National Science Foundation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms of the grant it would have to follow.
“These terms included affirming the statement that we ‘do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,’” Crary noted. “This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole.”
I should use python more. I like when people have principles.
NSF: “We’ll give you money as long as you don’t hire minorities”.
Python: “Get fucked.”
Chad shit
Besides the anti-woke bullshit, it’s just a bad idea to accept. It is absolutely not normal for a grant to have stipulations that if you violate some vaguely defined criteria somewhere in your organization, it can be clawed back at a later time. That’s a huge liability for an organization to take on that they may suddenly owe a million dollars some time in the future.
I mean basically yeah, “DEI” and “Woke” are right wing buzzwords that basically can mean whatever, and the Trump admin et al know this. They could say “letting x people use this is woke” or “hiring y people is DEI”. The Anti-DEI movement is just an excuse for actual discrimination because now we have people being fired not because they are unfit for their job, but because they’re from a minority who was deemed more qualified than someone who was White, Male and Cishet.
I mean Hegseth fired the Chief of Naval Operations because she was a woman. Straight up.
What a time we live in. It really feels like a fever dream
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it’s my meat pumpkin
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The text actually required them to not violate anti-discrimination laws.
What’s the size of the rock you’ve been living under in the past 10 months or so?
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Congratulations for having a real spine and showing the world that money isn’t everything
Thank you python team
There’s an often repeated theme in philosophy that any gift that comes with conditions is actually just business.
I would use the term extortion, but yup.
Oh for sure, Trumps business style is about extortion rather than collaboration. He has to win and they have to lose.
Even when it’s reverse? grants being conditional on DEI action has been a long time thing already
I’d say so. Yes
The Seattle zoo also rejected federal funding with these strings. My wife lost her job because of it. Because it was just for one program and the no-DEI was organization wide…
Apparently the Portland Zoo signed it… No one expected that shit. We both let her parents know that this is because of their vote in another state.
Hey look someone with integrity, morals, principles and balls. Sadly all four of those seem to be highly endangered traits.
Good for them. It is good to see people do something right for once.
In 2 days the White House will order every companie to stop using python because of woke or something
Imagining all the llm dorks suddenly trying to learn typescript over the weekend
It makes me very happy to think about
Or trying to control their mice population. Wait what?
Or OpenCL.
To them I say “good luck, fuckers”
How is it legal to basically say “We’ll give you some money if you promise to keep the blacks out of your organisation”
Because Congress and the Supreme Court have been captured entirely by fascists.
You frame it as “don’t discriminate based on skin color, as in don’t hire a black person because they’re black” while not saying any more of the quiet part out loud.
In a perfect world where nobody doing the hiring was ever even a little subconsciously racist, that would be perfectly reasonable, yeah.
Though that said we end up with a lot of nuance in the real world. Let’s say there’s a traditionally marginalised, opposed racial group. Let’s say times have changed somewhat and people suddenly accept them.
Well, the generational and cultural weight is still going to have a lasting effect even if times have changed, and it may be more difficult for people from that group to afford a good education, good job, good home, etc.
The point being that even if we all stopped being racist today and hired purely based on how good an employee someone will be, we’re likely still unknowingly skewing our decisions based on past social racial issues.
I’m probably not putting it very well but hopefully you get the idea! It’s probably pretty common knowledge anyway I guess haha, seems pretty obvious to me and I don’t even think about this stuff much :-)
Anyway, point is, we do still need to work as a society on ensuring diversity and fairness even when we’re not racist at all - I think the saying might be “Equity over Equality”, or such?
Obviously the USA Government are fascists, so they’re more interested in wiping out groups they don’t like, but they’re just another in a long line of evil governments that will eventually fall, no point thinking too deeply about why they’re being evil. They’ll eventually die off as all fascist regimes do. Hopefully we won’t have to fight a World War against them this time.
For context, I am an old white man engineer. I’ve worked in large and small companies over my career. Almost without fail, even with DEI policies in place, a non-white person or woman still had to be 10x more qualified than their white male counterparts to be hired. Once in the organization, they were generally put into some dead end role while far less qualified white men were advanced to higher positions. When I worked in the bible belt southeastern USA, you had the added factor of protestant christians ruling the roost too.
That’s depressing, but at least there were people like yourself who understood the backwards injustice of it all.
Some people and places have to be kicked and dragged into the modern day, alas.
Because conservatives convinced people that DEI was literally about filling a quotas at the cost of competency, because “controlling the narrative”.
based Python.
This makes me love python (the programming language) even more.
After growing up watching things like Bill Nye, seeing names like the NSF saying shit like this is like an actual fucking nightmare reality. It’s just so incredibly wrong.
Fucking hell, good for the PSF for maintaining their values. I’ll make a donation when I get paid. I’m sure they would appreciate it if any one else can spare a dollar or two.
https://psfmember.org/civicrm/contribute/transact/?reset=1&id=2
Edit: Added donation link
This should be the top comment. Now, excuse me. I’ve got a donation to go make.
ETA: Done. I felt dirty using Paypal, but I was being lazy, right up until Paypal barfed up some error saying “This credit card can’t be used something something blah blah blah. Let’s try a different one.” In response to which I suddenly found the energy to go find the checkbook and an envelope.
In response to which I suddenly found the energy to go find the checkbook and an envelope.
Who on Earth actually still uses checks? Is it
20051995?My wife’s uncle wanted a paper trail for things like paying the gardener, who didn’t have a way of doing cards anyway.
To make matters worse, the terms included a provision that if the PSF was found to have voilated that anti-DEI diktat, the NSF reserved the right to claw back any previously disbursed funds, Crary explained.
Likely why it was not accepted
Yeah, even if they weren’t willing to take a principled stance, that’s really dangerous. Especially with how temperamental these fascists are.
Go team snake 🐍
