GitHub reveals how software engineers are purging federal databases
181 comments
·February 4, 2025qingcharles
nimbius
IMO this is only going to be a thing for as long as:
0. it takes the reigning POTUS to realize its causing problems that are impacting wealthy elites (24 hours in the case of tariffs)
1. 4 years.
If i were product owner/manager of any of these teams id recommend we fork the codebase for 4 years and call it done. keep the forked version on standby with backports of major content updated in case you wind up with this sort of situation again, but dont start ripping all this stuff out of prod.
Or if on a longer timeline, build culture war into the release as a feature flag (culture=1, culture=0, etc..)
lenerdenator
> 1. 4 years.
That's optimistic.
We put a business executive in charge of the federal government. There's no such thing as term limits or checks-and-balances in the mind of a business executive, just taking a good horse out of the race and inefficiencies. On the first count, if Trump's still in relatively good health, I could absolutely see him making that case for scrapping the term limit on the Presidency.
null
hypeatei
> I could absolutely see him making that case for scrapping the term limit
They're already working on a constitutional amendment to allow a third term[0] and right wing lawyers have suggested that there are legal strategies Trump could try employing to stay in power. That along with Trump himself "jokingly" saying that we won't need to vote again if he's elected does not inspire confidence.
0: https://ogles.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-ogles-propo...
kernal
2. 12+ years.
nonchalantsui
Culture war as a feature flag is so good. I’m definitely reusing that.
netsharc
[flagged]
bqmjjx0kac
I really do expect them to try. I am slightly hopeful that this clown show of an administration is too incompetent to pull it off. The judicial branch appears to be bought and paid for, so maybe my optimism is unfounded.
ryandrake
This seems just as ridiculous and frustrating as a few years ago, dropping whatever they're doing to remove "master" and "whitelisting" from the code. Different team, same silliness.
azernik
1. This is removing actual content, not just changing internal naming. "Children/Families affected by systematic discrimination/bias/exclusion" will simply no longer be able to find grants targeted at them.
2. The amount of effort being put into this is much higher than GitHub changing their default for new repos to "main"
IshKebab
> The amount of effort being put into this is much higher than GitHub changing their default for new repos to "main"
Sorry but that's bullshit. This is just deleting a few words from static content. The whole `main` thing required:
* Github (and Gitlab etc.) to make `master` configurable - an entirely new feature.
* All tooling that previously could assume a default of `master` now can't have a sensible default. You have to specify every time.
* Users to remember which one to use for every repo.
This is still causing me pain. Repos I use are about 50:50 split between `main` and `master`. I sure do love having to retype `git switch master` half the time I do it.
This is dumb, but it definitely is less effort than the dumb `main` change.
amarcheschi
Except that replacing "master" with "main" probably didn't affect the lives of people subject to systemic discrimination. This might do
lucasyvas
I agree with the parent comment, but believe you have the more correct and important perspective in the current context.
They are both probably forms of overcorrection, this too far in the wrong direction where the former could have been too far in the more ideal direction.
Pandering is not as bad as discrimination, as you’ve pointed out.
pipes
It does not seem fair to me to exclude or include people in financial aid programs based on the colour of their skin. Individual circumstances seems like a much fairer and much less divisive system.
gregates
No, those are identifiers that appear only in code. It's an IDE or git rename with no impact on the product.
In this case, the engineers are changing the functionality of the product, not just changing code identifiers.
pc86
So whether you agree with the policy aims or not, wouldn't that mean this is actually productive work while trawling through git histories changing "master" to "main" is just a nonproductive waste of time.
insane_dreamer
1) Were employees ordered to implement PRs to go through all code and auto-remove all mentions of "master" and "whitelist" from public facing code (not just internal identifiers).
2) False equivalency.
IshKebab
> Were employees ordered to implement PRs to go through all code and auto-remove all mentions of "master" and "whitelist" from public facing code (not just internal identifiers)
Uhm, yes. Yes they were.
Here's one example:
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/09/renaming-whi...
TeeMassive
They're both changes ordered by decree for purely political reasons with disproportionate negative technical impact.
Cornbilly
Most places only changed that terminology on external viewable materials and the requests for removing terms from the code were just dumped in the backlog for some intern to maybe get to one day.
I could go pull my company's JIRA ticket and I guarantee you it hasn't been touched since 2020.
These companies were only going to do enough work for a PR win and nothing more.
tehjoker
that was really stupid but mostly harmless, this will cause a lot of people to actually suffer
whamlastxmas
Removing racistly coded language isn’t ridiculous. There’s a reason we don’t use words like “negro” anymore, too.
pc86
You're completely right. It's a shame that instead of doing that people were worried about terms like "whitelist."
wwweb
Oh sure, this is 100% the same..
kernal
The corollary is that they were very motivated to do so.
tehjoker
i cant imagine having my boss tell me to do this shit. i would quit
freitasm
Some people still need to feed themselves and their families.
But if there was an option, they definitely should.
netsharc
Having people with integrity quit is a secondary goal. And with the compliant people remaining, they can do a slippery slope, with the people thinking "Well I've already done X, X+1 isn't that much worse". Slash they'll absorb the Nazi propaganda as "acceptable".
Gas chambers when?
PakistaniDenzel
Everyone had to do the same shit with the master->main thing
everybodyknows
A concurrent parallel in the private sphere: I see today that all the pride/heritage weeks or months have disappeared from my Google Calendar.
Digging into Settings (on desktop web) reveals options to turn on "Regional" and "Global religious" holidays e.g. "Start of Ramadan" -- but apparently no way whatever to recover the disappeared -- not even via menu button "Browse calendars of interest".
tidus532
The Remove DEI project the article has an open pr to revert the changes: https://github.com/HHS/Head-Start-TTADP/pull/2617 Would have been nice if the article mentioned that.
philipLutz
Find and replace "Equity" with "1337"?
hk1337
Seems like it's just a PR for removing it from the government website?
Also, looks like they're adding a deletedAt field and soft deleting items in the database rather than hard delete.
Hizonner
> Seems like it's just a PR for removing it from the government website?
As a new crash priority ordered from outside by people who have probably never heard of the project. Not disruptive or anything. That's definitely how you manage a large organization.
Oh, and this particular "PR" does nothing to aid anybody or improve anything. There's that, too.
> Also, looks like they're adding a deletedAt field and soft deleting items in the database rather than hard delete.
Protecting themselves in case it gets rolled back, I imagine. When you get toddlers in charge, you can expect new "crash priority" rule changes on a daily basis, so you learn to prepare.
crooked-v
The word "just" there is doing a lot to gloss over the absurdity of government workers ordered to censor the word 'equity' instead of doing actual work.
LorenzoGood
src/migrations/20250122205314-definitionally-dirty-work.js Is funny.
pc86
And renamed, somebody got yelled at.
FrustratedMonky
Seems like there are more important things to do than code clean up
lucasyvas
Indeed - doesn’t seem very “Efficiency” based does it.
belter
"..The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward..."
- Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf (1925)Devilspawn6666
Have most of the commenters here been living under a rock for the past decade.
The woke "progressives" have been obsessed about policing language. I was going to use the word bl*listing but that's verboten as well.
In the UK people were arrested for just saying that all lives ma*ered.
So we now have extremists that had infested the US Federal Government desperately trying to backpedal - great!
Angostura
> In the UK people were arrested for just saying that all lives ma*ered.
You need to have a think about how you were convinced of that, and who told you it. because it isn’t true.
n4r9
> In the UK people were arrested for just saying that all lives ma*ered.
Any reference for that? And why start out the t's?
Devilspawn6666
You could try a 2 sec search...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bris...
There was also another case where the police launched an investigation, which by itself is ridiculous:
https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2020/6/23/uk-police-investi...
skywhopper
After years of nonsense complaints about non-existent “cancel culture” and “censorship” campaigns, here we have the real thing happening right in front of our eyes. Literal “forbidden” words being deleted from government documents and already-published material. This is truly disgusting, disturbing, and vile.
IshKebab
> non-existent “cancel culture”
Wow I've never heard anyone deny the very existence of cancel culture before. Or is this some kind of semantic distinction-without-a-difference?
dragonwriter
“Cancel culture” as a distinct novel thing doesn't exist; ostracism of people that diverge from a group’s values has existed forever, “cancel culture” is just a name applied to it by those indulging in certain beliefs that had previously been unquestionably dominant after they had become sufficiently controversial that those opposed to them were a significant-enough group that the ostracism that that previously dominant group had previously applied to its opponents sometimes had substantial impact in the other direction.
thrwthsnw
It’s kind of lame that these guys are blacklisting words based on some master list. Normally these things get grandfathered in but I guess they’re just blindly following orders after getting sold down the river. It seems like an insane waste of manpower if you ask me. I’d hate to be the low man on the totem pole slaving away at this kind of bitchwork and getting ragged on by the bossman if I missed a word.
darkwater
Why didn't you use the n-word as well? Also, do you really think it's the same? I mean, the parody you wrote with what's actually happening?
1shooner
I don't support any of this reactionary nonsense, but there are certainly lists of forbidden words that grew along with the DEI movement. Of course they were forbidden for different (I'd say better) reasons, but it was ultimately also asserting power through control of language.
cantstopmenow
How much of that accompanied foreign dissolution of Congressionally-mandated institutions?
azernik
How much of that was actually removed in a crash effort, and how much was just fliers saying "please use this other word in the future"?
tehjoker
based redditors are now in control of trillions of critical infrastructure. surely this will go well and not result in untold damage and predictable backfire
wwweb
[flagged]
sweeter
Okay 404, its evil that you put a fake hair on the github screenshot lmao...
Side note, I really don't give a single shit what anyone thinks about Diversity equity and Accessibility initiatives (though, I do think being opposed to requiring businesses to have wheel chair ramps and such, comically cruel) I don't know how anyone can support having 18 year old randoms having access to Federal databases and direct access to the governments pocket book, and support going far past judicial processes to illegally gut the minuscule, nearly non-existent, social safety nets that we do have. Idk how anyone in their right mind can say the wealthy deserve a trampoline, and everyone else can't even get a safety net.
cantstopmenow
[flagged]
These developers have had to drop whatever projects they were working on to go back to previous code and spend time finding all of this, just to keep their jobs. Then they have to redeploy new versions everywhere, which also carries a significant cost. Really frustrating.