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   see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 01-Oct-2023 01:33:55 JST see shy jo

   Firefox's new offline translation is certianly a nice feature.

   My question is, does clicking on these buttons install non-free software on my computer?

   I don't think that the free software community has settled on an answer to this question.

   • Embed this notice
     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 01-Oct-2023 01:33:54 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     Did a quick test with a fresh install of firefox and it automatically uses the ML model for detecting language without being configured. It also automatically downloaded the spanish translation model even though I didn't ask it to do the translation.

     I'm unsure if the language detection model is being shipped in firefox or downloaded on first run.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 01-Oct-2023 01:34:42 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     FWIW, I do own copyright to data used in this translation. They have ingested the translations of the debian installer into it; I wrote a lot of that text and it is GPL licensed.

     I found this url in their training set, for example:

     https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/saucy/+source/debian-installer/+pots/debian-installer/is/+translate?show=changed_in_ubuntu

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 01-Oct-2023 02:29:04 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     yeah, verified this using a fresh user account

     where they hide the LLM in the source code I don't know, wild!

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 01-Oct-2023 02:29:05 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     or did I? I forgot about .cache/mozilla

     Looking in the source, they have horrible things like 100+ kb of minifired js that loads the fasttext LLM, but I didn't find the LLM binary itself

   • Embed this notice
     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 01-Oct-2023 02:29:06 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     The https://fasttext.cc/ model is shipped in the firefox package, verified with this experiment.

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     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 01-Oct-2023 02:53:38 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1053278

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Sunday, 01-Oct-2023 02:56:20 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @joeyh I guess it would maybe make sense to have the JS blob in something like nonfree and I guess the LLM translator should have a clear opt-in in firefox or be shipped in Debian.