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.
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).
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.
Are you excusing it?
Since people can drown in water, we must ban water!
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.
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
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.
Revert a 4 year old commit without dealing with conflict hell? I sure wish them luck
Missing information being brought back? Assuming they don’t destroy backups. Assuming there are backups.
…
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?
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.