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.

  • @xenomor
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    1739 hours ago

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

    • @rottingleaf
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      -125 hours ago

      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]
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        1109 hours ago

        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.

          • @P1nkman
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            24 hours ago

            Since people can drown in water, we must ban water!

          • @[email protected]
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            679 hours ago

            I think you’re missing something here.

            GitHub isn’t doing anything. It’s just a repository where people can track changes that are happening by end users. The end users are using GitHub and are removing DEI stuff from their products at the direction of the US government (AKA. Musk and Trump).

            Being angry at Microsoft is like being angry at a grocery store chain because you saw a kid being told by his grandpa to feed stale bread (from that grocery store) to some ducks.

            • Maeve
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              -188 hours ago

              Maybe, I’ll reread, I’ve something to do shortly that will take most of my day but I’ll come back tonight to this. Thank you

              • @[email protected]
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                87 hours ago

                To add, GitHub is actually a great place to be making these changes, because with GitHub you retain history of the edits and prior versions. So after Trump changes his mind or loses power, the missing information can be brought back in fairly easily. Nothing is permanently lost.

                • @[email protected]
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                  26 hours ago

                  Missing information being brought back? Assuming they don’t destroy backups. Assuming there are backups.

          • @[email protected]
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            429 hours ago

            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?

            • Maeve
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              -609 hours ago

              And people discussing it are employed by musk?

              • TJA!
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                178 hours ago

                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?

          • snooggums
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            9 hours ago

            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.

  • *dust.sys
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    11010 hours ago

    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

    • @latenightnoir
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      359 hours ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      -36 hours ago

      The irony that the author was red scared… all this authoritarianism… certainly Trump’s a commie.

      • @rottingleaf
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        25 hours ago

        The author was that after getting a look at how Stalin’s USSR worked.

        I think we can agree that even a marxist-themed totalitarianism in an English-speaking country is extremely unlikely to be Stalinist, thus similar to 1984.

  • @[email protected]
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    66 hours ago

    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]
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      164 hours 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]
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      6 hours ago

      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

      • @rottingleaf
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        15 hours ago

        Just call it the zero color wink wink

      • @thedeadwalking4242
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        115 hours ago

        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.

        • Aatube
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          12 hours ago

          The server does not necessarily control the client though. Looking at the list of alternatives, I like boss/controller–worker the most.

        • The Octonaut
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          14 hours ago

          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]
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            43 hours ago

            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]
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          04 hours ago

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

  • @[email protected]
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    169 hours ago

    Apparently the new slogan is “Vox Populi No DEI”.

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

  • @nevemsenki
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    7 hours ago

    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.

    • @friend_of_satan
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      6 hours ago

      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.

      • @NABDad
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        34 hours ago

        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]
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          13 hours 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      25 hours ago

      Let’s hope that jarheads have some common sense.

      Wasn’t there some top brass saying during first term that it’s not that clear-cut “obey bitch” if Mango Mussolini says “fire”?

  • Optional
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    15 hours ago

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

  • Bob Robertson IX
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    27 hours ago

    Does anyone have a list of words that the new administration is now allowing that the previous administration had blocked?

    • @Elros
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      57 hours ago

      Looking for an advanced copy of the Newspeak Dictionary?

      • Bob Robertson IX
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        66 hours ago

        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.