‘Forbidden Words’: Github Reveals How Software Engineers Are Purging Federal Databases
‘Forbidden Words’: Github Reveals How Software Engineers Are Purging Federal Databases
A project called "Remove-DEI" shows the tweaks used to remove "forbidden words" from a database about childhood school readiness.
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.
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
Will they return the master-slave terminology? It's actually funny how the Newspeak wheel is turning.
It's called an euphemism treadmill
What would happen if someone began adding banned words to important parts of a database?
Smartest thing would be to just adjust the output so that its easily reverted.
This is literally what I've been doing, but there are people that are just overwriting shit.
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.
Imagine being this fragile
What a waste of human endeavor.
Literally flushing money down the drain to feed ego. It's honestly pathetic and disgusting.
Nuh uhn! It's streamlining the woke removal with maximum efficiencyTM
Let me get this straight. This is the “free speech absolutist” doing this, right?
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).
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
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.
They usually don't care, they just claim some imaginary East-Asian country banned any kind of self-expression to the point all people are wearing the same clothes, which made crime disappear over night or some similar bullshit. They want to claim humans are not different by nature.
The irony that the author was red scared... all this authoritarianism... certainly Trump's a commie.
The author got backstabbed and almost killed by Stalinists, who turned on them instead of fighting the fascists.
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.
Someone smart tell me how to take advantage of this to make the IRS forget I exist.
change your name to Diversity E. Inclusion
This made me laugh, it has Wile E. Coyote vibes to it as a solution
*how to make IRS forgetn't to tax the rich
No they've already figured that out and I'm certainly not rich.
Don't worry, they're working on the IRS too. I saw an anecdote where the Elongated Muskrat said he deleted E-file.
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.
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.
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"?
for f in $(find .); do sed -i 's/wokeness//g' $f; donefind -execmy dudeThis will break if the filename has spaces in it iirc.
Regex is the real deep state
Apparently the new slogan is "Vox Populi No DEI".
The content filtering approach to government, or, if you will, a filterocracy.
That's old news.
Does anyone have a list of words that the new administration is now allowing that the previous administration had blocked?
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
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.
Some parts of some DEI initiatives were dumb during the BLM protests, therefore we must do digital nazi bookburnings.🤡
Blocklist is way better than blacklist anyway 😇
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#000000?
Just call it the zero color wink wink
Same with the master branch.
Witch sistahs, what are we gonna do!! Im literally shaking uncontrollably, my transphibian body is levitating.
I think you're missing the point - Democrats failed to pass UBI and M4A because they love the genocides.
Are these the new camp gaurds?