not responding to any of the specifics that the poster clearly put time into, there's also a huge mismatch in tone. In general, do not act very corporate when people are personally pissed off, this has a tendency to just annoy most people further.

It’s the boilerplate every junior account manager uses when they don’t actually have a solution.

>I read it as a person trying to understand the situation.

I have been on the receiving end of such comments enough times to read it as a person trying to appear as if they are trying to understand the situation.

It's always the, "I'm sorry for how you feel," that strikes me as belittling and disingenuous.

Well. Too late. Now that they go you want to talk? If I was the one who finally had enough why the fuck would I want to talk to something I turned my back to?

There were very clear statements of what will happen and why. First acknowledge those, express you are sorry for what happened and hint some mea culpa and how you plan to solve it.

Only then if you feel the need to talk realize that you are the one begging them, not the other way around.

The OP/article is very clear and very direct on what the problems are. The response is so typical american conflict-shy “let’s talk so we can slowly dimish your critique, and also let’s do talking instead of writing so we cant really be held accountable for specifics”. And, to me it comes across as lazy: the op/article is very specific on the problems, just get to work already, no need to “further clarifications” (obviously disable that stupid bot for the japanese community; then get to work restoring original KBs from backups. Then reach out to talk about next steps)

It’s a tonedeaf response from the staff person. Zero respect for what’s clearly many, many hours of contribured work.

Same.

OP has given all that they need, English is probably not their first language, and the first response was to ask for even more unpaid time and labour (presumably in English) in a format that is likely much more difficult for them to summarise coherent thoughts succinctly in, while addressing zero of their issues. They’re asking for MORE effort of the volunteer to fix their bot’s fuckup.

I’m honestly struggling to think of a more insulting way to respond to this. At least “Fuck off” isn’t pretending to care, it’s fewer words to read and isn’t asking for an indeterminate amount of time from you.

a) don't apologize for the other persons feelings, but for your actions that lead to it

b) don't look like you are trying to take the conversation out of the community space it's happening in and/or hiding details by going to a private call (you can offer a call, but it shouldn't be the expectation)

c) Acknowledge the concrete complaints made. Are you truly "struggling to understand" what someone means when they complain that it didn't happen in a staging environment first?

d) a-c also lead to "don't sound like any cookie-cutter PR response to a complaint ever, people have learned those are not genuine". Especially if you are a project that makes a big deal out of its community interacting with said community.

e) ideally announce some concrete first step, e.g. pausing the bot

"We are sorry for overwriting the manual translations of all our volunteers. We have disabled the workflow and are working on restoring the old, manual translations.

We had planned to use the translation bot to help you guys, but based on your response, we have understood that we have overshot our target, and actually made it harmful.

Would you be interested in a call where we can apologize in person, and interview you about how the workflow integration could be designed so it actually helps you and other translators?"

Maybe something like:

    Oops, sounds like we screwed up really badly.  Sorry. :(

    We'll turn off the sumobot, and put things back the way the SUMO Japanese community was used to operating.

    Would you consider not quitting after we've put things back the way they were? :)

You wouldn't form this response. 'We didn't understand it was this bad, so we've shut down SUMO bot for the Japanese Wiki'.

There's a good example from another poster here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833236

Yes. In an online community that operates in written text and is separated by timezones, there's several reasons why that's a no-no.

To me, this seems very simple: they introduced a machine translation workflow. Doing so signals the intent to replace their human translators. The human translators understandably quit rather than collaborate with their replacements.

Speaking a second language live is much harder than taking your time and writing something.

I'm sorry you don't get it and that you feel they're excessively sensitive. On the behalf of the HN community would you like to share with us more about how you feel about it so that we can better understand your position. I'm sure we can help you find the best possible phrasing to better express the excess of said sensitivity. We're sorry you've had to encounter such a wording and attitude on our forum.

I'm sorry you feel that way.

sorry you're struggling with the way the community responded

That's not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that LLMs just can't constitute a punctually Japanese understanding of text like that guideline and speak in Japanese with native fluency no matter what. I just know this from knowing both sides of English-Japanese language pair. And I find that somewhat fascinating in a sense.

They do pretty good Russian, even to the point of very elaborate speech styles etc.

"..and how we can help you engage further with our automated ball kicking machine we used on you without consent.."

At the very least, ‘we will discuss how this could of been handled differently’, not I’m sorry you feel this way.

They said sorry for how you feel about it which is insincere and unhelpful.

What's the saying?

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

> If the MT-generated revision isn't reviewed within a set timeframe (which will be communicated later), it will be automatically approved and published, clearly labeled to indicate that it was translated by AI translation was used.

The complaint seems to indicate this "set timeframe" was 72 hours. Add to the fact that there's decent likelihood of an avalanche of articles "that haven't been updated in 6 months", this seems pretty ridiculous to have put into place before at least getting sign-off from senior maintainers that the translations were of sufficient quality.

Less competent PMs are shoving capital A and capital I everywhere in panic mode, getting even more anxious as every failure exposes and deplatforms them even more.

They couldve spent time to understand the problem domain and think more, if theyre not already busy fabricating a resume to sneak into The Actual Big Tech.

In particular, "the content is useful" is not a checkbox. "The content is produced by this technology" is, and overwriting hand-curated content is an obvious action.

> they should have informed the volunteers before throwing the switch

No, they should have involved the volunteers in the design process.

There was probably a more tactful way to shift labor from passionate volunteers to soulless AI.

I too would be upset if an organization threw out a decade of translation work without any warning or discussion, in favor of a robot pretending to understand my language and failing.

not converse, orthogonal

Some people just want to contribute to a common cause. Some people just want to spend five minutes of their time to fix that one annoying papercut which been bothering them for ages, others just enjoy working together with friendly people to achieve something tangible they can be proud of.

In my opinion one of the biggest benefits of Github to the open-source community is that contributing now has extremely low barriers. It is absolutely trivial to put an "edit this page" link in your documentation which lets a complete stranger fix a typo and open a pull request within seconds - and seeing your fix go live within a few hours is absolutely magical. That kind of trivial contribution is a gateway drug to becoming a valued community member, and it is absolutely essential to maintaining a healthy ecosystem around open-source projects.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

Everyone speaking more than one language knows. Human translations for things like software are bad enough as-is, but automated translations are universally horrible.

I set all of my software to English despite it not being my native language, simply because a lot of concepts don't translate cleanly and end up with forced and cringeworthy phrasing. Combine that with the un-Google-ability of translated errors and issues, and going for an interface in the native English verson is a no-brainer.

And that's with translations done by actual humans! Sites like Youtube have tried "helpfully" pushing machine translations on me for a looong time, and it is painfully clear to anyone speaking both the source language and the target language that the translation is absolute garbage and essentially unusable.

In fact, I barely speak any German (got a year or two of it in high school, but my grades were fairly embarrassing), but I prefer struggling with the native version over a machine translation. Given my knowledge of German-adjacent languages I can mostly make out the meaning of the original, and there's always the dictionary for the handful of words I'm not familiar with.

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.

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.

Same for German. It's horrible.

Use `https://google .com/search?q=-tl%20%s` as your search engine in the browser. Adding "-tl" to search terms remove most translated results from Google Search results. For now anyways.

I really hate it too especially when I want to search something specifically within the French context and I end up getting pages translated from Englsh to French and waste my time on irrelevant content.

It's a problem for everyone who speaks >1 language (the majority of the world?) since you can't turn it off.

I'm in a similar situation. I really wish there was a way to stop YouTube from suggesting me auto-dubbed videos.

Me and my GF had plenty of laughs in the beginning. Now it's become just annoying.

ThereShouldBeTheQuoteAudioTrackQuoteOptionUnderGearIconMenuAtTheRightBottomCornerOfVideoUserInterfaceAmongWhichEnglishIsOfCourseNearTheBottomOfTheListButNotQuiteTheLastItem

but it only applies to that specific video, and yeah, it makes no sense that this passed sniff tests for Google.

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.

It is awful. Its also not so transparent that its being done which feels unethical.

The Standard Chinese language was always known to be oddly syntactically close to US English. No one calls it an Indo-European language, but they sometimes feel closer together than English and French on surface levels. Japanese is not like that - even human translations between anything to/from Japanese sound translated.

Culture is just as much a part of language as the language itself.

There is an air of arrogance in proclaiming that it is merely language barriers that are an issue. But of course it's a convenient argument for big tech forcing MTL on all of us.

But it ultimately marginalizes smaller communities and kills languages. Cultural genocide if you will.

The dangerous thing is that the current state of MTL is serviceable and even usable, but a bilingual speaker will immediately know something is off.

I have noticed this both for French and German, two languages with lots of training material. I imagine it's much much worse for smaller languages and/or communities.

As more and more content on the web is automatically translated, we will all start to talk like translated-from-English LLMs, and that is a future I'm not looking forward to.

The ones that are easiest to point to are turns of phrase like “living your best life”, “that feeling when you…”, etc.

AI wouldnt misspell “truly”. It’s a human.

A few years in corporate managerial role will turn you into a bot.

Firefox is itself someone deciding to make their own fork of mozilla. Maybe we need to do it again every ten years.

I'm happy that somebody is trying to create a new browser -- even though some people say it's impossible nowadays.

But FUTO sponsoring that project gives bad vibes.

> The human element is not recorded in the final translation output, but it is important to people that they know something was processed by a human who had heart and the right intentions

Not that I entirely disagree with the conclusion here, but…

It feels like that same sentiment can be used to justify all sorts of shitty translation output, like a dialog saying cutesy “let’s get you signed in”, or having dialogs with “got it” on the button label. Sure, it’s so “human” and has “heart”, but also enrages me to my very core and makes me want to find whoever wrote it and punch them in the face as hard as I can.

I would like much less “human” in my software translations, to be honest. Give me dry, clear, unambiguous descriptions of what’s happening please. If an LLM can do that and strike a consistent tone, I don’t really care much at all about the human element going into it.

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.

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