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.
What would happen if someone began adding banned words to important parts of a database?
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
Smartest thing would be to just adjust the output so that its easily reverted.
Imagine being this fragile
Witch sistahs, what are we gonna do!! Im literally shaking uncontrollably, my transphibian body is levitating.
What a waste of human endeavor.
Someone smart tell me how to take advantage of this to make the IRS forget I exist.
Don’t worry, they’re working on the IRS too. I saw an anecdote where the Elongated Muskrat said he deleted E-file.
*how to make IRS forgetn’t to tax the rich
change your name to Diversity E. Inclusion
This made me laugh, it has Wile E. Coyote vibes to it as a solution
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
Blocklist is way better than blacklist anyway 😇
Some parts of some DEI initiatives were dumb during the BLM protests, therefore we must do digital nazi bookburnings.🤡
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.
Same with the master branch.
Imo the main branch should be called the trunk.
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
Does anyone have a list of words that the new administration is now allowing that the previous administration had blocked?
Looking for an advanced copy of the Newspeak Dictionary?
No, I’m curious to know which words or phrases the last administration wasn’t allowing. My guess is that there isn’t such a list.
Are these the new camp gaurds?
Apparently the new slogan is “Vox Populi No DEI”.
The content filtering approach to government, or, if you will, a filterocracy.
Let me get this straight. This is the “free speech absolutist” doing this, right?
GitHub is owned by Microsoft.
I yell at the road when people drive badly, too.
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.
Apologists who sit down at the same table as the Nazis are equivocal to the pre-seated Nazis. Zero sympathy.
Purge and lance the boil.
Are you excusing it?
Are you too stupid to understand the difference between hosting software source code and modifying it?
Microsoft/github are not the ones making changes through commits.
…
Excusing what? Someone called out the “free speech absolutist” hypocrisy. You assumed they were talking about Github or Microsoft for some reason. I corrected you.
Maybe learn how to contribute to a conversation?
Don’t feed the worthless troll.
And people discussing it are employed by musk?
The people that are discussing it are exposing it and showing what is happening. And the tools provided by GitHub are helping.
So your original comment was celebrating Microsoft?
