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.
nimbius 27 days ago [-]
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..)
4ndrewl 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
femiagbabiaka 27 days ago [-]
The histrionics don't help:
If this is the case, incepting everyone with the idea in advance subconsciously lowers resistance right now, when nothing can be done, because this is all hypothetical.
And if it isn't the case, you can't be taken seriously.
Simply respond to the moment, in the moment. That is already enough.
Plus remember: he doesn't need to be a dictator, because he won a democratic election. If anything, liberals should be focusing on how to avoid JD Vance simply winning in 2028.
panic 27 days ago [-]
It's not "histrionics"; they tried it last time and they'll try it again. This time they seem more organized, so I wouldn't be surprised if they succeed. If you care about the US remaining a functioning democracy, you should work in whatever way you can toward removing the current administration from power.
femiagbabiaka 27 days ago [-]
"They" are not any more organized now than they were then, they're simply better staffed. This is precisely why Trump has to use executive orders (many of which are rescinded instantly) and send Elon on dummy missions instead of just doing the durable thing: whipping Congress into passing law.
As it stands, the only durable policy win of his term so far was achieved on a bipartisan basis and mostly passed before he even took office: the Laken Riley Act. Why isn't the opposition party acting as opposition?
> If you care about the US remaining a functioning democracy, you should work in whatever way you can toward removing the current administration from power.
The U.S. is already not a functioning democracy (see 2016 and 2020), and removing the current administration from power (illegally?) will not change that.
This constant cycle of ineffective freakouts that America's liberal bloc find themselves in every 4 years is a large part of the reason why Trump won to begin with.
thejazzman 27 days ago [-]
not disagreeing with anything you wrote, well, except that very last line.
he won because many groups of people were promised exactly what they wanted to hear. majority of america is very dumb. to the point it seems intentional. they reject any attempt to be informed about this subject. people routinely having abortions voted trump. people on SSI voted for trump. unemployed people voted for trump. disabled veterans voted for trump. literal nazis trump -- and i'm not saying HE is one, i'm saying that his campaign made sure they see him as one, and it absolutely worked ... over and over again against many of these groups whom are just frothing for fellow haters
i get really upset trying to figure out how to resolve this. but i can't even talk to the couple of relatives i have who are in this cult. if they detect you aren't praising the leader, things get hostile fast.
femiagbabiaka 27 days ago [-]
I think the way out is to offer an alternative vision for the future that speaks to their wants and needs. The problem is that it can't happen overnight -- attacking the cult leader just raises their hackles. People have to come to that conclusion themselves. The Democrats don't have the ability to raise an effective counter to Trump at the moment that isn't an attack on the man himself. There's no substantive positive vision for the future -- because part of mainstream liberal politics is the idea that things are mostly ok as they are, minus some egalitarian tweaks in terms of rights for certain minority groups, etc.
But people have the sense -- in some cases rightfully and in some not -- that their lives aren't going great. So they look to someone to offer an opportunity for change. And they're willing -- really primed, by all of American society -- to throw under the bus whatever boogeyman is necessary as dictated by the Fox News monster of the week™
27 days ago [-]
retox 27 days ago [-]
>majority of america is very dumb
This attitude is another reason he won.
Tostino 27 days ago [-]
Doesn't change the facts on the ground. He loves the uneducated, and is doing everything he can to make sure future generations are less educated than their parents were.
honestSysAdmin 27 days ago [-]
[dead]
hamhock666 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
throwaway743 27 days ago [-]
You're fooling yourself if you think they're not doing this for their own ends and that it's an attempt to end an oligarchy rather than have it persist.
StillBored 27 days ago [-]
Except that anyone who has even basic knowledge of history understands that democracies fall to democratically elected leaders. Those leaders tend to share a number of personal attributes, and a style of rhetoric that remains similar with only the specific social group or identified problem changing. They often are supported only by small minorities of the population but control much of the apparatus of government. Consolidation of power, unwillingness to tolerate alternative views, legislative and court systems which abdicate their responsibilities, and dozens of other attributes. On a case by case basis its only taken a handful of those situations to install a dictator. The specific personality types who believe in their holy cause over the norms of following the rules and are willing to bend or break the rules to support it. It comes from the understanding that congress doesn't actually control the debt ceiling if the guy sitting in front of the treasury computer decides to press the button to raise it without congressional approval to "save the country" or whatever other rules need breaking in order to save us from a plausible sounding emergency. And Trump has again, shown he is willing to invent emergencies to win political battles.
So, relecting a person who has already shown a tendency to want to bend and break rules to stay in office, and is willing to simply ignore laws that aren't convenient is a problem. When that person starts installing sycophants into positions that actually control the military, financial and other fundamental levers of governing it becomes that persons choice, not the people or other democratically elected leaders whether to step down, or for that matter do anything else. The people who founded the USA understood that the president was just a step away from being a king and tried their best to counteract that. But, those people are a hundred and seventy years dead and the country has survived because the people elected to those positions were willing to adhere to the norms of governing, even if they didn't believe in the results.
So, I don't think anyone with any critical reasoning skills who has paid even the slightest attention over the past 12+ years believes that to be true of Trump or many of the people he is surrounding himself with this time. The McMasters who say "no you can't do that its illegal" are gone and daily any remaining resistance is being removed. Frankly at this point even if Trump steps down after 4 years. The Senators who have allowed it to progress this far have repeatedly abdicated their fundamental duty and are unfit for office (and that is putting it mildly).
If you can cut off funding to congressionally appropriate USAID programs, its just a likely you can cut off funding to the military unit that won't kiss the ring.
hamhock666 26 days ago [-]
This is a give and take, both branches the congress and the executive are equal, and both are democratically elected. Some situations call for more of one.
Since WW2 we have had a growing unelected federal bureaucracy (staffed by college graduates more and more left-leaning), that is controlled by congress as you mentioned. Congress is run by seniority, most are re-elected every year and are elected along party lines without much thought. And most legislation is written by lobbyists and activists. People are apathetic about congress, there is not much democracy there. People care much more about the presidential election.
I think if you look at the actions of our federal government over past decades you will see it has not been very good for the health of the American people. I think any action by a president to take back some power from Congress to upend that order is a good thing. Throughout our history certain presidents have completely changed the federal government during their terms in office, and afterwards the title goes back to more complacent presidents. Over time systems decay and you may need to start with something new.
hanginChad 27 days ago [-]
TL;DR “big government influence in everyone’s lives is ok when big government influence serves my narrative.”
hamhock666 27 days ago [-]
I would say serves my interests, and not just my interests but all of those who voted a certain way. That’s what elections should be
justonenote 27 days ago [-]
The FBI and 51 Intelligence officials signed a document saying Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation 2-3 weeks before the last election, when in fact it was actually Hunter Biden's laptop.
Is this a true statement or not?
Salgat 27 days ago [-]
The FBI never made such a statement, and the 51 *former* intelligence officers made a statement that, in their opinion, the laptop contained hallmarks of Russian disinformation, and all of this occurred 2 weeks before the 2020 election for maximum political effect.
27 days ago [-]
acdha 27 days ago [-]
> Plus remember: he doesn't need to be a dictator, because he won a democratic election.
He was elected President, not king. The laws being broken applied to all previous election winners.
gerdesj 27 days ago [-]
King Charles III is many Kings and quite a few other head of states/dominions/Mann! He does not have many of the powers that Trump is deploying.
It may turn out to be ironic that you describe Trump and our Monarch (or any other) within the same breath.
Please recall (or look up) what happened to Charles I of England.
cyanydeez 27 days ago [-]
You know the guy who was elected was prepared to stay in power had his insurrectionists been a little better planned.
Histerioinics and history are not associated with the same word.
Grow up.
4ndrewl 27 days ago [-]
I mean, he's literally gone on live TV, in an official briefing, saying he's going to take over the Gaza Strip. With no authority except his own. This is exactly how dictators across the world operate after they're initially elected.
SteveNuts 27 days ago [-]
Trump has already signaled he plans to run for a (as of right now) unconstitutional third term.
joshuanapoli 27 days ago [-]
Time is not on his side.
SteveNuts 27 days ago [-]
With the best healthcare in the world available, I definitely won't be getting my hopes up on that. And furthermore the order of succession isn't much better.
justonenote 27 days ago [-]
Where did he signal this?
Once you find the quote, go onto politco (a not exactly pro-trump site) fact-checking service to get the full context.
Literally one guy proposed an amendment in an attempt to brown nose his boss.
It has practically zero support and has an actual zero chance of being ratified.
SteveNuts 27 days ago [-]
I actually agree with you, I don’t think a constitutional amendment will be ratified in my lifetime. But a lot of things I didn’t think I’d ever see have happened in the last two weeks
27 days ago [-]
27 days ago [-]
grajaganDev 27 days ago [-]
>he doesn't need to be a dictator, because he won a democratic election
So did Hitler.
sertraline 27 days ago [-]
I wish that in 100 years Hitler becomes truly synonymous to "Satan", and instead of "satanic" or "demonic" people would say "hitleric". Because it sounds cooler and it suits the way how people throw "hitlers" at each other online.
nonchalantsui 27 days ago [-]
Culture war as a feature flag is so good. I’m definitely reusing that.
mschuster91 27 days ago [-]
> it takes the reigning POTUS to realize its causing problems that are impacting wealthy elites (24 hours in the case of tariffs)
He didn't "realize" anything. All of the show we're seeing was planned posturing and "deal-making by leverage". We shouldn't be accepting even talking about the US annexing Greenland FFS - but here we are, with credible proposals for installing new US military presence on Greenland being discussed. That's alarming.
> 4 years.
Bold of you to assume there will be elections in four years, that these elections will be anywhere close to fair, or that the people who voted for the 47th won't just vote for him (or his successor, assuming the 47th goes six-feet-under) again.
ty6853 27 days ago [-]
There has been no revolutionary change in governance since FDR. The federal apparatus has been tightening the screws with ever vaster and more expensive compendium of regulations and laws. End result, about the largest incarcerated population of the world.
The parties in power failed to unwind any of this so instead they got an unhinged strongman who promised to do it with a sledgehammer. Trump is a symptom rather than a cause.
pjc50 27 days ago [-]
Last I heard El Salvador was offering to help expand the prison population.
mschuster91 27 days ago [-]
> The parties in power failed to unwind any of this so instead they got an unhinged strongman who promised to do it with a sledgehammer.
... and will do just the opposite of what he promised and they were hoping for. Recent news about how scientific grants are being retroactively reviewed for any signs of "woke" language - if that isn't a vast expansion of governmental authoritarian powers, I seriously don't know what is.
rpmisms 27 days ago [-]
> We shouldn't be accepting even talking about the US annexing Greenland FFS
Genuine question: why? Expansionism may be out of style, but I don't see how it's inherently evil.
mschuster91 27 days ago [-]
> Expansionism may be out of style, but I don't see how it's inherently evil.
Any society IMHO has the right to self-determination and self-sovereignty, as long as they adhere to at least the minimum standards of civilized societies aka UDHR - and the governments of those that don't even pay lip service to it should be fair game for everyone else to depose, we've seen the horrors of Syria, the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the genocides of Russia (against Ukrainians), Myanmar and China (Uyghurs and Tibetans) or the kleptocracy that was Gaza under Hamas, enough is enough and someone has to at least enforce the basic laws of humanity.
In the end, the people of Greenland should be the ones that have the say about what happens to their country, not the Americans, and for all I care the question if Denmark should have authority over Greenland should be seriously reconsidered as well given the atrocities of the last decades - among others, kidnapping children and forcibly sterilizing women [1].
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.
ben_w 27 days ago [-]
> 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.
He isn't. Even absent any impact that catching covid may have had on his body, he's visibly obese. More detailed reports on his health are hard to come by thanks to (a) that being private, and (b) the extremely noisy people who either want to demonise or deify him, but it's not unreasonable to think he's got a 25% chance of old age catching up with him fatally by the end of this term.
But if the term limits get scrapped, I wouldn't be surprised to see a return of Bush or Obama as alternatives. Or Bill Clinton. Bill, George, and Donald were all born in 1946.
(1946 was also the same year the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council started meeting. Coincidence, or the secret world government? Coincidence, obviously).
flir 27 days ago [-]
They're aiming for "scrap term limits, but only for Presidents who have served non-consecutive terms". (Or it's all just "notice me senpai" from the soulless minions in Congress. Maybe both.)
27 days ago [-]
hypeatei 27 days ago [-]
> 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.
Luckily a constitutional amendment has 0% chance of being ratified by enough states, even if they're somehow able to get a supermajority in both houses of Congress. Any legislation in that direction is just a distraction. It's the other strategies we need to watch more carefully.
ryandrake 27 days ago [-]
Yea, he doesn't need a constitutional amendment. He controls all three branches of government, so who is going to stop him?
chii 27 days ago [-]
That's why the second amendment exists.
netsharc 27 days ago [-]
Four years? Oh, honey...
Where do I put money on the MAGA-Nazis pulling a Putin on future elections? I suppose Putin isn't the first one to do rigged elections, somehow he's the only one currently in my mind.
Sadly Wikipedia doesn't have an article entitled "List of Rigged Elections"...
bqmjjx0kac 27 days ago [-]
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.
pc86 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
netsharc 27 days ago [-]
Grandfather comment didn't mention anything being "complete"...
But ooh yeah, 3 out of 9 are clean, so there's a chance? Let's just ignore the 6 incompetent apparatchiks and "simple majority rule" shall we?
Don't be so obtuse, we know you're not that stupid.
pc86 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Volundr 27 days ago [-]
> My point was more that if "liberal" == "clean" and "conservative" == "incompetent apparatchiks" then you're (the royal you) a shill
If I consider all the ones who voted for Presidential immunity corrupt does that make me a shill? It's a decision with no constitutional basis (the constitution grants no presidential immunity, but does grant other immunities, implying if it was intended it'd be in there) and ahistorical (we can find plenty of examples of presidents assuming they or their predecessor could be prosecuted).
That still leaves us in the same place a Supreme Court where the majority is beholden to the current President, not the constitution.
pc86 26 days ago [-]
No it doesn't, if you're trained in constitutional law and actually know what you're talking about. Disagreeing with something doesn't make you a shill. Saying everyone who disagrees with you is a $PEJORATIVE_OF_CHOICE does. Maybe even it doesn't matter if you know what you're talking about or not as long as you approach it in good faith.
"The judicial branch is bought and paid for" is a ridiculous shill thing to say because 1) it assumes that smart, well-educated, successful people only believe a thing because of corruption. 2) it obviates the need to address any of the other side's claims on their merits, because they're just corrupt so who cares. 3) it sets up your side as the victors-by-default, because the other corrupt and you hate everything the other side does so by definition you're Good. It used to be a common refrain of the right when most judges and justices and most courts were left-of-center. But now that federal circuit courts are evenly split between R-appointed and D-appointed justices, and SCOTUS has more Republican appointees than Democratic, the judiciary is farcical.
"This is a hallowed, storied institution just so long as it does things I like, and a corrupt oligarchy when it doesn't" is the very definition of shill.
netsharc 27 days ago [-]
And this is you addressing my claims of you being obtuse... how?
Sure, typical whatever-you-are tactic of changing the topic when being attacked. Plus some "Won't somebody think of the site's rules?!".
pc86 26 days ago [-]
I didn't address that claim because it's a pointless ad hominem. Tell me what I could respond with that would have you say "oh actually you're right, I was wrong, my apologies" even if just internally.
pc86 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
miltonlost 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ryandrake 27 days ago [-]
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 27 days ago [-]
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 27 days ago [-]
> 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.
knome 27 days ago [-]
Having to keep track of what branch has been arbitrarily tapped as the trunk in a repo is not reasonably comparable to stripping Americans of recognition and rights.
The former may annoy some folks until they standardize or figure out a way to tag the repos. The latter is actively aiming to be detrimental to people in a large way, and unless stopped, will very likely succeed in that goal.
_kst_ 27 days ago [-]
I deal with the main/master brouhaha by using a script I wrote that determines the name of the appropriate branch:
#!/bin/bash
git remote show origin | sed -n '/^ *HEAD branch: */s///p'
It's in my `$HOME/bin` as `git-master`, symlinked as `git-main`.
git switch $(git master)
(`git foo` finds and executes a `git-foo` command anywhere in $PATH, a handy feature if you want to implement your own extensions.)
(This is of course irrelevant to the topic of the top-level post.)
IshKebab 27 days ago [-]
Ah neat! Might have to steal that. Let's just hope nobody decides that "origin" is racist too...
27 days ago [-]
pjc50 27 days ago [-]
You didn't have to do this, there was no EO.
IshKebab 27 days ago [-]
Ah so is there a way I can magically get everyone to go back to `master`?
ben_w 27 days ago [-]
To get *everyone* to magically go back would require *forcing me* to go back. Very few of the places I worked kept the default name anyway, for entirely unrelated reasons. Call the default branch "A" for all I care. Or "Release". Or "Primary". Or "Root".
Sure, I know the etymology doesn't go to what it sounds like, but even without any culture war stuff — and this is very mild, I view "not using 'master'" in this context as "being polite" — even without culture war stuff, what you're whinging about was already something people had to handle.
IshKebab 26 days ago [-]
So I am forced to deal with the main/master mess. That's what I thought. I don't know why you commented.
ben_w 26 days ago [-]
"Very few of the places I worked kept the default name anyway, for entirely unrelated reasons."
You already had the problem you're whinging about, even without any culture war.
And I really do mean it when I say you are 'whinging' here: of all the things people in software have to deal with, what something is called is among the more trivial.
A policy that strips people of money, even with good reason, is much more disruptive than "what's this called?", that you call this "bullshit" and *this* is your comparison? It's like a posh person in WW1 saying that their caviar being rationed is more important than the troops getting winter jackets.
EasyMark 27 days ago [-]
It isn't though. This is the beginning of wiping LGBTQ from any federal government concerns, grants, programs, health data, etc. It's been pretty obvious for the past 2 weeks that Trump doesn't care about the law, nor do his acolytes or GOP Congress members who have failed to stand up for the very role of the Congress as a check to Presidential and Judicial power. They passed these laws, the President has to go through them to make changes to them, not do end runs around the law disguised as Musk and his minions
cbeach 27 days ago [-]
Why should people get grants because of who they choose to sleep with?
gchamonlive 27 days ago [-]
Why should people not get specific needs cared for, to exist for instance, because of who they choose to sleep with? I think that question precedes yours in priority.
cbeach 26 days ago [-]
Could you give me an example of someone whose sexual preferences mean they are unable to "exist" unless they have a government grant?
gchamonlive 25 days ago [-]
A friend of mine got a stone thrown to his head because he was holding hands with someone from the same sex.
He barely survived and today, I think 10 years later, he still suffers from severe migraines and doesn't have movement in half his body.
And I wouldn't blame you if you didn't believe me. I sometimes also don't believe this happened, that that was just a bad dream. That we actually need laws to prevent people from killing each other just because.
ben_w 27 days ago [-]
Because they're a usefully distinct group from the point of view of epidemiological studies.
amarcheschi 27 days ago [-]
Iirc, lgbtq removal involved removing gender studies and pages regarding sexual and women's health. It hadn't to do with grants
beezlewax 27 days ago [-]
I use "git switch -"
Usually you're switching from a feature branch back to main or master anyway.
Hizonner 27 days ago [-]
Less effort on that repo? Sure. Less effort replicated over the entire US government? No, sorry, don't buy it.
... and the git changes were allowed to happen on a sane schedule.
Oh, and most of the people or projects affected by the git change got a choice.
isaacremuant 27 days ago [-]
> 2. The amount of effort being put into this is much higher than GitHub changing their default for new repos to "main"
The buck didn't stop with that useless piece of wokeism that, oh so curiously, didn't go after master degrees.
The funniest thing when red is in power instead of blue is how all the blue people pretend their crap was good and the crap of red is bad and how it's not about the action but about who does it.
amarcheschi 27 days ago [-]
Except that replacing "master" with "main" probably didn't affect the lives of people subject to systemic discrimination. This might do
lucasyvas 27 days ago [-]
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 27 days ago [-]
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.
This comments section seem to be full of the "Fuck Woke DEI" Maganazis and mentioning "systemic racism" will trigger them, but if you're still reading, look at George Floyd, in an alternate world, he'd be a wealthy person descendant of landowners, but in this reality, his grandparents' land was stolen, he grew up poor (and black) and ended up being yet another black-murdered-by-cop figure: https://dwkcommentaries.com/2020/10/08/a-moving-biography-of... . But snowflakes get triggered if there's an idea of better treatment for descendants of victims of systemic racism (another snowflake trigger word).
To the snowflakes: Hey, why care about all that, your continued violence has won you the ethno-supremacy fascism you wanted, where being white and incompetent doesn't matter, because you'll get that cushy job anyway!
amarcheschi 27 days ago [-]
I hope that this was valued in accordance to other values. Eg. A rich black kid in Washington probably wouldn't be eligible to receive this grants, while a poor white kid in Kentucky would. I also hope that "systemic discrimination" would take into account more than just skin color
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 27 days ago [-]
No. This is the idiocy that continues to undermine any argument from free speech or forced speech. You cannot just agree with the language you like. You have to be able to live with horrible, horrid language that you detest and then, maybe, we can have some semblance of sense come back. Words don't hurt people. People do. Case in point, it is not words that are deleting those words. It is actions.
You are part of the problem. Yes. You.
amarcheschi 27 days ago [-]
I'm not sure if I am understanding your message. You are trying to say that I should live without dei messages? If so, I live in a country where I basically lived half of my (pretty short yet, tbh) life without those kind of messages. I was too young to be offended by the lack of messages, I'm now grateful that there is a consideration for different backgrounds.
An example might be jobs postings, in computer science the tone used for the post might discourage more women to apply than man. Having a process to ensure this doesn't happen results in more women applying, but more men as well, the increase is just less than woman in %
I also not see an issue with changing a word that has a bleak history with one that hasn't, it doesn't remove anything from people
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 27 days ago [-]
<< I also not see an issue with changing a word that has a bleak history with one that hasn't, it doesn't remove anything from people
I will be very blunt. You are simply wrong. Not just inaccurate, but wrong. Not technically wrong, but wrong. If it removes word, it removes something. And since "something" is far, far removed from 'not anything'. You are factually wrong. As in, you cannot get more wrong than you just did. Fucking QED.
amarcheschi 27 days ago [-]
It is changed, not removed. This time is removed. Honestly, I don't get your point. Mind your words jesus
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 27 days ago [-]
Friend, if the word is 'changed' from X to Y, then word X ceased to be used in favor of word Y. In other words, word X is removed. I mind my words fairly carefully. The point is what I wrote in previous paragraph. I have only mentioned it thrice..
gregates 27 days ago [-]
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 27 days ago [-]
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.
bjourne 27 days ago [-]
Did you tax money fund any master->main branch renamings?
dark_glass 27 days ago [-]
This could be seen as technical debt, inherited by the current administration. These changes should have never taken place.
zeroonetwothree 23 days ago [-]
I imagine some government agencies do use git so the answer is likely yes.
miltonlost 27 days ago [-]
"Whether or not you agree with the policy aims, wouldn't this mean that the death camps are actually doing productive work?"
You can't ignore the policy aims when determining what is "productive" as productivity is directly to the end result. It's WORSE that this is productive vs non-productive.
You're "Tired of nazi comparisons" when... Musk did two Nazi Salutes! He brought the comparison on by doing a Nazi salute! Twice! You're the one who refuses to see a salute for what it is.
tmnvdb 27 days ago [-]
Yes the case against death camps is not that they are a waste of time symbolic measure with no real world effects.
pc86 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tbossanova 27 days ago [-]
Curious as to how the Nazi salute thing is seen by you? Just a little forgivable misstep?
miltonlost 27 days ago [-]
Probably looks like a good opportunity for a high five!!!
insane_dreamer 27 days ago [-]
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 27 days ago [-]
> 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)
Ah so the morality of censorship depends on exactly who your employer is. Got it.
insane_dreamer 26 days ago [-]
Nope; the OP's argument was that the previous administration did the same thing. Stay on track with the discussion.
IshKebab 26 days ago [-]
I am on track. You've misread. They never said that the previous administration was responsible for the whole `master` thing.
> 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.
TeeMassive 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
wwweb 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
pc86 27 days ago [-]
Please don't admonish people with a 1-hour old throwaway account, especially if you're not even going to say what you think "this" is.
Cornbilly 27 days ago [-]
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.
flir 27 days ago [-]
It's Microsoft. If they were serious they would have, say, refused to sell Office licenses to the worst-offending police departments. Instead they renamed master to main. If it was me (it's not, I'm a pasty white guy) I'd find it condescending. But it's also harmless, and shorter to type. It's not a hill I'm going to die on, and the false equivalency smacks of bad faith.
Cornbilly 27 days ago [-]
I agree. There is no way people being annoying about some possibly inconsiderate naming conventions is the same as malicious actors going out of their way to delete information.
I was just pointing out that the companies that changed terminology due to “wokeness” only did it for a PR. It was never an actual endorsement of progressive politics or whatever these dorks try to sell it as.
flir 27 days ago [-]
Sorry if it came off like I wasn't agreeing. Whatever the progressive equivalent of greenwashing is. That.
mplanchard 27 days ago [-]
In addition to what others have said about the very real effects on the people using these programs, one was mandated by the government, the other was companies being performative. There is a vast difference.
tehjoker 27 days ago [-]
that was really stupid but mostly harmless, this will cause a lot of people to actually suffer
whatthedangit 27 days ago [-]
Welcome to the era of the Conservative Justice Warrior. They're deploying all of the same annoying and repressive tactics that got progressives booted from power with breakneck speed.
wodenokoto 27 days ago [-]
So in your world, rm and mv accomplish the same thing?
whamlastxmas 27 days ago [-]
Removing racistly coded language isn’t ridiculous. There’s a reason we don’t use words like “negro” anymore, too.
pc86 27 days ago [-]
You're completely right. It's a shame that instead of doing that people were worried about terms like "whitelist."
TheOtherHobbes 27 days ago [-]
One is about a set of words which have no practical effect on function, the other is about an unelected apparatchik with questionable foreign links deliberately destroying the administrative and constitutional integrity of a superpower.
It really isn't a both sides situation.
wwweb 27 days ago [-]
Oh sure, this is 100% the same..
zeroonetwothree 23 days ago [-]
Did you also complain when they made these changes in the first place?
kernal 27 days ago [-]
The corollary is that they were very motivated to do so.
tehjoker 27 days ago [-]
i cant imagine having my boss tell me to do this shit. i would quit
freitasm 27 days ago [-]
Some people still need to feed themselves and their families.
But if there was an option, they definitely should.
netsharc 27 days ago [-]
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?
tehjoker 27 days ago [-]
If the people with integrity quit, they have less overall capacity. An alternative is to get your union to be political and strike over this shit. If you don't resist in some capacity, you are just helping them.
blibble 27 days ago [-]
imagine being told to spend a week re-doing builds to rename "master" to "main"
monkeydreams 27 days ago [-]
These are not exactly equal. I'm not saying that I am particularly triggered by such titles (even when they apply to my family history, genealogy, etc) but there are some people who are and accomodating them is not a huge impact.
Changing the names back because you were upset that somone changed them in the first place, with the express knowledge that some people may be affected by this, is a dick move.
One of these moves is a virtue signal, yes, but it has no real impact once completed. This current move from 'main' to 'master' is designed to both virtue signal and to upset/piss people off/etc.
tehjoker 27 days ago [-]
That was stupid, but not evil.
PakistaniDenzel 27 days ago [-]
Everyone had to do the same shit with the master->main thing
SELECT created_at, 'https://github.com/'||repo_name||'/issues/'||number AS url, event_type, actor_login, repo_name, title FROM github_events WHERE match(title, '\\bDEI\\b') ORDER BY created_at DESC
pdimitar 27 days ago [-]
Wait... HOW?!
everybodyknows 27 days ago [-]
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".
trhway 27 days ago [-]
How it was done when GitHub didn't exist yet - my uncle's story about his time in the school in USSR : Children, open the history book at page 54, you see the photo titled "Soviet Marshal, Hero of Revolution ...". Now take the ink bottle and pour the ink over that photo as he is an enemy of the people.
insane_dreamer 27 days ago [-]
It's still that way in China -- I saw high school or college textbooks with pages glued together or removed.
hk1337 27 days ago [-]
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 27 days ago [-]
> 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 27 days ago [-]
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.
moi2388 27 days ago [-]
Good. The racism under the guise of DEI was insane.
notfed 27 days ago [-]
I struggle to connect what's described in this article to preventing racism. Care to explain?
moi2388 27 days ago [-]
In itself not much. But that’s what the executive order to remove DEI is about, and this isa symptom of it.
I think meritocracies are good, and racism in all forms are bad.
latexr 27 days ago [-]
Say there are two kids: little Billy and little Cody.
Billy has been pampered all his life. He was from a rich family who gave him everything, including the best education. He had ample free time to be a kid. He was personally escorted to school on a horse and had private tutors on call. His final grade was 80/100.
Cody lived in the slums. His family barely got money to eat most days. Cody had to work to help support his family but through struggle was still able to attend school. He had to do his homework on the bus. His life was full of hardship and out of necessity he did little else than work and study. His final grade was 79/100.
One day they both apply for the same job. The employer says “Well, grades don’t lie. I’m sorry Cody, but I’ll hire Billy”.
How is that a meritocracy?
The goal of these initiatives is not to give an unfair advantage to other groups, it’s to even the playing field and combat the systemic bias. If you are truly for meritocracies and are able to see past what’s right in front of your nose, you’ll realise the status quo is inherently racist. To live in a true meritocracy you have to mitigate multiple generations of harm.
properpopper 27 days ago [-]
> He was from a rich family who gave him everything, including the best education. He had ample free time to be a kid. He was personally escorted to school on a horse and had private tutors on call.
> His family barely got money to eat most days. Cody had to work to help support his family but through struggle was still able to attend school. He had to do his homework on the bus. His life was full of hardship and out of necessity he did little else than work and study.
Cool narrative building, but this information should not matter for the employer, because that particular employer selects candidates based on grades - I see no issues with it
Your comment is also implies that a kid from a rich family should have higher grades, but it's flawed - who has more motivation to achieve something?
Also between "rich" and "poor" families there are a lot of kids from "medium" families, what about them?
latexr 27 days ago [-]
> but this information should not matter for the employer
Of course it should. And for society too. Because it shows that under very different adversities, the person with significant hurdles was able to reach the same effective level as someone with none. It shows that one of them can overcome problems, while the other you don’t know.
If one sprinter is able to sprint over a clear open field in 20 seconds, and another is able to sprint the same distance in the same time in a muddy swamp, are you really going to argue those are equivalent?
> Your comment is also implies that a kid from a rich family should have higher grades
No, what it says is that it’s easier to achieve a goal when obstacles are removed for you. The grades are a metaphor, it’s an analogy.
> who has more motivation to achieve something?
Motivation isn’t an infinite resource. Every hurdle is a new opportunity for someone to give up because they can’t take it anymore. In case it wasn’t clear, Cody ended up failing anyway.
> Also between "rich" and "poor" families there are a lot of kids from "medium" families, what about them?
Yes, what about them? I made an analogy in a short internet comment to illustrate an idea, no one would have read a dissertation filled with subjective and hard to parse minutiae.
pc86 26 days ago [-]
At the risk of repeating another comment, the problem is that DEI proponents don't care about socio-economic status or family struggles, they care about race and whether or not you're from a "historically marginalized community" for certain specific definitions of "marginalized" and "historically."
If the rich kid was black and the poor kid was white, proponents of DEI would point to the poor kid getting hired as clear-cut evidence of systemic racism against the black kid.
pc86 26 days ago [-]
This presumes the existence of systemic bias in the first place, not to mention the fact that overt racism and sexism is the way to overcome that.
In any DEI conversation you end up with people making convoluted examples like the one you gave. Nobody is getting a job based on a 80 vs. 79 on a single exam. It's farcical. What you end up with at the end of the DEI road is making promotion, hiring, and firing decisions based on immutable characteristics of people. Okay if you really, really think that being a descendant of a slave from 300 years ago puts you at a material disadvantage today, argue to have public services available to verified descendants of slaves regardless of racial identity, and regardless of current socio-economic status.
But DEI doesn't want to help descendants of slaves. It wants to help black and brown people whether they're actually impacted or not, and it wants to avoid helping white and asian people even if they are at a socio-economic or educational disadvantage. You can't tell me with a straight face that a white person who could verify they have family lineage of slaves from the 1700s would be included as a minority in any DEI program. Look at any conversation where newspeak like "white-passing" is used unironically and this blatant racism is on clear display.
latexr 26 days ago [-]
My comment was not an example, it was an analogy. It was purposefully exaggerated to drive a point, and I feel that was quite clear. It’s absurd to call an obviously made up story “farcical”.
What you are doing is conflating my point—which was to illustrate that true merit is more than what you see on the surface—with other conversations you’ve seen somewhere and attacking those. You’re arguing against something, but not any point I made.
pc86 25 days ago [-]
You're completely right that I kind of got off track there and thank you for calling me out on it. But in this comment I think you're conflating merit with potential.
If we're comparing those two hypothetical people, the one with the lower score clearly has more potential as they overcame all those obstacles and did almost as well as the one who had a ton of advantages. But if (and I'm not saying this is an objectively good goal) you want to hire strictly off of merit, you hire the 80 because 80 > 79. If you want to hire on potential, it's a pretty clear choice to hire the 79.
Not every job needs to be 100% merit-focused, but some should. A pretty good, and IMO relevant, example would be basically any job in the national defense / intelligence circles. We should not care what obstacles you had to overcome to get that 79, if someone else got an 80 they're the ones that should be working at the CIA/NSA/whatever.
But there are plenty of jobs where potential is as important or more so than merit. That's part of why there's no such thing as the "two equally qualified candidates" thing that both sides like to use as examples so much.
Jensson 26 days ago [-]
Plot twist: Billy is black and Cody is white, so you want Cody to get double discriminated against here. Which is what we see in reality, poor white men are the least represented in higher studies, even less than poor black men.
latexr 26 days ago [-]
No, not “plot twist”. A meme does not validate an argument. I don’t want anyone to be discriminated against, though it’s telling that’s what you took from it.
The point of the comment is not to argue for discrimination, but to point out there is more to merit than what’s immediately in front of your face.
zeroonetwothree 23 days ago [-]
Consider that you are a shareholder of the employer, or a customer of the employer, or a fellow employee. Wouldn’t you prefer that the employer hire the best candidate for the job regardless of their background?
It’s unfortunate that Cody had a rough life, but it’s not the job of his employer to help his. They aren’t a charity after all.
I also don’t know where racism played into your example at all so it’s weird you bring it up. It seems to be entirely about SES.
fargle 25 days ago [-]
this is baloney.
first, what is "personally escorted to school on a horse" supposed to be? and if he had private tutors, why did he only get 80%? and, regardless of the background, is not 80% still objectively better than 79%?
second, your example is about financial inequality. rich vs. poor. you're trying to paint a picture of a spoiled rich kid vs. a grubby gritty motivated poor kid.
but DEI is about "your color defines your opportunity" not your wealth. well, yes some races/color are over/under represented in rich/poor. but that converse is not necessarily true for individuals - an individual being a particular shade does not imply his privilege.
what happens when Billy is a wealthy minority and Cody is neither? and rich minority Billy got a 65% and Cody got a 95%? do you still give the job to Billy? because in the past people that looked like Cody were evil to people who looked like Billy? we cannot solve inequity by creating more of it.
If you are truly for equality and are able to see past what’s right in front of your nose, you’ll realize life is inherently unfair. But promoting literal racism is not going to make up for multiple generations of harm. by punishing those who had nothing to do with that harm. based on the same racism that led to the harm.
brigandish 26 days ago [-]
> How is that a meritocracy?
Because the person with the better score was chosen.
> The goal of these initiatives is not to give an unfair advantage to other groups, it’s to even the playing field and combat the systemic bias.
If that is the goal then improve the schooling, make it easier to do homework in a better environment etc. Forcing employers through the law to hire people they wouldn’t if given a free choice is not meritocratic nor helpful more generally.
latexr 26 days ago [-]
> Because the person with the better score was chosen.
Merit: the quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward.
Having a high score isn’t on its own meritorious. If two people achieve the same thing but one of them was being propped up while the other was being pushed down, the latter showed more skill.
> If that is the goal then improve the schooling, make it easier to do homework in a better environment etc.
Yes, all of those things should be done too. But when not being handwavey and dismiss, one realises change takes time, must be done in steps, and approached from several angles.
brigandish 26 days ago [-]
The only objective metric given was a score, that is literally merit.
In the simplistic example (necessarily so, that’s not a criticism of it) there is not much more to go on. You can assign merit to doing homework on the bus etc, but the fact is that both those boys went into an exam at the end and one scored more than the other.
I love an underdog but that doesn’t wipe away objectivity either.
daft_pink 27 days ago [-]
Why has hacker news turned into politics central :(
saagarjha 27 days ago [-]
Because software engineers are being asked to perform political decisions.
pc86 26 days ago [-]
Software engineers who work for the federal government are being told (not asked) to follow a lawful executive order from a democratically elected President.
They don't really have a choice in the matter.
miltonlost 26 days ago [-]
"I was just following orders" is not an excuse to most moral people who learn from history. Soldiers cannot commit war crimes because their superior offices tell them to. Federal workers swear an oath on the Constitution to defend it from enemies both foreign and domestic.
pc86 25 days ago [-]
You skipped right over the "lawful executive order" and "democratically elected" parts of my point pretty conveniently, there.
"I was following orders" is not a justification for committing crimes, but "I don't want to" is not a justification for not following lawful orders.
If you have actual reason to believe removing "DEI" from a drop down list on a website is not a lawful order, I would love to hear it. But you don't, which is why you're talking about soldiers and war crimes and trying to frame this as "an enemy...domestic" and not talking about what it is - changing text on websites.
lenkite 26 days ago [-]
Nobody had a problem following orders in the last administration to fire container-ship loads of people.
miltonlost 26 days ago [-]
whatabout whatabout whatabout
leovingi 26 days ago [-]
Being told to remove DEI wording is not comparable to a war crime, please engage in a serious discussion and leave the hysteria at the door.
notfed 27 days ago [-]
Yeah this is really not the right article to complain about such a thing lol
sanderjd 27 days ago [-]
Because of the inauguration a couple weeks ago. That's how it goes. Don't worry, it will settle down.
And also: There are an unusually larger number of actual HN angles going on in this particular new administration. This article is clearly relevant to this forum, and so is the recent Wired article about the DOGE employees.
Fraterkes 27 days ago [-]
Because it is part of the world
jefurii 27 days ago [-]
You could've just skipped over this page, but you're here commenting. Just sayin'
daft_pink 27 days ago [-]
it's cause my rss reader has like 10 articles about trump today from hn.... most of them flagged though.
latexr 27 days ago [-]
Because tech bros and companies keep shoving themselves into politics. You’re complaining at the wrong end.
throw10920 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
afpx 27 days ago [-]
Should have been here 4, 8, 12, and 16 years ago.
LorenzoGood 27 days ago [-]
src/migrations/20250122205314-definitionally-dirty-work.js Is funny.
It would be interesting to see folks align on new words to mean the same thing.
tehjoker 27 days ago [-]
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
mikrotikker 26 days ago [-]
Such people were already banned from Reddit for thought crimes
wwweb 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
sweeter 27 days ago [-]
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.
pizzafeelsright 27 days ago [-]
I can support a diverse (young) and diverse (unknown, hired from the outside) team.
If the database is so insecure that anyone from Texas can just walk in, I would hope we find a way to secure our data.
I would assume a full audit is taking place. If not then demand it. We cannot allow people to spend our taxes without oversight.
pc86 26 days ago [-]
Please don't lump accessibility in with DEI. Accessibility is a noble goal that most everybody agrees with. DEI is, at best, an extremely divisive thing that millions of people disagree with and voted against.
Lumping them together is an attempt to save DEI by attaching it to A when they have nothing to do with each other. DEI is very new and A has been around for quite a long time at this point.
tdeck 26 days ago [-]
This is only true if you ignore everything about the history and present of the movement for accessibility and disability rights.
pc86 25 days ago [-]
It would have taken you just a few more seconds to actually explain how this is the case.
Here's a thought: laid-off tech workers should encript every database and hold the keys for ransom. Or just until these jokers are nullified.
pc86 26 days ago [-]
Is "Here's a thought: commit crimes" really the thing you're trying to say here? What exactly does "nullified" mean in this context?
tdeck 26 days ago [-]
That would probably cause the kind of chaos the administration is trying to create in order to justify shutting down and privatizing these agencies.
skywhopper 27 days ago [-]
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 27 days ago [-]
> 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 27 days ago [-]
“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.
tbrownaw 27 days ago [-]
> “Cancel culture” as a distinct novel thing doesn't exist
Remember that something being a culture is about pervasiveness and normalization. It's not a mob harassing your employer because you posted photos with the wrong brand of political attire; it's it being culturally acceptable for a mob to harass your employer because you posted photos with the wrong brand of political attire.
Sure people protesting things is old, like you say. As are groups deciding to not associate with certain people.
But that is not in fact the same a nominally-impartial authorities encouraging protests for the purpose of having an excuse to impose a hecklers' veto on things they don't like.
And it is not the same as targeted harassment of anyone outside the ostracising group who doesn't bow to their demands.
dragonwriter 27 days ago [-]
> Remember that something being a culture is about pervasiveness and normalization. It's not a mob harassing your employer because you posted photos with the wrong brand of political attire; it's it being culturally acceptable for a mob to harass your employer because you posted photos with the wrong brand of political attire.
And, and that's been true forever; in fact what is attributed to cancel culture is mild compared to what has been socially acceptable within living memory for displays of political wrongthink, what changed is that that comparatively mild social consequence became acceptable against the side which had previously only been the giver but not receiver of socially acceptable consequence for noncompliance with their norms.
tshaddox 27 days ago [-]
It exists in the same sense that "pie attack culture" exists. Some people certainly have been pied in the face, so how could you deny that "pie attack culture" exists?
tbrownaw 27 days ago [-]
> Some people certainly have been pied in the face, so how could you deny that "pie attack culture" exists?
By not being obtuse enough to conflate "this has happened at least once" with "this appears to be widely considered culturally acceptable".
IshKebab 27 days ago [-]
"Culture" means that it has become common and normalised. If there was a big uptick in pie attacks then sure, but there hasn't.
pjc50 27 days ago [-]
The word got used to mean everything from "complaining about a bystander using a rude word on twitter" to "finally prosecuting somebody after enough credible rape allegations went public".
thrwthsnw 27 days ago [-]
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 27 days ago [-]
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 27 days ago [-]
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.
dragonwriter 27 days ago [-]
> the DEI movement.
"DEI" is not a movement, it is just a rebranding of Affirmative Action to emphasize the goals and break the association with (long explicitliy illegal, but often popularly associated with Affirmative Action) quota systems.
tbrownaw 27 days ago [-]
I don't recall AA coming with affinity groups and explicit celebration and centering of differences.
cantstopmenow 27 days ago [-]
How much of that accompanied foreign dissolution of Congressionally-mandated institutions?
azernik 27 days ago [-]
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"?
tdeck 26 days ago [-]
It's almost like the "free speech warriors" were never being intellectually honest or actually making good faith arguments, but instead pretending to make arguments in order to frustrate, irritate, distract, and waste people's time.
belter 27 days ago [-]
"..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)
27 days ago [-]
FrustratedMonky 27 days ago [-]
Seems like there are more important things to do than code clean up
lucasyvas 27 days ago [-]
Indeed - doesn’t seem very “Efficiency” based does it.
idunnoman1222 27 days ago [-]
Well, it went too far in one direction and now it’s gonna go too far and the other direction and I guess the only people we have to blame and the only ones who care are the ones who cared
stevetron 27 days ago [-]
What I don't seem to understand, and I haven't found anything about, is this: How did Elon Musk and his staff obtain log-in credentials to the databases? Or log-in credentials for anything, especially given that the people in-charge were not willing to cooperate? And after all this purging is done, can't the databases be re-loaded from the backup-tapes?
BryantD 27 days ago [-]
It's sort of hard to piece it together because there's not a ton of transparency about what's going on. However, there have been a number of well-sourced stories on access at the Treasury Department. David Lebryk, who previously oversaw the payments system, was placed on administrative leave after refusing to cooperate. It only takes one person to say yes.
And reloading databases isn't simple if you have to account for legitimate changes that have occurred post-backup. Given that we're talking about some of the core software that runs our government, I'd be extremely nervous about the whole thing.
simonw 27 days ago [-]
This particular story isn't about Elon's team - the PR is authored by the regular project maintainers, presumably in response to the executive orders that are flying around right now.
skywhopper 27 days ago [-]
The “people in charge” ie career government employees who refused to comply were walked out by security and fired. The political “people in charge” are lackeys of Trump and Musk, and they’re the ones who insisted on handing over the credentials.
redcobra762 27 days ago [-]
Probably some version of this (with threats instead of drugs): https://xkcd.com/538/
wwweb 27 days ago [-]
The new Treasury Secretary gave them to him. Or Trump did. It's not complicated, it's just a coup.
AlgorithmicTime 27 days ago [-]
[dead]
bsimpson 27 days ago [-]
I'm sure how the government functions on a technological level qualifies for "things hackers might find interesting," but the comments on these Trump/DOGE-reactionary threads are really disappointing. Too many of them are just signaling the author's ideological affiliations without adding anything substantive/curiosity-inspiring.
Fraterkes 27 days ago [-]
If someone sharing their view on an issue isn't curiosity-inspiring to you, isn't that mostly
an indication of your own incuriosity
jjkaczor 27 days ago [-]
"Land of the free" != "Forbidden words & phrases".
TimTheTinker 27 days ago [-]
"Forbidden words & phrases" is a pragmatic way to express "how to follow orders at this moment", but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison against worldview-level ideals like "land of the free". One could just as easily say that removing phrases like "final solution" is against freedom -- which it clearly isn't.
throwaway984393 27 days ago [-]
[dead]
zachanderson 27 days ago [-]
[dead]
Devilspawn666 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mehh 27 days ago [-]
> In the UK people were arrested for saying thay all lives mattered.
ahh just seen your account was just created, so wasting my time, but no, no one in the UK was arrested for saying that.
throwaway_2494 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
biddit 27 days ago [-]
You're assessing them with the wrong criteria.
You don't hire architects to execute a demolition and you also don't hire anyone heavily invested in keeping the building standing. But you DO hire people loyal to you to perform the work, who will receive staunch opposition the latter group of people.
throwaway_2494 27 days ago [-]
This is the bit I don't get. Why are there so many people ready to line up to defend the powerful against the weak, the rich against the poor?
What a brave and noble purpose! I'm real proud of people like that...
The richest man on earth in charge of cost cutting. Go and bathe in a jacuzzi of cash Musk, and stop acting like a sore winner...
Hizonner 27 days ago [-]
If you hired Trump's idiots to handle a demolition, they would:
1. Bring the building down on their own heads, with bystanders inside.
2. Destabilize the neighboring buildings to the point where they also had to be demolished.
3. Flood the site and cause a giant gas leak.
dmonitor 27 days ago [-]
4. Use the self-made catastrophe as evidence that more buildings are dangerous and need to be demolished
anigbrowl 27 days ago [-]
It's a mistake to dismiss them all as idiots. MAGA people have very different values from you, and you need to consider the possibility that they are comeptent and malicious.
0x3444ac53 27 days ago [-]
Seconding this. Their reasoning is unsound to the point of comedy, their arguments are nonsense, they have a fundamental misunderstanding of science, technology, society, etc.
Because they don't fucking care. They have an agenda. Sometimes it's rooted in bigotry, religion, or just antisocial beliefs, but they have an agenda and they can (and will, and are) execute it.
cantstopmenow 27 days ago [-]
4. Pat yourself on the back while people complaining about egg prices cheer as their kids die of measles.
cantstopmenow 27 days ago [-]
Cool. Now address the fact that all of this is an unconstitutional coup.
gonzoflip 27 days ago [-]
How is the executive branch directing a department under their authority a coup? Please be specific.
anigbrowl 27 days ago [-]
Because they're simply upending/ignoring Congressional mandates in the form of law. For example, Congress directed the creation of USAID as an independent agency in 1961. It cannot simply be abolished by executive fiat.
Hizonner 27 days ago [-]
Actually in 1961 it was purely an executive thing. I think it was either 1978 or 1998 when Congress put it into statute.
Your link talks about two people being arrested at a protest of 300, presumably for being involved in one of the "minor scuffles" mentioned. Not for saying "All lives matter". Or are you really suggesting that at an "All lives matter" protest these two were the only ones saying it?
n4r9 27 days ago [-]
But are there any cases where someone was arrested for saying all lives matter?
AlexandrB 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
floatrock 27 days ago [-]
Removing categories like "whitelist/blacklist" is trying to create a more inclusive environment where people don't internalize "white = good, black = bad".
Removing categories like "Children/Families affected by systematic discrimination/bias/exclusion" is pretending uncomfortable and unfair realities don't exist.
So sure, superficially both are cases of "some words are naughty", but one of those spreads love, the other denies some people's harsh lived experiences.
Which world do you want to be part of?
lo_zamoyski 27 days ago [-]
> Removing categories like "whitelist/blacklist" is trying to create a more inclusive environment where people don't internalize "white = good, black = bad".
This is preposterously pseudoscientific. Even the dumbest person has a basic a grasp of equivocity. The inability to do so suggests mental illness.
The same person who uses the word "blacklist" is very much capable of preferring the elegance of a black suit or the sleek beauty of a black sports cars or a dark pair of slacks, and dislike white suits and white sports cars or white jeans. He may prefer brunettes over blondes.
According to this reasoning, "Enlightenment" should also be renamed, as the association of "light" with good and "darkness" with evil "exclusives people" (I, too, would rename the Enlightenment, but for much more substantive reasons).
It is insane to think that the use of words like "whitelist" and "blacklist" somehow "excludes" anyone.
insane_dreamer 27 days ago [-]
Whether you like it or not, or whether you think it's insane or not, the words we use are important and impactful in themselves.
floatrock 27 days ago [-]
Suits, sports cars, women, and whatever other precious alpha status symbol you seem to judge your sense of self-worth by and make metaphors with come in all the colors of rainbow, so yeah, of course that's all taste. Whitelist and blacklist is pretty dual. Black-and-white you might say. Maybe there's a third default/unspecified/null/not-quite-binary state.
But seriously, we're a bunch of engineers here... why is this so threatening to your sense of masculinity when "allowlist/denylist" are unambiguously better for no simpler reason than they're declarative?
eatenfill 27 days ago [-]
wtf
lelanthran 27 days ago [-]
> Removing categories like "whitelist/blacklist" is trying to create a more inclusive environment where people don't internalize "white = good, black = bad".
Maybe that was the intention. The result was that it normalised language policing to such an extent that a backlash was inevitable.
Your intentions don't matter when you are banning words. Your actions do.
The road to hell ...
floatrock 26 days ago [-]
Language is fluid and continuously evolving.
imho any decent person will say "Yeah, I see the trouble with blacklist/whitelist", and if they're a techie, they'd also say "Yeah, allowlist/denylist is more descriptive and fits in well."
I think any decent person will also stop short of officially recognizing The 29 Gender Pronouns from this week's trending tiktok and recognize there's a middle ground between wide cultural acceptance and letting people express themselves.
Discrediting any language evolution as calling it the road to hell is just as silly as the (caricature of) the person getting upset at the cashier they've never met before because cashier didn't magically know their preferred 24th Form gender pronoun.
A decent person understands some change is inevitable (especially if there's an uncomfortable historical context with the way things are now) while also moderating the amount of change. Basically, just be a decent, reasonable human who has some empathy for others.
I hope we're not too far off the deep end from being reasonable.
eastbound 27 days ago [-]
Is there even a correlation between removing white-related vocabulary and better performance of black people (removing other biases such as density)? Are you removing white terms by racism against whites, or is it a honest attempt at performing better?
Because honestly it doesn’t feel like the world has improved, seen from Europe, in the 15 last years. Like, not at all.
floatrock 27 days ago [-]
Can we just leave it at "allowlist/denylist is declarative terminology without any attached baggage, and declarative is always better"?
It's like the bathroom fearmongering... don't show your junk to people who don't want to see it, and wash your hands. Just be kind and be a decent human being.
lo_zamoyski 27 days ago [-]
But there is no baggage, and this attempt to police innocuous language based on someone's pet paranoias is bullying.
darknavi 27 days ago [-]
The cronut was invented in 2013, so we have that going for us. Which is nice.
zigglezaggle 27 days ago [-]
Yes.
This change has user facing implications in that it is removing application data and/or functionality.
Your example is that people changed the name of some internal constants and private methods. Nobody notices except the developers.
ncr100 27 days ago [-]
They're the same in the sense that they both are topics around sensitivity of other humans experience. And I feel there are significant differences because while slavery and racism are kind of (1) a settled topic ethically and societally, LGBTQ+ acceptance ( exclusion and insensitivity acts are happening today ) are not "settled" (sadly), given the popular support of openly anti-LGBTQ+ rights by the recently winning USA political regime.
I feel there is significance in the details, especially since this is an area of human sensitivities.
Master and slave and blacklist, and all that are related to historical United States' participation and exploitation of its (now citizen), black population as slaves. There are people today, who are alive who are descendants of people who were enslaved by literally (barf) my American ancestors.
Getting closer to your question, that's a little different I think context wise than a trans person being denied their major life-changing, hopefully freeing identity, assertion by government edict, today.
And it's important to note I'm not a trans person currently. I'm very sloppy with these subjects. I have a concern inhumanity is on the rise amongst humans.
You could argue that removing some of these phrasings went too far, sure, but it came from a good place. We casually use master/slave metaphors for databases; it's not the #1 thing that needs to change but it's a move in the right direction. Again, aside from a slight eye roll, who is hurt or offended by us saying the phrase "master/slave" less?
This attack on anything DEI is meant to terrorize and strike fear into anyone who isn't a straight white male. It's weaponizing decades of progress for marginalized folks into racist dogwhistles.
Additionally, the original changes were optional and grassroots. This is a government directive. They're very different.
arwhatever 27 days ago [-]
I suspect that the place these removals came from was the desire to dictate other's behavior and/or to feel more enlightened than you, masquerading as protecting from hurt or offense, which is not really a very good place.
gkoberger 27 days ago [-]
Would you consider that... some people actually care about making the people around them more comfortable, especially if it comes at exactly zero cost to themselves?
wombatpm 27 days ago [-]
It’s not just an attack on DEI, it’s a return to cultural attitudes that were prevalent in the 1970’s. The new attitude is that anyone who is not a straight white male in any position of any responsibility must be a DEI hire and should be assumed to be incompetent until proven otherwise. All they need now is to bring back the 3 martini lunch and open sexual harassment and my 78 year old father would feel right at home.
dingnuts 27 days ago [-]
master in the sense of a db or branch is not a master/slave metaphor, it's the meaning of master that is an antonym for "copy" or "replica" as when one creates a master from which to form a mold -- the whole issue is based on a linguistic misapprehension
maximilianburke 27 days ago [-]
So then when talking about database replication, why are the non-authoritative servers called slaves?
BenjiWiebe 27 days ago [-]
It really is like slavery, isn't it. The slave database does whatever it's master tells it to, and has no freedom to make up information.
stanleykm 27 days ago [-]
and what about slave?
NoMoreNicksLeft 27 days ago [-]
>Again, aside from a slight eye roll, who is hurt or offended by us saying the phrase "master/slave" less?
If you add up all the discomfort caused by being forced to change vocabulary. The man-hours wasted changing documentation everywhere. The time wasted, re-learning which were words weren't suddenly taboo. Then this is not some small quantity, however you want to quantify it. You basically taxed all of us... and though the tax was perhaps small per person, the total wasn't.
Effort better spent elsewhere. Political capital wasted on nonsense. If you only saw eye rolls, it was because those rolling their eyes knew better than to say anything then. They picked their battles, and now what we see happening right now is a consequence of all that.
>This attack on anything DEI is meant to terrorize and strike fear into anyone who isn't a straight white male.
I'm reminded of the study that said something like 95% of the jobs created in the DEI era went to those who weren't white. Which might make sense if they were only 5% of the population. Thank goodness that the election tally wasn't predicated on that same notion of "fairness".
>It's weaponizing decades of progress
Progress towards what, exactly? And why would I want to progress towards whatever that is? It's only progress if it happens to be the "direction you want to go", but I don't think I want to go in that direction.
gkoberger 27 days ago [-]
"Progress towards what, exactly?"
It wasn't until the 1960s that segregation in public places was made illegal. 1990s that the ADA prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. It wasn't until the 2010s that gay marriage was legalized, and 2020s that it was ruled you can't discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.
It took decades for many marginalized communities to be legally even allowed to have certain jobs due to their gender or color of their skin, and now those qualities are yet again being used to prevent them from employment under the implication that anyone who isn't a straight white male is a DEI hire.
NoMoreNicksLeft 27 days ago [-]
>It wasn't until the 1960s that segregation in public places was made illegal. 1990s that the ADA prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. It wasn't until the 2010s that gay marriage was legalized, and 2020s that it was ruled you can't discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.
All of that sounds wonderful to you, I'm sure. I don't even know what "gender identity" is supposed to mean though... it's one of those shared cultural delusions that is opaque to those who aren't a part of the culture. You believe it to be a real phenomenon because others believe it with you, and you wouldn't really fit in if you didn't. And "gay marriage" is laughably sad. That's your victory of progress? It will be nice to see it all rolled back. Pendulums swing.
WhyIsItAlwaysHN 27 days ago [-]
The year is 2025. You have an internet browser. Look up the concepts you don't understand.
How are you so certain about a phenomenon not existing when you have no idea about it? Do you apply the same filters to everything else you don't understand?
Also be careful with wishing for "progress" to be rolled back. First it's other peoples' freedom to live their lives how they want to and then it's yours.
NoMoreNicksLeft 26 days ago [-]
>Look up the concepts you don't understand.
Looking it up wouldn't help, because these aren't objective phenomenon. They're just nonsense. It'd be like trying to understand what it feels like to be a schizophrenic by reading the wikipedia page. My inability to understand is just a way of framing something for you... to show that, in many ways, we don't even live on the same planet. And I don't want to live on yours. I don't want to become the schizophrenic, so to speak.
>How are you so certain about a phenomenon not existing when
When you're outside of it, it's plainly clear. To the person who isn't a schizophrenic they can be 100% certain that there are no voices to hear. It's not the CIA blocking the mind-waves beamed down from the government satellites... it just doesn't exist. Not that my assertions can convince the crazy guy.
>First it's other peoples' freedom to live their lives how they want to and then it's yours.
If you bothered to reason through that, you'd see it for being false. That must not be true for everyone, even in the imaginary scenarios you have nightmares about. For some, at least, sometimes they really do just stop when they're done doing what they wanted to do, and cross no other lines. I'm pretty confident which side of the line I stand on. Find more sophisticated propaganda, I suppose, is the only advice I have for you.
sanktanglia 27 days ago [-]
Lol what do you define as the "dei era" ? I think if during any timeframe 95% of new hires were non white people would notice. This is the real nonsense
gkoberger 27 days ago [-]
Yeah, the lack of a source makes it clear this is BS.
It's based in a bit of truth. Yes, there were 300,000 jobs created in 2021, and 94% did go to people of color. However, these were non-professional roles (service workers, laborers) that were coming back as COVID died down.
As far as new executive, managerial and professional roles, the share of people of color increased by just 2%.
Does wanting to keep master/slave and white/blacklist while also keeping information and resources for people historically (and to some extent currently) disadvantaged by systematic oppression mean that basically everyone will be mad at me? What do you call this position?
Edit: The Google admin panel won't even populate the "allowlist" when you search whitelist which is frustrating. I'd at least like it to show up, even if it's believed to be important enough to change.
Etheryte 27 days ago [-]
I'm from a group of people that was historically oppressed in slavery, can I keep using master/slave or do you decide that it's offensive for me? Of all the things that are a problem in the world, this is by far one of the weirdest and silliest hills to die on.
kfrzcode 27 days ago [-]
If you're a person you're likely from a group of people that was historically oppressed in slavery. The list of peoples who were not oppressed, historically, is very short. Humans have treated each other horribly for many, many generations.
9283409232 27 days ago [-]
> What do you call this position?
Being reasonable. The master/slave thing is silly.
readthenotes1 27 days ago [-]
To you maybe.
I worked with a woman whose relatives didn't make it out of Auschwitz.
She objected to us initializing System Services.
Silly?
9283409232 27 days ago [-]
Yes.
wvbdmp 27 days ago [-]
Germans are a bit touchy on this. There are a bunch of two-letter or two-digit combinations you can’t have on your license plate, for example. Somemore far-fetched than others. At some place I recently heard about they use two-letter initials (extremely collision prone, but whatever), except for people like Nadja Schmidt.
It’s definitely silly, but otoh I guess all culture is silly…
justsocrateasin 27 days ago [-]
I also had relatives that didn't make it out of Auschwitz. I could not care less.
zer8k 27 days ago [-]
The silliest.
ncr100 27 days ago [-]
Regardless, it would be nicer to keep our improved education so that people do understand the power dynamics implied in certain terms.
Some people living today, working in and around a "git default repo setup" are descendants of slaves.
Would it be better if public education simply discussed power dynamics, inclusion, and sensitivity?
janalsncm 27 days ago [-]
Changing “master” to “main” is exactly the kind of empty symbolic gesture corporate America loves.
If you want to talk about real power dynamics, walk down the street in San Francisco. Visible poverty everywhere, in one of the richest cities on Earth. If you want healthcare, food, shelter, or political representation, you need to pay.
That’s the relevant power dynamic, and because it is so intractable these activists have conceded it and instead resort to virtue signaling (“we can’t change the system but at least we want to!”). Who the hell cares. George Floyd’s problem wasn’t that not enough software engineers were aware of American chattel slavery, his problem was that being poor is effectively illegal.
eej71 27 days ago [-]
There's a chance this is an example of Poe's Law. But I'm unsure!
Edman274 27 days ago [-]
It's pretty obviously sarcastic, but it's interesting because ChatGPT thinks it's sincere. It appears that sarcasm detection is still outside the capabilities of large language models, which is surprising because people have been manually annotating sarcastic remarks on internet forums for the past 30 years. How could it get simpler than that to create a training set?
AlexandrB 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
simonw 27 days ago [-]
I don't understand, what does that have to do with master/slave terminology?
dgfitz 27 days ago [-]
My interpretation of the GP (my personal views on the debate have no bearing) is that the whole master/slave debate meant a whole lot to a few thousand people in one specific country, and absolutely nothing to the rest of the world.
They then go on to mention a term that they find offensive, that seems like it shouldn't be offensive, and imply that under the same rules that master/slave was abandoned, we should abandon the term "equity" as well.
AlexandrB 27 days ago [-]
Admittedly this applies less to master/slave, but certainly applies to terms like whitelist/blacklist.
lo_zamoyski 27 days ago [-]
What do you think communism was ideologically about if not a system of "imposed equity"? In the name of what were people persecuted and killed if not "equality"?
For him, the celebration of these is offensive and excluding.
ncr100 27 days ago [-]
I'm a descendent of a grandmother who, as a child fled the brand new Soviet regime when my great grandpa was being shuffled off to the Gulag on the train in the cold North. I'm sorry that your family died by those same people who shuffled off my great grandpa. Hello.
Is there a problem / disadvantage / critical misleading with using my context as a lens to understand what's the right way to appropriately address unfair power dynamics?
AlexandrB 27 days ago [-]
What I struggle with is this: the rules that govern which words are "problematic" are often arbitrary and based on the US political landscape. These decisions have little to do with how many people were affected globally, yet these rules are broadly applied to (at least) all English-speaking countries.
The linked article wants me to be outraged (or at least upset) that references to equity are being removed from government software. Why should I be? As I mentioned in another comment, some of these tactics are broadly similar to what left-leaning movements did or wanted to do. The positions being taken are often presented as objective and empathic (for example based on historic power imbalances), but power imbalances are dynamic and regional.
LPisGood 27 days ago [-]
>The power dynamics you're talking about are always in the context of North America, specifically the USA
Well that’s where the people are that are having these discussions for the most part. People from other parts of the world would be wise to have their own discussions and ignore the American cultural context of our discussions.
insane_dreamer 27 days ago [-]
equity has nothing to do with communism
mola 27 days ago [-]
How is equity communist?
fourseventy 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
stanleykm 27 days ago [-]
The fact that people who think they are smart blame cultural shifts on a “woke cult” is amazing to me.
cglace 27 days ago [-]
People from the left who think they are smart have names for the people who represent this new cultural shift. It's natural to blame things you don't like on the other "stupid" group.
stanleykm 27 days ago [-]
I think there is plenty of room to critique what this person is calling “woke” terminology but the “warblgarbl woke cult” from the right is just absurd. Hacker News is apparently a place we are supposed to be able to have more technical and higher minded discussions than say Reddit but every time a cultural issue comes up we revert to cave man.
Actually thats not fair to cave men, we revert to reactionary nonsense.
goatlover 27 days ago [-]
The fact that people don't realize the same word can have multiple meanings and not just the meaning it had in some previous century is amazing to me.
stanleykm 27 days ago [-]
well look if people wanted to be able to use the words master and slave all over the place they should have thought about it earlier and not had masters and slaves to start with. i dont know what to tell you.
alxjrvs 27 days ago [-]
Every accusation is a confession from the Red Hat crowd.
bastardoperator 27 days ago [-]
Nope, you can use git symbolic-ref to get the remote default branch.
cdme 27 days ago [-]
Fascist othering in the digital age.
zer8k 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
TylerE 27 days ago [-]
This is _actual, for real, fascism.
TimTheTinker 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
EasyMark 27 days ago [-]
How ignoring the law not fascism? Mandates do not supercede law, nor allow the executive branch to operate outside branches of government that are not under it's control, and yet Congress does nothing, that's is actually how fascism really does start, when what "dear leader" says is acted upon even though it is clearly illegal
TimTheTinker 27 days ago [-]
Which actions that Trump has taken were illegal?
EasyMark 27 days ago [-]
1. closing USAID, he can't do that, it's has to go through Congress
2. Given Musk and minions full access to federal and private records, breaks FISMA and CFAA
3. The "buy out" of employees, violates Administrative Leave Act and Anti-Deficiency Act
4. The Spending Freeze that he backed out of, the one that would have required an Act of Congress
5. his upcoming attempt to end the Department of Education and defund it, without Congressional Laws behind it.
6. Firing inspectors without giving Congress 30 days notice to review the action
I could go on, but I have a feeling it won't matter to those who think he can do no wrong.
dragonwriter 27 days ago [-]
> The Spending Freeze that he backed out of
OMB rescinded the memo, but the freeze appears to have continued (in defiance of a court order against it, which is another level of illegality.)
amarcheschi 27 days ago [-]
Mussolini was elected too
At least, at the beginning
He later had his power gave to him by the king which should have put him under arrest
TimTheTinker 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
amarcheschi 27 days ago [-]
I do not have to wait 4 years, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is most likely a duck.
The fact that he is "governing" through EOs, - many of those will be challenged in court, I guess, but in the meantime they still stand valid - is not being done in a respectful way. An example, regular citizens working for Trump having access to not only read but also write on the federal payment system https://www.crisesnotes.com/day-five-of-the-trump-musk-treas...
Another example - denying multiple times actual science, since the scientist are amongst one of the groups he blames
He's definitely on the way for being a good mussolini 2
TimTheTinker 27 days ago [-]
One of the president's main jobs is to direct how the executive branch is run. That's an authority vested on him by the constitution. So writing EOs directing various executive branches in particular ways (and in ways that aren't contradicting federal law) is entirely within his mandate as the elected president.
What we're witnessing is the weakening (and potential removal) of an effective 4th branch of government (what some call the "deep state"). I don't see that as a bad thing, as structurally speaking, this 4th branch does not govern according to the will of the people, since they are not accountable to the people.
What boggles my mind is this -- Democrats complained for decades about how Congress was ceding its authority to these unelected officials. I grew up in a Democrat family and cheered as Bill Clinton was elected. And now Democrats, who call themselves the "party that defends democracy", are acting as the primary proponents of these unaccountable officials and agencies. Make it make sense.
amarcheschi 27 days ago [-]
Probably the other times they didn't appoint someone so connected with the dark enlightenment ideologies and that spews lies continuously on a media channel he owns. It is important the who, but it is important also the what (as in, what's he/she if appointed for).
Not being American, I can't really comment on what the democrats appointed before musk. However, I do not believe it has happened before to have someone access with write permission the payment system, to access personal sensitive data of federal workers[1], and so many other things I wouldn't even know where to start complaining about
1. Musk wasn't elected.
2. Musk's merry band of misfit incels wasn't elected.
3. Government offices are created by statute, and they're terminated by statute.
My God, you people are exhausting and terrible.
TimTheTinker 27 days ago [-]
As I've said elsewhere, Musk and the Doge employees only have audit power - not executive. There's a very big difference between those types of powers.
Musk is not terminating any executive departments or agencies. Neither is Trump (except perhaps some that are not statutory).
USAID still exists. It clearly wasn't obeying its statutory mandate -- that's what gives Trump the authority to bring its current activities to an end and fire a lot of its employees. It will likely be ended by Congress after what's been revealed, but we'll have to wait and see.
TylerE 27 days ago [-]
> Musk and the Doge employees only have audit power - not executive.
You've said this, but it's obvious that's not what they're doing, and no one is attempting to stop them. Literally unchecked corruption. Musk should be in prison for this - it's very close to treason.
TylerE 27 days ago [-]
Giving their billionaire buddies feee reign on us government systems does
TimTheTinker 27 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mmcwilliams 27 days ago [-]
This doesn't appear to be strictly what is happening. Musk posted on Twitter yesterday that he "deleted" the group 18F. That is neither an examination, a report or a recommendation.
TimTheTinker 27 days ago [-]
I think he's overstating what he's actually doing for political points. The group is not deleted - but he's recommending such an action to Trump.
Yes no one is stepping in to stop him when he is obviously doing quite a bit more than that.
TimTheTinker 27 days ago [-]
> obviously doing quite a bit more than that.
Any examples? Just based on what he and @DOGE have reported, they're basically doing a systematic financial audit. (And Trump is firing those who don't allow the audit to occur.)
Febra33 27 days ago [-]
LMAO. You clearly need to read more about Hitler's rise to power and how he was actually elected. You people really do not understand politics nor democracy.
TimTheTinker 27 days ago [-]
Hitler and Mussolini weren't fascist dictators at first. They became that gradually (though in retrospect, biographers have identified such ambitions early on).
Comparing Trump to those guys 2 weeks in, when Congress and the Supreme Court are very much alive and able to pounce on him, is rather early, no?
CamperBob2 27 days ago [-]
Four years and 2 weeks.
There's sufficient evidence. He has shown us who he is, and what he is.
buttercraft 27 days ago [-]
Uh, if you wait until he's a fascist dictator, it's too late.
sagolikasoppor 27 days ago [-]
So when we have to use main instead of master everyone is fine with it but now it's bad to purge words?
I think this is great news. Well done Trump & co.
kobelb 27 days ago [-]
This is false equivalence. Not using the phrase master was meant to create a more inclusive environment.
Rendered at 02:06:27 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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..)
If this is the case, incepting everyone with the idea in advance subconsciously lowers resistance right now, when nothing can be done, because this is all hypothetical.
And if it isn't the case, you can't be taken seriously.
Simply respond to the moment, in the moment. That is already enough.
Plus remember: he doesn't need to be a dictator, because he won a democratic election. If anything, liberals should be focusing on how to avoid JD Vance simply winning in 2028.
As it stands, the only durable policy win of his term so far was achieved on a bipartisan basis and mostly passed before he even took office: the Laken Riley Act. Why isn't the opposition party acting as opposition?
> If you care about the US remaining a functioning democracy, you should work in whatever way you can toward removing the current administration from power.
The U.S. is already not a functioning democracy (see 2016 and 2020), and removing the current administration from power (illegally?) will not change that.
This constant cycle of ineffective freakouts that America's liberal bloc find themselves in every 4 years is a large part of the reason why Trump won to begin with.
he won because many groups of people were promised exactly what they wanted to hear. majority of america is very dumb. to the point it seems intentional. they reject any attempt to be informed about this subject. people routinely having abortions voted trump. people on SSI voted for trump. unemployed people voted for trump. disabled veterans voted for trump. literal nazis trump -- and i'm not saying HE is one, i'm saying that his campaign made sure they see him as one, and it absolutely worked ... over and over again against many of these groups whom are just frothing for fellow haters
i get really upset trying to figure out how to resolve this. but i can't even talk to the couple of relatives i have who are in this cult. if they detect you aren't praising the leader, things get hostile fast.
But people have the sense -- in some cases rightfully and in some not -- that their lives aren't going great. So they look to someone to offer an opportunity for change. And they're willing -- really primed, by all of American society -- to throw under the bus whatever boogeyman is necessary as dictated by the Fox News monster of the week™
This attitude is another reason he won.
So, relecting a person who has already shown a tendency to want to bend and break rules to stay in office, and is willing to simply ignore laws that aren't convenient is a problem. When that person starts installing sycophants into positions that actually control the military, financial and other fundamental levers of governing it becomes that persons choice, not the people or other democratically elected leaders whether to step down, or for that matter do anything else. The people who founded the USA understood that the president was just a step away from being a king and tried their best to counteract that. But, those people are a hundred and seventy years dead and the country has survived because the people elected to those positions were willing to adhere to the norms of governing, even if they didn't believe in the results.
So, I don't think anyone with any critical reasoning skills who has paid even the slightest attention over the past 12+ years believes that to be true of Trump or many of the people he is surrounding himself with this time. The McMasters who say "no you can't do that its illegal" are gone and daily any remaining resistance is being removed. Frankly at this point even if Trump steps down after 4 years. The Senators who have allowed it to progress this far have repeatedly abdicated their fundamental duty and are unfit for office (and that is putting it mildly).
If you can cut off funding to congressionally appropriate USAID programs, its just a likely you can cut off funding to the military unit that won't kiss the ring.
Since WW2 we have had a growing unelected federal bureaucracy (staffed by college graduates more and more left-leaning), that is controlled by congress as you mentioned. Congress is run by seniority, most are re-elected every year and are elected along party lines without much thought. And most legislation is written by lobbyists and activists. People are apathetic about congress, there is not much democracy there. People care much more about the presidential election.
I think if you look at the actions of our federal government over past decades you will see it has not been very good for the health of the American people. I think any action by a president to take back some power from Congress to upend that order is a good thing. Throughout our history certain presidents have completely changed the federal government during their terms in office, and afterwards the title goes back to more complacent presidents. Over time systems decay and you may need to start with something new.
Is this a true statement or not?
He was elected President, not king. The laws being broken applied to all previous election winners.
It may turn out to be ironic that you describe Trump and our Monarch (or any other) within the same breath.
Please recall (or look up) what happened to Charles I of England.
Histerioinics and history are not associated with the same word.
Grow up.
Once you find the quote, go onto politco (a not exactly pro-trump site) fact-checking service to get the full context.
Here from his own mouth https://youtube.com/shorts/DpVsZZtEpS8?feature=shared
And a proposed amendment to go with it, excluding Obama of course https://ogles.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-ogles-propo...
It has practically zero support and has an actual zero chance of being ratified.
So did Hitler.
He didn't "realize" anything. All of the show we're seeing was planned posturing and "deal-making by leverage". We shouldn't be accepting even talking about the US annexing Greenland FFS - but here we are, with credible proposals for installing new US military presence on Greenland being discussed. That's alarming.
> 4 years.
Bold of you to assume there will be elections in four years, that these elections will be anywhere close to fair, or that the people who voted for the 47th won't just vote for him (or his successor, assuming the 47th goes six-feet-under) again.
The parties in power failed to unwind any of this so instead they got an unhinged strongman who promised to do it with a sledgehammer. Trump is a symptom rather than a cause.
... and will do just the opposite of what he promised and they were hoping for. Recent news about how scientific grants are being retroactively reviewed for any signs of "woke" language - if that isn't a vast expansion of governmental authoritarian powers, I seriously don't know what is.
Genuine question: why? Expansionism may be out of style, but I don't see how it's inherently evil.
Any society IMHO has the right to self-determination and self-sovereignty, as long as they adhere to at least the minimum standards of civilized societies aka UDHR - and the governments of those that don't even pay lip service to it should be fair game for everyone else to depose, we've seen the horrors of Syria, the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the genocides of Russia (against Ukrainians), Myanmar and China (Uyghurs and Tibetans) or the kleptocracy that was Gaza under Hamas, enough is enough and someone has to at least enforce the basic laws of humanity.
In the end, the people of Greenland should be the ones that have the say about what happens to their country, not the Americans, and for all I care the question if Denmark should have authority over Greenland should be seriously reconsidered as well given the atrocities of the last decades - among others, kidnapping children and forcibly sterilizing women [1].
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/greenland-denmark-relations-scandals/a...
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.
He isn't. Even absent any impact that catching covid may have had on his body, he's visibly obese. More detailed reports on his health are hard to come by thanks to (a) that being private, and (b) the extremely noisy people who either want to demonise or deify him, but it's not unreasonable to think he's got a 25% chance of old age catching up with him fatally by the end of this term.
But if the term limits get scrapped, I wouldn't be surprised to see a return of Bush or Obama as alternatives. Or Bill Clinton. Bill, George, and Donald were all born in 1946.
(1946 was also the same year the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council started meeting. Coincidence, or the secret world government? Coincidence, obviously).
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...
Where do I put money on the MAGA-Nazis pulling a Putin on future elections? I suppose Putin isn't the first one to do rigged elections, somehow he's the only one currently in my mind.
Sadly Wikipedia doesn't have an article entitled "List of Rigged Elections"...
But ooh yeah, 3 out of 9 are clean, so there's a chance? Let's just ignore the 6 incompetent apparatchiks and "simple majority rule" shall we?
Don't be so obtuse, we know you're not that stupid.
If I consider all the ones who voted for Presidential immunity corrupt does that make me a shill? It's a decision with no constitutional basis (the constitution grants no presidential immunity, but does grant other immunities, implying if it was intended it'd be in there) and ahistorical (we can find plenty of examples of presidents assuming they or their predecessor could be prosecuted).
That still leaves us in the same place a Supreme Court where the majority is beholden to the current President, not the constitution.
"The judicial branch is bought and paid for" is a ridiculous shill thing to say because 1) it assumes that smart, well-educated, successful people only believe a thing because of corruption. 2) it obviates the need to address any of the other side's claims on their merits, because they're just corrupt so who cares. 3) it sets up your side as the victors-by-default, because the other corrupt and you hate everything the other side does so by definition you're Good. It used to be a common refrain of the right when most judges and justices and most courts were left-of-center. But now that federal circuit courts are evenly split between R-appointed and D-appointed justices, and SCOTUS has more Republican appointees than Democratic, the judiciary is farcical.
"This is a hallowed, storied institution just so long as it does things I like, and a corrupt oligarchy when it doesn't" is the very definition of shill.
Sure, typical whatever-you-are tactic of changing the topic when being attacked. Plus some "Won't somebody think of the site's rules?!".
2. 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.
The former may annoy some folks until they standardize or figure out a way to tag the repos. The latter is actively aiming to be detrimental to people in a large way, and unless stopped, will very likely succeed in that goal.
(This is of course irrelevant to the topic of the top-level post.)
Sure, I know the etymology doesn't go to what it sounds like, but even without any culture war stuff — and this is very mild, I view "not using 'master'" in this context as "being polite" — even without culture war stuff, what you're whinging about was already something people had to handle.
You already had the problem you're whinging about, even without any culture war.
And I really do mean it when I say you are 'whinging' here: of all the things people in software have to deal with, what something is called is among the more trivial.
A policy that strips people of money, even with good reason, is much more disruptive than "what's this called?", that you call this "bullshit" and *this* is your comparison? It's like a posh person in WW1 saying that their caviar being rationed is more important than the troops getting winter jackets.
He barely survived and today, I think 10 years later, he still suffers from severe migraines and doesn't have movement in half his body.
And I wouldn't blame you if you didn't believe me. I sometimes also don't believe this happened, that that was just a bad dream. That we actually need laws to prevent people from killing each other just because.
Usually you're switching from a feature branch back to main or master anyway.
... and the git changes were allowed to happen on a sane schedule.
Oh, and most of the people or projects affected by the git change got a choice.
The buck didn't stop with that useless piece of wokeism that, oh so curiously, didn't go after master degrees.
The funniest thing when red is in power instead of blue is how all the blue people pretend their crap was good and the crap of red is bad and how it's not about the action but about who does it.
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.
This comments section seem to be full of the "Fuck Woke DEI" Maganazis and mentioning "systemic racism" will trigger them, but if you're still reading, look at George Floyd, in an alternate world, he'd be a wealthy person descendant of landowners, but in this reality, his grandparents' land was stolen, he grew up poor (and black) and ended up being yet another black-murdered-by-cop figure: https://dwkcommentaries.com/2020/10/08/a-moving-biography-of... . But snowflakes get triggered if there's an idea of better treatment for descendants of victims of systemic racism (another snowflake trigger word).
To the snowflakes: Hey, why care about all that, your continued violence has won you the ethno-supremacy fascism you wanted, where being white and incompetent doesn't matter, because you'll get that cushy job anyway!
You are part of the problem. Yes. You.
An example might be jobs postings, in computer science the tone used for the post might discourage more women to apply than man. Having a process to ensure this doesn't happen results in more women applying, but more men as well, the increase is just less than woman in %
I also not see an issue with changing a word that has a bleak history with one that hasn't, it doesn't remove anything from people
I will be very blunt. You are simply wrong. Not just inaccurate, but wrong. Not technically wrong, but wrong. If it removes word, it removes something. And since "something" is far, far removed from 'not anything'. You are factually wrong. As in, you cannot get more wrong than you just did. Fucking QED.
In this case, the engineers are changing the functionality of the product, not just changing code identifiers.
You can't ignore the policy aims when determining what is "productive" as productivity is directly to the end result. It's WORSE that this is productive vs non-productive.
You're "Tired of nazi comparisons" when... Musk did two Nazi Salutes! He brought the comparison on by doing a Nazi salute! Twice! You're the one who refuses to see a salute for what it is.
2) False equivalency.
Uhm, yes. Yes they were.
Here's one example:
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/09/renaming-whi...
> 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.
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.
I was just pointing out that the companies that changed terminology due to “wokeness” only did it for a PR. It was never an actual endorsement of progressive politics or whatever these dorks try to sell it as.
It really isn't a both sides situation.
But if there was an option, they definitely should.
Gas chambers when?
Changing the names back because you were upset that somone changed them in the first place, with the express knowledge that some people may be affected by this, is a dick move.
One of these moves is a virtue signal, yes, but it has no real impact once completed. This current move from 'main' to 'master' is designed to both virtue signal and to upset/piss people off/etc.
The SQL query:
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".
Also, looks like they're adding a deletedAt field and soft deleting items in the database rather than hard delete.
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.
I think meritocracies are good, and racism in all forms are bad.
Billy has been pampered all his life. He was from a rich family who gave him everything, including the best education. He had ample free time to be a kid. He was personally escorted to school on a horse and had private tutors on call. His final grade was 80/100.
Cody lived in the slums. His family barely got money to eat most days. Cody had to work to help support his family but through struggle was still able to attend school. He had to do his homework on the bus. His life was full of hardship and out of necessity he did little else than work and study. His final grade was 79/100.
One day they both apply for the same job. The employer says “Well, grades don’t lie. I’m sorry Cody, but I’ll hire Billy”.
How is that a meritocracy?
The goal of these initiatives is not to give an unfair advantage to other groups, it’s to even the playing field and combat the systemic bias. If you are truly for meritocracies and are able to see past what’s right in front of your nose, you’ll realise the status quo is inherently racist. To live in a true meritocracy you have to mitigate multiple generations of harm.
> His family barely got money to eat most days. Cody had to work to help support his family but through struggle was still able to attend school. He had to do his homework on the bus. His life was full of hardship and out of necessity he did little else than work and study.
Cool narrative building, but this information should not matter for the employer, because that particular employer selects candidates based on grades - I see no issues with it
Your comment is also implies that a kid from a rich family should have higher grades, but it's flawed - who has more motivation to achieve something?
Also between "rich" and "poor" families there are a lot of kids from "medium" families, what about them?
Of course it should. And for society too. Because it shows that under very different adversities, the person with significant hurdles was able to reach the same effective level as someone with none. It shows that one of them can overcome problems, while the other you don’t know.
If one sprinter is able to sprint over a clear open field in 20 seconds, and another is able to sprint the same distance in the same time in a muddy swamp, are you really going to argue those are equivalent?
> Your comment is also implies that a kid from a rich family should have higher grades
No, what it says is that it’s easier to achieve a goal when obstacles are removed for you. The grades are a metaphor, it’s an analogy.
> who has more motivation to achieve something?
Motivation isn’t an infinite resource. Every hurdle is a new opportunity for someone to give up because they can’t take it anymore. In case it wasn’t clear, Cody ended up failing anyway.
> Also between "rich" and "poor" families there are a lot of kids from "medium" families, what about them?
Yes, what about them? I made an analogy in a short internet comment to illustrate an idea, no one would have read a dissertation filled with subjective and hard to parse minutiae.
If the rich kid was black and the poor kid was white, proponents of DEI would point to the poor kid getting hired as clear-cut evidence of systemic racism against the black kid.
In any DEI conversation you end up with people making convoluted examples like the one you gave. Nobody is getting a job based on a 80 vs. 79 on a single exam. It's farcical. What you end up with at the end of the DEI road is making promotion, hiring, and firing decisions based on immutable characteristics of people. Okay if you really, really think that being a descendant of a slave from 300 years ago puts you at a material disadvantage today, argue to have public services available to verified descendants of slaves regardless of racial identity, and regardless of current socio-economic status.
But DEI doesn't want to help descendants of slaves. It wants to help black and brown people whether they're actually impacted or not, and it wants to avoid helping white and asian people even if they are at a socio-economic or educational disadvantage. You can't tell me with a straight face that a white person who could verify they have family lineage of slaves from the 1700s would be included as a minority in any DEI program. Look at any conversation where newspeak like "white-passing" is used unironically and this blatant racism is on clear display.
What you are doing is conflating my point—which was to illustrate that true merit is more than what you see on the surface—with other conversations you’ve seen somewhere and attacking those. You’re arguing against something, but not any point I made.
If we're comparing those two hypothetical people, the one with the lower score clearly has more potential as they overcame all those obstacles and did almost as well as the one who had a ton of advantages. But if (and I'm not saying this is an objectively good goal) you want to hire strictly off of merit, you hire the 80 because 80 > 79. If you want to hire on potential, it's a pretty clear choice to hire the 79.
Not every job needs to be 100% merit-focused, but some should. A pretty good, and IMO relevant, example would be basically any job in the national defense / intelligence circles. We should not care what obstacles you had to overcome to get that 79, if someone else got an 80 they're the ones that should be working at the CIA/NSA/whatever.
But there are plenty of jobs where potential is as important or more so than merit. That's part of why there's no such thing as the "two equally qualified candidates" thing that both sides like to use as examples so much.
The point of the comment is not to argue for discrimination, but to point out there is more to merit than what’s immediately in front of your face.
It’s unfortunate that Cody had a rough life, but it’s not the job of his employer to help his. They aren’t a charity after all.
I also don’t know where racism played into your example at all so it’s weird you bring it up. It seems to be entirely about SES.
first, what is "personally escorted to school on a horse" supposed to be? and if he had private tutors, why did he only get 80%? and, regardless of the background, is not 80% still objectively better than 79%?
second, your example is about financial inequality. rich vs. poor. you're trying to paint a picture of a spoiled rich kid vs. a grubby gritty motivated poor kid.
but DEI is about "your color defines your opportunity" not your wealth. well, yes some races/color are over/under represented in rich/poor. but that converse is not necessarily true for individuals - an individual being a particular shade does not imply his privilege.
what happens when Billy is a wealthy minority and Cody is neither? and rich minority Billy got a 65% and Cody got a 95%? do you still give the job to Billy? because in the past people that looked like Cody were evil to people who looked like Billy? we cannot solve inequity by creating more of it.
If you are truly for equality and are able to see past what’s right in front of your nose, you’ll realize life is inherently unfair. But promoting literal racism is not going to make up for multiple generations of harm. by punishing those who had nothing to do with that harm. based on the same racism that led to the harm.
Because the person with the better score was chosen.
> The goal of these initiatives is not to give an unfair advantage to other groups, it’s to even the playing field and combat the systemic bias.
If that is the goal then improve the schooling, make it easier to do homework in a better environment etc. Forcing employers through the law to hire people they wouldn’t if given a free choice is not meritocratic nor helpful more generally.
Merit: the quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward.
Having a high score isn’t on its own meritorious. If two people achieve the same thing but one of them was being propped up while the other was being pushed down, the latter showed more skill.
> If that is the goal then improve the schooling, make it easier to do homework in a better environment etc.
Yes, all of those things should be done too. But when not being handwavey and dismiss, one realises change takes time, must be done in steps, and approached from several angles.
In the simplistic example (necessarily so, that’s not a criticism of it) there is not much more to go on. You can assign merit to doing homework on the bus etc, but the fact is that both those boys went into an exam at the end and one scored more than the other.
I love an underdog but that doesn’t wipe away objectivity either.
They don't really have a choice in the matter.
"I was following orders" is not a justification for committing crimes, but "I don't want to" is not a justification for not following lawful orders.
If you have actual reason to believe removing "DEI" from a drop down list on a website is not a lawful order, I would love to hear it. But you don't, which is why you're talking about soldiers and war crimes and trying to frame this as "an enemy...domestic" and not talking about what it is - changing text on websites.
And also: There are an unusually larger number of actual HN angles going on in this particular new administration. This article is clearly relevant to this forum, and so is the recent Wired article about the DOGE employees.
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.
If the database is so insecure that anyone from Texas can just walk in, I would hope we find a way to secure our data.
I would assume a full audit is taking place. If not then demand it. We cannot allow people to spend our taxes without oversight.
Lumping them together is an attempt to save DEI by attaching it to A when they have nothing to do with each other. DEI is very new and A has been around for quite a long time at this point.
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?
Remember that something being a culture is about pervasiveness and normalization. It's not a mob harassing your employer because you posted photos with the wrong brand of political attire; it's it being culturally acceptable for a mob to harass your employer because you posted photos with the wrong brand of political attire.
Sure people protesting things is old, like you say. As are groups deciding to not associate with certain people.
But that is not in fact the same a nominally-impartial authorities encouraging protests for the purpose of having an excuse to impose a hecklers' veto on things they don't like.
And it is not the same as targeted harassment of anyone outside the ostracising group who doesn't bow to their demands.
And, and that's been true forever; in fact what is attributed to cancel culture is mild compared to what has been socially acceptable within living memory for displays of political wrongthink, what changed is that that comparatively mild social consequence became acceptable against the side which had previously only been the giver but not receiver of socially acceptable consequence for noncompliance with their norms.
By not being obtuse enough to conflate "this has happened at least once" with "this appears to be widely considered culturally acceptable".
"DEI" is not a movement, it is just a rebranding of Affirmative Action to emphasize the goals and break the association with (long explicitliy illegal, but often popularly associated with Affirmative Action) quota systems.
And reloading databases isn't simple if you have to account for legitimate changes that have occurred post-backup. Given that we're talking about some of the core software that runs our government, I'd be extremely nervous about the whole thing.
ahh just seen your account was just created, so wasting my time, but no, no one in the UK was arrested for saying that.
You don't hire architects to execute a demolition and you also don't hire anyone heavily invested in keeping the building standing. But you DO hire people loyal to you to perform the work, who will receive staunch opposition the latter group of people.
What a brave and noble purpose! I'm real proud of people like that...
The richest man on earth in charge of cost cutting. Go and bathe in a jacuzzi of cash Musk, and stop acting like a sore winner...
1. Bring the building down on their own heads, with bystanders inside.
2. Destabilize the neighboring buildings to the point where they also had to be demolished.
3. Flood the site and cause a giant gas leak.
Because they don't fucking care. They have an agenda. Sometimes it's rooted in bigotry, religion, or just antisocial beliefs, but they have an agenda and they can (and will, and are) execute it.
Sadly one of the references in that paragraph is a dead link now, because it references the USAID website which has been taken offline.
That doesn't seem to have happened, it looks like Rubio is now in charge of it. So again, how is this a coup?
Was always so, even back on the TV show.
You need to have a think about how you were convinced of that, and who told you it. because it isn’t true.
Any reference for that? And why start out the t's?
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...
Removing categories like "Children/Families affected by systematic discrimination/bias/exclusion" is pretending uncomfortable and unfair realities don't exist.
So sure, superficially both are cases of "some words are naughty", but one of those spreads love, the other denies some people's harsh lived experiences.
Which world do you want to be part of?
This is preposterously pseudoscientific. Even the dumbest person has a basic a grasp of equivocity. The inability to do so suggests mental illness.
The same person who uses the word "blacklist" is very much capable of preferring the elegance of a black suit or the sleek beauty of a black sports cars or a dark pair of slacks, and dislike white suits and white sports cars or white jeans. He may prefer brunettes over blondes.
According to this reasoning, "Enlightenment" should also be renamed, as the association of "light" with good and "darkness" with evil "exclusives people" (I, too, would rename the Enlightenment, but for much more substantive reasons).
It is insane to think that the use of words like "whitelist" and "blacklist" somehow "excludes" anyone.
But seriously, we're a bunch of engineers here... why is this so threatening to your sense of masculinity when "allowlist/denylist" are unambiguously better for no simpler reason than they're declarative?
Maybe that was the intention. The result was that it normalised language policing to such an extent that a backlash was inevitable.
Your intentions don't matter when you are banning words. Your actions do.
The road to hell ...
imho any decent person will say "Yeah, I see the trouble with blacklist/whitelist", and if they're a techie, they'd also say "Yeah, allowlist/denylist is more descriptive and fits in well."
I think any decent person will also stop short of officially recognizing The 29 Gender Pronouns from this week's trending tiktok and recognize there's a middle ground between wide cultural acceptance and letting people express themselves.
Discrediting any language evolution as calling it the road to hell is just as silly as the (caricature of) the person getting upset at the cashier they've never met before because cashier didn't magically know their preferred 24th Form gender pronoun.
A decent person understands some change is inevitable (especially if there's an uncomfortable historical context with the way things are now) while also moderating the amount of change. Basically, just be a decent, reasonable human who has some empathy for others.
I hope we're not too far off the deep end from being reasonable.
Because honestly it doesn’t feel like the world has improved, seen from Europe, in the 15 last years. Like, not at all.
It's like the bathroom fearmongering... don't show your junk to people who don't want to see it, and wash your hands. Just be kind and be a decent human being.
This change has user facing implications in that it is removing application data and/or functionality.
Your example is that people changed the name of some internal constants and private methods. Nobody notices except the developers.
I feel there is significance in the details, especially since this is an area of human sensitivities.
Master and slave and blacklist, and all that are related to historical United States' participation and exploitation of its (now citizen), black population as slaves. There are people today, who are alive who are descendants of people who were enslaved by literally (barf) my American ancestors.
Getting closer to your question, that's a little different I think context wise than a trans person being denied their major life-changing, hopefully freeing identity, assertion by government edict, today.
And it's important to note I'm not a trans person currently. I'm very sloppy with these subjects. I have a concern inhumanity is on the rise amongst humans.
(1) "Kind Of Settled [that Racism is bad]" - https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6112317/2025/02/04/nfl-end-... - :-(
You could argue that removing some of these phrasings went too far, sure, but it came from a good place. We casually use master/slave metaphors for databases; it's not the #1 thing that needs to change but it's a move in the right direction. Again, aside from a slight eye roll, who is hurt or offended by us saying the phrase "master/slave" less?
This attack on anything DEI is meant to terrorize and strike fear into anyone who isn't a straight white male. It's weaponizing decades of progress for marginalized folks into racist dogwhistles.
Additionally, the original changes were optional and grassroots. This is a government directive. They're very different.
If you add up all the discomfort caused by being forced to change vocabulary. The man-hours wasted changing documentation everywhere. The time wasted, re-learning which were words weren't suddenly taboo. Then this is not some small quantity, however you want to quantify it. You basically taxed all of us... and though the tax was perhaps small per person, the total wasn't.
Effort better spent elsewhere. Political capital wasted on nonsense. If you only saw eye rolls, it was because those rolling their eyes knew better than to say anything then. They picked their battles, and now what we see happening right now is a consequence of all that.
>This attack on anything DEI is meant to terrorize and strike fear into anyone who isn't a straight white male.
I'm reminded of the study that said something like 95% of the jobs created in the DEI era went to those who weren't white. Which might make sense if they were only 5% of the population. Thank goodness that the election tally wasn't predicated on that same notion of "fairness".
>It's weaponizing decades of progress
Progress towards what, exactly? And why would I want to progress towards whatever that is? It's only progress if it happens to be the "direction you want to go", but I don't think I want to go in that direction.
It wasn't until the 1960s that segregation in public places was made illegal. 1990s that the ADA prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. It wasn't until the 2010s that gay marriage was legalized, and 2020s that it was ruled you can't discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.
It took decades for many marginalized communities to be legally even allowed to have certain jobs due to their gender or color of their skin, and now those qualities are yet again being used to prevent them from employment under the implication that anyone who isn't a straight white male is a DEI hire.
All of that sounds wonderful to you, I'm sure. I don't even know what "gender identity" is supposed to mean though... it's one of those shared cultural delusions that is opaque to those who aren't a part of the culture. You believe it to be a real phenomenon because others believe it with you, and you wouldn't really fit in if you didn't. And "gay marriage" is laughably sad. That's your victory of progress? It will be nice to see it all rolled back. Pendulums swing.
How are you so certain about a phenomenon not existing when you have no idea about it? Do you apply the same filters to everything else you don't understand?
Also be careful with wishing for "progress" to be rolled back. First it's other peoples' freedom to live their lives how they want to and then it's yours.
Looking it up wouldn't help, because these aren't objective phenomenon. They're just nonsense. It'd be like trying to understand what it feels like to be a schizophrenic by reading the wikipedia page. My inability to understand is just a way of framing something for you... to show that, in many ways, we don't even live on the same planet. And I don't want to live on yours. I don't want to become the schizophrenic, so to speak.
>How are you so certain about a phenomenon not existing when
When you're outside of it, it's plainly clear. To the person who isn't a schizophrenic they can be 100% certain that there are no voices to hear. It's not the CIA blocking the mind-waves beamed down from the government satellites... it just doesn't exist. Not that my assertions can convince the crazy guy.
>First it's other peoples' freedom to live their lives how they want to and then it's yours.
If you bothered to reason through that, you'd see it for being false. That must not be true for everyone, even in the imaginary scenarios you have nightmares about. For some, at least, sometimes they really do just stop when they're done doing what they wanted to do, and cross no other lines. I'm pretty confident which side of the line I stand on. Find more sophisticated propaganda, I suppose, is the only advice I have for you.
It's based in a bit of truth. Yes, there were 300,000 jobs created in 2021, and 94% did go to people of color. However, these were non-professional roles (service workers, laborers) that were coming back as COVID died down.
As far as new executive, managerial and professional roles, the share of people of color increased by just 2%.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...
Do you think that all white people are executives and professionals, such that they don't need laborer/service jobs?
Edit: The Google admin panel won't even populate the "allowlist" when you search whitelist which is frustrating. I'd at least like it to show up, even if it's believed to be important enough to change.
Being reasonable. The master/slave thing is silly.
I worked with a woman whose relatives didn't make it out of Auschwitz.
She objected to us initializing System Services.
Silly?
It’s definitely silly, but otoh I guess all culture is silly…
Some people living today, working in and around a "git default repo setup" are descendants of slaves.
Would it be better if public education simply discussed power dynamics, inclusion, and sensitivity?
If you want to talk about real power dynamics, walk down the street in San Francisco. Visible poverty everywhere, in one of the richest cities on Earth. If you want healthcare, food, shelter, or political representation, you need to pay.
That’s the relevant power dynamic, and because it is so intractable these activists have conceded it and instead resort to virtue signaling (“we can’t change the system but at least we want to!”). Who the hell cares. George Floyd’s problem wasn’t that not enough software engineers were aware of American chattel slavery, his problem was that being poor is effectively illegal.
They then go on to mention a term that they find offensive, that seems like it shouldn't be offensive, and imply that under the same rules that master/slave was abandoned, we should abandon the term "equity" as well.
For him, the celebration of these is offensive and excluding.
Is there a problem / disadvantage / critical misleading with using my context as a lens to understand what's the right way to appropriately address unfair power dynamics?
The linked article wants me to be outraged (or at least upset) that references to equity are being removed from government software. Why should I be? As I mentioned in another comment, some of these tactics are broadly similar to what left-leaning movements did or wanted to do. The positions being taken are often presented as objective and empathic (for example based on historic power imbalances), but power imbalances are dynamic and regional.
Well that’s where the people are that are having these discussions for the most part. People from other parts of the world would be wise to have their own discussions and ignore the American cultural context of our discussions.
Actually thats not fair to cave men, we revert to reactionary nonsense.
2. Given Musk and minions full access to federal and private records, breaks FISMA and CFAA
3. The "buy out" of employees, violates Administrative Leave Act and Anti-Deficiency Act
4. The Spending Freeze that he backed out of, the one that would have required an Act of Congress
5. his upcoming attempt to end the Department of Education and defund it, without Congressional Laws behind it.
6. Firing inspectors without giving Congress 30 days notice to review the action
I could go on, but I have a feeling it won't matter to those who think he can do no wrong.
OMB rescinded the memo, but the freeze appears to have continued (in defiance of a court order against it, which is another level of illegality.)
At least, at the beginning
He later had his power gave to him by the king which should have put him under arrest
The fact that he is "governing" through EOs, - many of those will be challenged in court, I guess, but in the meantime they still stand valid - is not being done in a respectful way. An example, regular citizens working for Trump having access to not only read but also write on the federal payment system https://www.crisesnotes.com/day-five-of-the-trump-musk-treas...
Another example - denying multiple times actual science, since the scientist are amongst one of the groups he blames
He's definitely on the way for being a good mussolini 2
What we're witnessing is the weakening (and potential removal) of an effective 4th branch of government (what some call the "deep state"). I don't see that as a bad thing, as structurally speaking, this 4th branch does not govern according to the will of the people, since they are not accountable to the people.
What boggles my mind is this -- Democrats complained for decades about how Congress was ceding its authority to these unelected officials. I grew up in a Democrat family and cheered as Bill Clinton was elected. And now Democrats, who call themselves the "party that defends democracy", are acting as the primary proponents of these unaccountable officials and agencies. Make it make sense.
Not being American, I can't really comment on what the democrats appointed before musk. However, I do not believe it has happened before to have someone access with write permission the payment system, to access personal sensitive data of federal workers[1], and so many other things I wouldn't even know where to start complaining about
https://www.govexec.com/transition/2025/02/robbery-progress-...
My God, you people are exhausting and terrible.
Musk is not terminating any executive departments or agencies. Neither is Trump (except perhaps some that are not statutory).
USAID still exists. It clearly wasn't obeying its statutory mandate -- that's what gives Trump the authority to bring its current activities to an end and fire a lot of its employees. It will likely be ended by Congress after what's been revealed, but we'll have to wait and see.
You've said this, but it's obvious that's not what they're doing, and no one is attempting to stop them. Literally unchecked corruption. Musk should be in prison for this - it's very close to treason.
https://www.barrons.com/advisor/articles/elon-musk-18f-irs-d...
Any examples? Just based on what he and @DOGE have reported, they're basically doing a systematic financial audit. (And Trump is firing those who don't allow the audit to occur.)
Comparing Trump to those guys 2 weeks in, when Congress and the Supreme Court are very much alive and able to pounce on him, is rather early, no?
There's sufficient evidence. He has shown us who he is, and what he is.
I think this is great news. Well done Trump & co.