this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 hour ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Will they return the master-slave terminology? It's actually funny how the Newspeak wheel is turning.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

It's called an euphemism treadmill

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Smartest thing would be to just adjust the output so that its easily reverted.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

This is literally what I've been doing, but there are people that are just overwriting shit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 14 hours ago

Imagine being this fragile

[–] [email protected] 65 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

What a waste of human endeavor.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Literally flushing money down the drain to feed ego. It's honestly pathetic and disgusting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Nuh uhn! It's streamlining the woke removal with maximum efficiency^TM^

[–] [email protected] 40 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

Someone smart tell me how to take advantage of this to make the IRS forget I exist.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

change your name to Diversity E. Inclusion

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago

This made me laugh, it has Wile E. Coyote vibes to it as a solution

[–] [email protected] 12 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

*how to make IRS forgetn't to tax the rich

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

No they've already figured that out and I'm certainly not rich.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago

Don't worry, they're working on the IRS too. I saw an anecdote where the Elongated Muskrat said he deleted E-file.

[–] [email protected] 271 points 1 day ago (26 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 163 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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] 5 points 16 hours ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (2 children)

for f in $(find .); do sed -i 's/wokeness//g' $f; done

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago

find -exec my dude

[–] [email protected] 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

This will break if the filename has spaces in it iirc.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

Regex is the real deep state

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

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.

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