Dear English Reader, go fixk yourself

This post is AI-free, corrector-free, 100% France-grown, 0% proof-read, animal cruelty free, vegan, inclusive, hetero-friendly and does not contain any trace of nuts but may severely damage your self-perception if you’re a rich white straight American who thinks the world revolves around your teeny tiny perception of human experience.

So let’s be clear if it wasn’t but I’m mostly writing out of anger. We call that ‘billet d’humeur’ and if you don’t know what it means and find it tedious to read, please refer to the post title. Damn it feels good reconnecting with feeling-driven writing, rather than polishing some technical C++ document.

So for context, I naively accepted to share my previous post about acting as a Review manager on the Reddit r/cpp channel. I love the Boost community, they are passionate, and talented, and I saw my article as a way to give back to the community. Because I am fully aware of my inability to draft “serious” technical docs in English (why should I ? If you’re an English speaker just feel fortunate that the technical world revolves around you for a few decades more and stop expecting other languages to be replaced and if you feel this parenthesis has been going for too long then GOOD I’m glad it irritated your language sensitivity and it validates what is soon to be the next point of this rant) I used AI to correct grammar and fix semantics. Nothing too bad, I just write a paragraph, select it, ask Chagpt to rephrase it but keep it close to the original and tada I have a globally acceptable draft. Well that did not please the microsoft gatekeeper of the channel, as they simply deleted the post for AI slope. From his words “I don’t care if you use it to translate”. Well. Someone needs to spend a few years in Pays Basque to learn a big bunch of life lessons.

If you think using AI this way is cheating then you’re leaving in a world of privilege: it means you never had to write or proof-read serious stuff in a language that is not yours, and that consequently you can’t even grasp the cost it represents. Asking native speakers to fix your blog posts, your poems, your code documentation, your code reviews or your Boost Reviews is not free: it costs time, it strains friendships, it requires network. Have you ever asked a friend “Hey here is this 3 pages long document I drafted, you may not understand everything but can you take an hour or two to fix the language” ? Have you ever asked the same friend the same service twice ? Thrice? It’s just draining. In Academia trying to find native speakers to correct manuscript was a nightmare. Even after corrections, manuscripts would come back with reviewers asking to … have it proofread by native speakers. 

So yeah non-native speakers have a VERY different experience. And you are so stupidly, naively or consciously rooted in your tour d’ivoire (same thing: refer to the title) you can’t even acknowledge that.

And so YEAH non-native speakers will use AI to have a chance to be read, to fix our broken grammar, to track and repair our semantic confusions (a cod is not a cob nor a cab but what is a knob again ?), to erase the silent spaces put before interrogation points, so to hopefully converge towards something that could have been plausibly written by a native-speaker. And the aim was naively to … reach better international communication?

And so you dare telling me I have too many emojis, too many em dashes, too many bullet points, and that the reading is tedious and that the work is worthless ? Are you intentionally stupid or being arrogant is so deeply encoded in your DNA that even the most intense genetic therapy would have no chance to have you experience humility ?

So yeah go fixk yourself. I’ll make a fun doodle out of this when I’ll have the time.

And if you are a rich white straight American smiling at that rant and nodding with understanding, then just know: you are golden, thank you. Now go educate your concitoyens because they are in desperate need of what you have: common sense.