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.

  • @[email protected]
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    2315 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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      98 hours ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      2913 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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      15 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

      • @[email protected]
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        1614 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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          511 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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          713 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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            712 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.

            • The Octonaut
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              24 hours ago

              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.

        • @[email protected]
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          613 hours ago

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