this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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A project called "Remove-DEI" shows the tweaks used to remove "forbidden words" from a database about childhood school readiness.

The updates, shown in Github commits, are to a database for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Head Start program. They show a project called “Remove-DEI,” which reveal some of the back-and-forth that is happening behind the scenes to align federal agencies with Donald Trump’s executive orders that forbid almost anything having to do with race or gender within federal agencies. The Github pages show software engineers discussing amongst themselves how to best remove all instances of “forbidden words” from a specific database, and the code updates they used to do it. The changes also show that, while thousands of government datasets are disappearing from the internet, even ones that remain are having parts of their utility deprecated or broken in a way that may not be visible to those outside the government.

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[–] [email protected] 289 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Let me get this straight. This is the “free speech absolutist” doing this, right?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Internals of state structures being mandated some terminology is not really a violation of free speech.

In theory there are two approaches to discrimination - the neutral and the compensatory. The neutral one is that eventually discrimination will dissolve if the structure is built truly neutrally. The compensatory one is to detect kinds of discrimination and compensate for them specifically. I can imagine both the former and the latter feeling nicer in theory. The former - well, no special cases, just prevent the structure itself from reinforcing injustice. The latter - well, everything in life is a special case, you'll never have a perfect structure, so it's better to work with what you have.

It's like different kinds of interference in radio, requiring different solutions. In fact they are not contradictory and both have their place in a working system (I haven't heard of such).

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oops no such thing as a neutral state structure, thank you come again

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (4 children)

What the fuck did I just read? This sounds actually a lot like raw unapologetic hate of people that don't fit [blank] from society. It's utterly insane. It will hurt you eventually, you know that right?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

GitHub is owned by Microsoft.

[–] [email protected] 153 points 1 month ago (18 children)

This is being done by trump and musk.

Microsoft just own the company where this is being discussed because the people actually doing the work are treating it like any other software project.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 month ago

I yell at the road when people drive badly, too.

[–] [email protected] 173 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Read 1984, if you haven't already.

This is exactly what The Party does through simplifying the Newspeak dictionary - targeting words to remove from the lexicon to make even communicating against The Party's narrative impossible.

DEI is being Unpersoned

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is why it's essential, now more than ever, to keep these words and notions alive, let the truth be an act of rebellion in itself.

Life is meaningless without diversity, and it is up to each and every one of us to protect it.

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What a waste of human endeavor.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Literally flushing money down the drain to feed ego. It's honestly pathetic and disgusting.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 month ago

Imagine being this fragile

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Someone smart tell me how to take advantage of this to make the IRS forget I exist.

[–] ogler 71 points 1 month ago (2 children)

change your name to Diversity E. Inclusion

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

This made me laugh, it has Wile E. Coyote vibes to it as a solution

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

*how to make IRS forgetn't to tax the rich

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm a contractor for uscis. We were ordered to change all instances of the word 'immigrant' to 'alien'. We said ok and shrugged because our systems actually use the word 'person'. They didn't say anything about that and we didn't ask

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

This level of pettiness could be amusing if it wasn't in control of the world's largest army and nuclear arsenal.

Edit: and not actively trying to murder people, now that I think about it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I recently took a critical eye to the lyrics of the USA national anthem and was surprised to realize that it's basically about killing people all night long and not getting killed yourself.

It's not about equality, the American dream, honor, economic strength, ingenuity. It's about killing people with bombs. And a flag.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

To be fair, when the poem was written we were getting our asses kicked and survival was not assured.

If you look at the events of the moment, the significant part is the "not getting killed" part.

If things had gone differently, we could all be speaking English today!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

To be fair, it wasn't even adopted as the national anthem until 1931in the middle of decades of nationalism, and hateful "patriotism" designed to force a very specific image of America that is NOT inclusive to others.

Today there are far too many morons who think so many of these oppressive things were instituted by the founders and therefore it should remain as is forever. The same assholes who think some past heyday was "better" than today.

It's up there with the pledge of allegiance, in god we trust, and various statues and shit.

Fuck these people.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago (5 children)

It's not that unlike what companies were doing to appease the woke gods, a friend works at Salesforce and he had to change the name of a class called Blacklist to something else because apparently they're not allowed to use the word black in any context in the code

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 month ago

But, it is unlike that. Companies were changing the name of an existing feature to be more inclusive. Trump is more REMOVING data sets or data fields entirely. It's not renaming "gender" to "sex" because they believe there is no difference, it's completely removing climate change information from websites.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

I wonder how they communicated GUI colors then.

draw.set_color(r=0,g=0,b=0) # Adjust text color to very very dark grey

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago

Some parts of some DEI initiatives were dumb during the BLM protests, therefore we must do digital nazi bookburnings.🤡

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Same with the master branch.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (6 children)

You what the master terminology comes from? Master and slave. USB devices do this day use this terminology master device and slave device. There’s no reason to be perpetuating the terms sever and client work fine. Main branch also works fine.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Master in branch meant the same as the master of an audio track or video. We haven't all stopped saying "remaster" or "masterpiece".

As it turns out, there are software developers from outside the country with people whose grandparents-grandparents were chattel slaves, and they name things without the same baggage. It's Gulf of America stuff, but for the 'good guys'.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't think the argument is worth having.

Only thing I will say is that the audio world has no common meaning for a slave.
Programming does.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The point is that no branch was ever called a slave branch, just as no audio copy was ever called a slave copy. One does not direct the other in the same way that master and slave implies. Usually quite the opposite.

Oh and master-slave usually refers to hardware infrastructure, not programming. Where, as you mentioned, client-service is the equivalent, or parent and child.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Main branch sounds like it's pro-tree and therefore anti-mushroom! Get him, everyone!!!!

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Apparently the new slogan is "Vox Populi No DEI".

The content filtering approach to government, or, if you will, a filterocracy.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

for f in $(find .); do sed -i 's/wokeness//g' $f; done

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Will they return the master-slave terminology? It's actually funny how the Newspeak wheel is turning.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

I think you're missing the point - Democrats failed to pass UBI and M4A because they love the genocides.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Smartest thing would be to just adjust the output so that its easily reverted.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is literally what I've been doing, but there are people that are just overwriting shit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

their idiots. if anything breaks doing something more akin to masking to nothing will make them look like a hero. doing something that can't be undone is wack.

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