The government doesn't use SQL
See the post on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/provisionalidea.bsky.social/post/3lhujtm2qkc2i
According to many comments, the US government DOES use SQL, and Musk is not understanding much what's going on.
Elon’s shock and fury about the database key sounds like he got a report from an out-of-breath 20 year old DOGE kid who thinks they’re hot shit and discovered some massive flaw.
Elon also seems like the kind of person that believes a database schema is all that’s needed to govern a population.
Database schema = "Not fraudulant", what's so hard about that? Login credentials don't even need to be encrypted if you say no fraud before you log in, and cross your fingers. It's basic programming knowledge, come on man. Also throw some salt over shoulder and slaughter a goat for good measure just in case.
I'm sure folks on here know this, but you know, there's also that 10K a day that don't so...
What makes this especially funny, to me, is that SSN is the literal text book example (when I was in school anyway) of a "natural" key that you absolutely should never use as a primary key. It is often the representative example of the kinds of data that seems like it'd make a good key but will absolutely fuck you over if you do.
SSN is not unique to a person. They get reused after death, and a person can have more than one in their lifetime (if your id is stolen and you arduously go about getting a new one). Edit: (See responses) It seems I'm misinformed about SSNs, apologies. I have heard from numerous sources that they are not unique to a person, but the specifics of how it happens are unknown to me.
And they're protected information due to all the financials that rely on them, so you don't really want to store them at all (unless you're the SSA, who would have guessed that'd ever come up though!?)
It's so stupid that it would be hilarious if people weren't dying.
Small correction to an otherwise great explanation: SSNs are not recycled after death.
**Q20: *Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?*****A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder's death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.
"Several generations" well that is fucking garbage
So they’ve issued almost half the possible numbers, current US population is actively using 1/3rd of them. I think unless there is a major drop in birth rates “several generations” is two. Either my great grandkids will be reusing dead people SSNs or there will be 10 digit numbers which is going to be a problem for any systems that coded it as char(9).
It doesn't. There is no truely unique ID in the US.
Source: myself. Worked on health insurance and it was hell.
The SSN is supposed to just be a number that you give your employers and the IRS so that your social security (the USs blanket retirement savings/pension system) contributions get logged correctly to you and then when you retire you can use that number to get the social security benefits that you paid into. The number has ended up being used for all sorts of things because the USA is slightly broken because it is SORT OF a unique ID number for each US citizen, except of course that it wasn't intended to be that, SSNs are only supposed to be used from first social security contribution (first paycheck) to last social security payout (death) so naturally they can just be recycled.
When you die your social is reused and assigned to someone else eventually. This is what makes it not unique. If something were to screw up in the process the new person could have debt from the prior person for example even though it is not their debt. Another concept common is using the last 4. There are so many conflicts when using just last 4 in a database its bad design.
https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus explains it pretty well
It's supposed to be unique and might actually be now, but there are def duplicate ssns out there. Craziest identity situation I was told by a project manager of government system that is all about identities. Same First, Same last,same Date of Birth, same SSN; different people.
Weird story, and I have to assume this is data entry error, identity theft, or something else: I couldn't sign up for a hospital billing platform because my name and full birthdate (including year) conflicted with someone else in the system. I called the hospital billing department and they were very confused about the whole situation. It didn't really get resolved, and I basically had to let it go to collections so that I could pay because of the shitty system. I don't have a very common name, and never have had this problem before.
I don't know all the ways but my identity was stolen and I never knew until my attorney was looking at something else for me in conjunction with the social security commission where I lived, and it popped up under a different name. They then accessed my records using other information, and it was the same number. It took a long time to get it sorted. A few years.
I'm hardly the king of databases, but always using a surrogate key (either an auto-incremented integet or a random uuid) has done me pretty well over the years. I had to engineer a combination of sequential timestamp with a hash extension as a key for one legacy system (keys had to be unique but mostly sequential), and an append-only log store would have been a better choice than an RDBMS, but sometimes you make it work with what you have.
Natural keys are almost always a bad idea though. SSNs aren't natural, which is one pitfall: implicitly relying on someone else's data practices by assuming their keys are natural. But also, nature is usually both more unique than you want (every snowflake is technically unique) and less than you'd hoped (all living things share quite a lot of DNA). Which means you end up relying on how good your taxonomy is for uniqueness. As opposed to surrogate keys, which you can assure the uniqueness of, by definition, for your needs.
SSNs are not reissued after death and never have been. I've been seeing a lot of people comment this, but I'm not sure where they're getting it from. (They're not unique for other reasons, however.)
Just curious, but if SSNs were not recycled after death, would there be any reason not to use them as a primary key?
They're sequential, so the values above and below yours are valid SSNs of people born in the same hospital around the same time.
This would make it trivially easy to get access to records you shouldn't
As the user posted, one human can have more than one SSN in their lifetime. Many humans will never have an SSN. Some of those humans may have a TIN. Some humans may have at least one TIN and one SSN at some point.
(if your id is stolen and you arduously go about getting a new one)
I thought I had lost mine once and got a new SSN card, they don't give you a new number, it's the same number
OP is talking about identity theft, not physically losing your card.
I remember seeing this after he bought Twitter
Storms I hope that’s true.
I kind of doubt it. It's been known that he's a fraud of a coder for a while, that seems like a clear riff.
Enough that I was really disappointed when Some More News talked about Zip2 like he was the sole founder and therefore must have been good at coding at some point.
Btw, the guy he and his brother founded the company with died at 51.
As a megarich techie... With the dirt on Elon's real capabilities.
Interesting.
You know, the thing that always seemed really scary about the OG Nazis is that they were competent, intelligent, put-together people that were just fucking evil. Then you look at the US Nazis and the fucking bozo density is off the charts, but they seem to be succeeding anyway.
Three possibilities come to mind:
The OG Nazis were actually bozos too, they just had very good propaganda. So good that you're still seeing the effects today.
They were more competent bozos. They ran Germany the way that your stupid friend gets laid more often because they aren’t smart enough to be embarrassed by themselves and they know only one goal.
Whereas these guys run America like an ugly stupid person that insists that no, actually, they have already in fact convinced you to sleep with them despite what your words say and the goal is to confuse you into bed.
Is it also a case of survivorship bias? Like, I am not super versed in Nazi history, but... There are famous "smart" Nazis like Goebbels and Himmler and Speer - are they only well known because a) they slowly emerged as influential and/or b) it became clear years later that they were the ones behind the wheel?
'Cause I do think that trump and musk are dumb as bricks, but I don't think Steve Bannon is, and there are probably others like him..
The high leadership were absolute bozos, except for their propaganda guy (Goebel?). And at the lower levels, they had good engineering (still do). Thankfully the higher ups were more interested in building an über-weapon (because that’s good propaganda) than actually winning the war.
Let’s hope the current crop of nazis se their downfall faster. Actually, fuck hope. Let’s make them.
The nazis weren't as competent and intelligent as you suggest, that work was outsourced to IBM - Yes, that IBM.
You know that Watson product that IBM sells and advertises so often? R one that plays chess and was on jeopardy (Fun!) Turns out that Watson was the name of the dude that signed off on them accelerating the Holocaust for the nazis. Some believe the nazis couldn't have been nearly as efficient at unrepentant large scale murder without IBM joining the fray, yet they skate on by...
The very first hacker purposely damaged the contact that read the value that stored if a citizen was Jewish on the punch cards of census data in occupied France (if I'm remembering correctly) it's not known how many he saved but he did pay the ultimate price and died in the concentration camps for his sabotage efforts
Edit: my memory was close. René Carmille specifically delayed the June 1941 report on the numbers of Jewish citizens and foreigners so that it still wasn't complete by the time of his ultimate arrest in 1944, and utilized his position to create extremely real fake identities for escaping refugees amongst other resistance actions
It's absolutely the second one. They basically all had brain damage from ww1 (who knew explosions are bad for you) and several of them including Hitler were drugged the fuck up. Julius Streicher was a clown, but not like a funny or sad clown, more like pathetic, like honestly comparable to someone from 8chan. Goebbels was a creepy loser. Hitler was a meth addict with ibs and anger issues who spent his last days just destroying the air quality of the bunker he would die in and kept invading countries despite already being at war. Heidrich died by personally chasing after antifascists who happened to have a grenade. And that's not touching on their archeological or spiritual beliefs which are on par with qanon for believability and sensibility
Yep, the actual competence was basically in the army (inherited from a long military tradition), so it's important that those generals don't cave.
Heidrich died by personally chasing after antifascists who happened to have a grenade.
That's a fucked up way to describe the assassination.
OG Nazis were looking for aryans in Tibet.
Hopefully all 3 but as the other poster said, Nazis really were clowns.
Sure, Hitler had some early successes militarily - combined arms blitzkrieg was a new deal and effective - but it's not like that won the war. Besides which there is just so much dumbass occult bullshit going on in the background with the Nazis like you would not believe.
You don't need to be smart or super competent to get a bunch of people killed. You just need enough people willing to pull the triggers and for the rest of the people to go along. Going along is easy until it ends with shit like the Holocaust.
Just look at the military decisions Hitler made, that was luckily an incompetent guy thinking he's smarter than everyone else. That rings a bell, doesn't it?
In the long run, making less stupid decisions wouldn't most likely have changed the outcome, but even more people would likely have died (and unfortunately the people executing the murder of the Jews weren't as incompetent as their glorious leader).
A lot of behaviour in politics is emotionally driven, and sustained by the lazyness of voters not learning how the system they live in works.
If anything, I think this requires more emotional intelligence and perhaps acting skills.
I think some of the more intelligent US Nazis are letting the bozos do their thing and riding the coat-tails and avoiding direct blame if things turn. I'm looking at a good chunk of the House and Senate.
OG Nazis were master manipulators, dressed cool as fuck and their propaganda machine was one of the best ever. Intelligent? There is no hard evidence of that, and their military strategies were poorly thought. They had fucking cool weapons and equipment, so maybe good engineers were involved, but that's it.
Our Nazis have way less style
OG Nazis were bozos. They advanced people based on the shape of their face. How exactly do you think that would turn out in the long run?
Here's Lazerpig dissecting the myth of Michael Wittmann for example.
You know, the thing that always seemed really scary about the OG Nazis is that they were competent, intelligent, put-together people that were just fucking evil. Then you look at the US Nazis and the fucking bozo density is off the charts, but they seem to be succeeding anyway.
Not every fascist and Nazi needed to be competent, intelligent, and put-together. Just enough of them. I suppose we'll find out in real-time if they have amassed sufficient numbers this go 'round.
The OG Nazis were actually bozos too.
All 3 of those. Yes.
As someone who has literally helped the government use SQL for over a decade, this is huge news.
Elon is basically what a dumb kid thinks smart people sound like
and the dumb kids, unfortunately. I did a spot with some non-US teenagers, in a class recently. The topic was "name a person you admire and why". Guess whose filthy name came up...
Also everyone who criticized his Nazi salute is ableist. /s
And therefore Lemmy.World would like to give them a chance to speak their mind!:-P
Elon starting to comment on technical matters was the moment I learned he was actually completely beyond incompetent, since I have some actual expertise on the subject. Right around the time he bought Twitter and commented publicly on its architecture.
This is further evidence to that point
He's the Steven Segal of futurism
Now i Really want to see The Dipshit run.
His response to the 2018 Thai Cave rescue is what made me realize how big of a shit stain on society he is.
Jesus Fucking Christ !!!
What does Elmo think the government use ? MongoDB, because its Web Scale 0?
They probably do use lots of NoSQL DBs too, which perform better for non relational "data lake" style architectures where you just wanna dump mountains of data as fast as possible into storage, to be perused later.
When you have cases where you have very very high volume of data in, but very low need to query it (but some potential need, just very low), nosql DBs excel
Stuff like census data where you just gotta legally store it for historical reasons, and very rarely some person will wanna query it for a study or something.
Keep in mind when I talk about low need to query, the opposite high need us on the scale of like, "this db gets queried multiple times per minute'
Stuff like... logins to a website, data that gets queried many times per minute or even second, then sometimes nosql DBs fall off.
Depends what is queried.
Super basic "lookup by ID" Stuff that operates as just a big ole KeyValuePair mapping ID -> Value? And thats all you gotta query?
NoSql is still the right tool for the job.
The moment any kind of JOIN enters the discussion though, chances are you actually wanna use sql now
So you're saying Relational DataBase Management Systems do really well as soon as Relations are involved?
To nitpick, Census data is heavily queried. They use Oracle now, I believe.
Just so you know census data is very heavily queried. Everything from civil engineering to economics wants to look at that dataset every day.
I wouldn't even consider "per minute" frequently queried. Per millisecond for stock market shit
Lol had never seen that before, but Jesus Christ that is a painful depiction of my life.
Lmao we’re gonna get to watch eel-on-musk and all of his dipshit wünderkinds speedrun through all of the pitfalls a junior DBA / data engineer is liable to make, and they’re gonna do it on prod, and prod is the US government.
What could possibly go wrong
Either a DELETE FROM or a DROP DATABASE if I had to guess
An UPDATE without a WHERE clause that doesn't get noticed for a week or two. Your data's hosed and you can't really cope with reverting to your last known good backup. Bonus points if you haven't tested your recovery procedures recently. Then he runs around screeching about how the data is obviously fraudulent and he's a genius for finding it.
Little Johnny Tables, the hero we didn't expect.
Oh I just curled up into a fetal ball at the thought of that...
He's going to dedupe the social security databases, thinking that he's screwing over trans people because he thinks they are the only people who change their names... not realizing that the vast majority of married women have at least two names associated with their SSN.
Isn’t Oracle a big government supplier with millions if not billions worth of contracts?
Elon is a fraud but for someone who claims he created one of the Web’s first e-commerce sites this level of ignorance is embarrassing
He paid some people to pretend he's the founder, then used that title to build a reputation of being genius and what not. And he's been getting rich off of investor capitol ever since.
I don't know which company he did and didn't start himself. But I know he definitely didn't write the code behind ebay or paypal
Everything uses SQL. The world fucking runs on SQL
(yes I know SQL isn't something that you can "run" something on yadda yadda...)
Tell that to the person who implemented Tetris in Postgresql.
That is bananas! The implementation details are worth a read. Plus, all the links to other bananas projects are great.
Eh ECS is basically all about making SELECT ... FROM bar, baz WHERE bar.id == baz.id, joins on primary keys, as fast as possible and use it as often as possible. Games are real-time databases with gaudy user interfaces so it stands to reason that posgresql is a game with a bland user interface.
As much as I hate to say Elon might be right... The problem is that critical parts of the US government run on systems older than his goon squad. There's actual COBOL in use, right now today, by the US government.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/outdated-and-old-it-systems-slow-government-and-put-taxpayers-risk
If Elon could fix the actual problem without being a dick about it all, no one would have a problem with any of this.
“Your tax dollars are being stolen”
Rare moment of clarity from our global barony.
Right for the wrong reasons.
A government official known for performing a nazi salute just broadcast an ableist slur.
Cool cool cool
"Political appointee"
alien invader
Gotta keep play to the cheap seats, these clowns
Civilized people should really coopt the word "removed" to mean Republican. I mean, they have the (R) next to their names to remind us already.
Then when someone takes offense you can just say
Jesus Titty-Fucking Christ, Carol. Just because someone has a mental disability doesn't make them a Republican!"
btw do you know why it was decided to treat the r-word as an ableist slur? And why didn't they also make "idiot" a slur, since it has basically the same etymology? Is this a lemmy-specific thing? I've never seen anyone use or interpret the r-word as a slur outside of lemmy
In contemporary language, that word (among others) is almost entirely used as an insult by way of equating somebody's intelligence with those who have intellectual disabilities, which creates a negative connotation. Similarly, this is why we don't say things we dislike are "gay" anymore. It's disrespectful to the people who actually fall under the definition, and it proliferates negative associations with traits that people are stuck living with and had no choice in acquiring.
The only reason "idiot" hasn't followed suit is because it's much more culturally ingrained, and there's hasn't been as significant of an attempt to change it as with other words.
I've never seen anyone use or interpret the r-word as a slur outside of lemmy
It's not exclusive to Lemmy, but it is mostly left-leaning spaces or gen Z individuals who see it that way. Center and right-leaning spaces see treating the word as a slur to be censorship (as opposed to being respectful of others) and keep using it or actively push back by saying it more.
Not Lemmy specific. There was US legislation related to the word being deemed offensive fifteen years ago (given the slow nature of Congress, it wasn't a new sentiment then, either): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa%27s_Law
Fair enough that plenty of insulting words could be cast as abelist: but my guess is that a word like "idiot" is old enough that most folks called that in a medical context aren't around any more. Maybe I'm wrong though: plenty of folks do push against saying things like "crazy" in an insulting manner.
You must not be close to anyone that has any sort of mental illness. It's a very broad and hurtful term. It has been for a long time.
Edit. Found this online
https://www.spreadtheword.global/resource-archive/r-word-effects
Maury determined that this was a lie.
See, they want you to believe that SQL stands for Structured Query Language. But I know from our lord and savior Elon that it actually means Socialist Queer Liberals!
There's a white paper with the social security logo on it https://www.mysql.com/industry/government/
Someone needs to explain to Musk how to debug with the JSON so that the ipv6 GUI does not overflow into the git API front-end
Easy. Just defragment the kernel flux, water root but do not saturate the soil, and then set the virtual tensors to sigWumbo++. If you saturated root then set the tensors to asyncoMumbo-- to account for the extra conductivity. After that refragment the kernel flux because it was happy that way.
careful, "git api" almost makes sense
Whenever Elon speaks of programming, he just spouts the most delusional Point-Haired Boss bullshit imaginable. Truly, he has been promoted to the level of his incompetence.
(It is also highly ironic considering the Dilbert creator's politics.)
It's hard to figure out what he's talking about , when he says the "whole social security database". Like in which tables are they duplicated? Does it mean the entire row is duplicated or just the SSN, it might make sense to be duplicated depending on the schema. Is it an append only db, so there might be updated columns on the same ssn and you need to filter by the latest update timestamp? Who knows.
But also, saying that there's a "social security database" and then following that up by the govt "doesn't use SQL" so.. the db is actually just a spreadsheet? A .txt file? The SSNs are just written down in someone's notebook? Lol
SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned. The database could easily be keeping track of all previous assignments for any given SSN.
Remember, SSNs are designed for social security and nothing else. They got picked up as a unique ID by private interests as a hack. They were never supposed to be as widespread in use as they are. The federal government using it this way is the specific, designed use case.
Yep, and any attempt to replace them with a purpose designed government ID has gotten conspiracy nuts to shut it down
SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned.
Not even that. If you were born before 2014 or so and you're from somewhere relatively populous theres a pretty good chance there's more than one living human with your SSN right now. SSN were never meant to be unique, the pairing of SSN and name was meant to be unique but no one really checked for that for most of the history of the program so it really wasn't either. The combination of SSN, name and age/birthdate should actually be unique though because of how they were assigned even back in the day.
SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned.
Nope, they don't. No SSN has ever been reused and will not for generations.
https://www.aarp.org/social-security/faq/do-identification-numbers-get-reused/
Musk just uses words to sound smart which is such a stupid thing to do on the internet when so many people can easily call your bullshit.
From rod Hilton on mastodon "He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets."
He looked over the shoulder of one of the script kiddies he hired and saw 2 lines with the same SSN, freaked out, remembered some database words he picked up somewhere and hopped on twitter.
Muskrat grew up as a trust fund baby on money from his dad's apartheid emerald mines. He's essentially clueless regarding technical skills and got where he is from just hiring people who knew what they were doing.
Unfortunately there's been a bunch of propaganda over the years making him out to be some super genius that's the lead engineer for all of his companies, and he's since bought into all of it
It’s LotusNotes all the way down
Or mongoDB 🙄
Probably something bespoke/legacy.
Have you met out lord and saviour COBOL?
He seems to be one of those people that think nosql should be used everywhere.
The more this dipshit talks about programming the more I'm convinced that he's got absolutely no clue how any of it works. Like, he's famous for creating PayPal, I'm really wondering if he paid someone to code that shit and just took credit (and all the money from its sale).
Here's a video out there where he's talking to Twitter devs telling them they need a total rewrite because their stack is too complicated.
Someone gives him the slightest amount of pushback by asking what exactly he means by a rewrite and he cannot give a coherent answer. Someone else asks him to clarify what it is about their stack that is 'crazy'. Elon gets very flustered and can only respond by calling the guy a jackass.
He knows absolutely nothing about programming.
I'd bet a million dollar one of his lil baby faced goons did an export to .csv so Leon could open it up in excel, do a remove duplicate values, and send it back and have the goon could glaze him for being a genius.
If SSN based fraud is the program then let's establish an actual federal identification number. Even the Social Services bureau tried to get everyone to not use it as the end all source of truth. They only created it for social security benefits, literally only that purpose.
They should just publish every SSN at once with names. That'll make them useless as "secret" numbers and useful as identifiers.
In college, early 90s, our student IDs had our photo and SSN on it
I've operated ever since under rhe assumption anyone and everyone has access to it.
Then with all the data breaches over the last 10/15 years? Freeze credit reports with the 3 reporting agencies for free. Check for extra accounts with the free annual credit report pulls.
For all practical purposes, our SSNs are easily obtained by someone who wants it.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but a unique identifier has to be housed somewhere where in can be accessed in a format humans can read, which means it can be accessed and dumped so it's no longer private or secret.
I'm not a fan of biometrics, and I tolerate 2FA. I really think it's more important we change how we think about and use personal, unique, identifiers (like SSNs)
hasnt that already happened with a data breach? i remember reading something about it
DROP TABLE Musk
Little Bobby tables, we call him
He sure is loose with that r-word…
Those who live in Asperger's house shouldn't be casting retarded stones.
i like you
It gets a reaction and that lets him feel something.
His father used to call him that. Makes sense he uses it lightly.
It triggers the libs
Tax dollars are definitely being stolen... by this unelected buffoon
No no, billionaires would never steal money after closing down oversight and watchdog agencies, then brazenly starting a new ''office of mysterious authority you don't get to background check that operates in the dark'' and using it to access the most sensitive parts of US government functionality. That's crazy talk!
You guys are literally fighting against government transparency and stopping wasteful spending of your (or at least someone elses) tax dollars because you have an irrational hatred for the guy. Absolutely insane. No one should be against what DOGE is doing - unless of course you're one of the many people profiting from the blank cheques being handed out wastefully.
He used to be regarded as tony stark. Nah he is Justin Hammer. Steals ideas implements them shit and has no idea about anything
I get your point but I disagree. I think both Tony Stark and Justin Hammer are more competent than Elon.
Hammer was no where near as good as Tony but he did make some good stuff.
I would say he’s more like Obadiah Stane, an opportunist taking credit for others work.
True. Atleast Hammer knew his weapons and could sell them alone
I used to think he was the modern Thomas Edison, but it turns out he's actually the modern Thomas Edison.
That's so fucking clever, I love it.
Difference is, Edison had scientist that invented something useful. Elon, well...he came up with the idea of a shittier version for busses, trams and subways
Phony Stark*
He is like tony stark in a timeline where Tony stark decided to join the terrorists instead of building the suit to escape. Oh and in this timeline Tony Starks brain has been rotted away by ketamine
Yeah. That is Hammer
Dont forget openly bragging about his wide berth of knowledge
Musk doesn't understand database design (or the existence of PRIMARY KEY ()), surprise.
This retard thinks the government doesn't use SQL...
SQLite was literally invented within the US military.
D. Richard Hipp designed SQLite in the spring of 2000 while working for General Dynamics on contract with the United States Navy.
Well today I learned!
SQL is not web-scale
Time to watch this gem again: https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs
I cannot wait to cut off the testicles of a 3.000lb raging bull as it tries to kick my head in.
NoSQL is web-scale.
REAL GOVERNMENTS USE EXCEL SHEETS /j
Wasn't it the uk or something that messed up a vote due to excel's row limit?
I think it was something to do with COVID stats during the initial outbreak, but yes, yes it was the UK government and their bizarre love affair with stupid tech choices.
It was tracking COVID-19 cases and data needed for contact tracing!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/excel_england_coronavirus_contact_error/
There was also a Harvard paper that was the main justification for austerity in the UK given its conclusion that past a certain GDP/debt ratio al sorts of bad things happen.
Turned out to be an excel error skipping 1/4 of their data and when re-run with the whole set the effect vanished. Horrible abuses of excel and csv files are by no means limited to any one country.
The only 'transparency' he's shown is screenshots of basic spreadsheets that don't actually clarify anything. His minions are just sending him spreadsheets extracted from systems they don't understand, and he's just making decisions based on whether the title of the program sounds woke or not.
It's going to be fun when he fucks with some Wall Street Equity fund's money.
That's what he does. Not understand things.
Now now, he also has LeAdErShIp skills like taking his incorrect understandings and making the ToUgH dEcIsIoNs and being DeCiSiVe and taking RiSkS that will in no way impact his lifestyle but could destroy the careers and lives of thousands to millions of other people.
More importantly, not understand things and then comment on them like he is the real shit
Musk seems to think Musk is a tech genius, but really he was just born into money and used it to buy a bunch of companies. In fairness he was able to recognise which companies to buy, doesn't mean he knows anything about databases though.
In fairness he was able to recognise which companies to buy
I think this is just survivorship bias. There are millions of wealthy individuals investing in companies every single day. Occasionally these gambles pay off and make people extremely wealthy.
Most of the time the people who succeed just spend their incredibe wealth and live a quiet happy life.
But there are others who crave attention. These individuals bully their way into prestigious positions and pretend that they're leading the company.
Elon is that kind of person. He started wealthy, bet his money on companies that succeeded. Then took the CEO role so he would get credit for the companys' successes.
If ever people dare stop paying attention to him he'll do something drastic to recapture the spotlight on.
He's the kind of person who will stand on stage and do a nazi salute just because he wants you to look at him.
He also apparently watched a lot of SeaQuest DSV, and is trying to make it a reality. Hyperloop: SeaQuest. Electric cars: SeaQuest. Big car dashboard screens: SeaQuest. Magic Space Science: SeaQuest. CyberTruck....Apple Mouse ADB gen 1-ish wrapped in aluminum foil. I guess what I find most fascinating is that I have similar mental maladies to him, but I learned instead of just being perpetually dumb. It is actually disappointing that he chose to not learn and just ride the walrus instead. No idea why anyone worships him.
OT: You reminded me that i never watched seaquest more than a few episodes and i will have to do that now. does it still hold up for someone who loved TNG and Voyager?
Yeah just imagine if his takeaway from getting into cyberpunk had been user serviceable disability aids that are aesthetically cool.
Like i get being into the aesthetics of fiction. I love me some elfcore shit and a variety of sci-fi aesthetics. But man you gotta think about practicality
Which of his companies did he buy?
Sounds like he got confused looking at a view of a join.
sql
SELECT holder_name, amount
FROM account JOIN transaction ON transaction.account_id=account.id;
-- WTF!! THERE'S DUPLICATES!!!
That, or he doesn't understand composite keys.
Commie-site keys??? LIBERAL!!! GUT IT!
Not even that complicated - SSN are not unique, by design. The combination of SSN and name is supposed to be, but for most of the history of the program no one was actually checking for that so it really isn't either. Until something like 2014 the first 5 digits of your SSN were basically a code for where you were born and the last 4 were just assigned in order.
Nah, they are supposed to be unique. If it was that it'd at least be a design choice potentially worthy of criticism. But consider, who's more likely to have fucked up a database task: Musk? Or the designer, someone with a degree (a real degree) on this topic?
Don't worry: since he's so big on transparency, I'm sure he'll release the schema so we can check his work... 🙄
That man will be doing to same thing to important shit right now.
When Elon bought Twitter, I realised right away I'd need to close my account.
What made me hurry up exporting my data and closing the account were the reports of Elon Musk personally fucking with the systems, and the subsequent glitches and outages. Had to get it done while the site was still moderately functional.
And they just let this guy get his hands on actually important national computer infrastructure? Fucking hell.
Problem is you can't shut down your account with the government because that's your everything. That's your identity, that's your retirement, that's your unemployment. And he's been given carte blanche to fuck with it in any way he feels like by the giant orange douchebag who thinks Elmo's a fucking genius. And the Republican Congress is either unwilling or too scared shitless of his billion$ to get in his way.
The manager began to explain in detail some of the obstacles to relocating the servers to Portland. “It has different rack densities, different power densities,” she said. “So the rooms need to be upgraded.” She started to give a lot more details, but after a minute, Musk interrupted.
“This is making my brain hurt,” he said
the man hailed as a tech genius, everyone!
He did the exact same thing after taking over Twitter, talking about "poorly batched RPCs" in the timeline which makes zero sense because that's obviously not how HTTP works.
The sad thing is Elon regularly shows how much of a very judgmental, "I'm so smart" idiot* he is, but somehow I keep meeting people who think he's a genius. I guess the assumption that money=smart still holds true in the US, despite being disproven time and time again.
*Do we not have a single word for this concept? I come across this kind of person so frequently there really should be one.
"Muskian fraud" seems like a good term for someone who desperately claims to be a genius but can't back it up. "Trumpian fraud" seems like a good term for someone who desperately claims to be wealthy but can't back it up.
I prefer the term "fElon Musk", considering he literally just stole tens of millions of dollars from the State of New York.
Charlatan?
Dunning-Krugerist?
Perhaps you're looking for the "appeal to money" logical fallacy, otherwise known as "argumentum ad crumenam" or "argument to the purse". Not a single word, but it seems to fit the concept.
There's a saying in German - "Der dümmste Bauer hat die größten Kartoffeln", the dumbest farmer has the biggest potatoes
Not just america, my inlaws In Australia think he shits pure gold. They were quite upset when i referred to him as "the perpetually khold idiot manchild" last Christmas
Oh, I'm calling it now. This one is going to be used as an attack of trans people. Throw out the archaic and manual process of updating names in federal databases, and keep it simple by making the records immutable. Then hit them with a lovely
"You MUST use your REAL NAME (MAIDEN NAME) on government forms. If the name does not match, you will be denied."
There are already attempts to make it so your name has to match your birth certificate in order to vote.
Targets both trans rights and women's rights, simultaneously.
Oh, great. So it's also another regressive push towards recreating the mysognist shithole decades where married women were treated as the property of their husbands. What's next, giving married men in heterosexual relationships two votes?
I'm not american but how exactly is making your name match birth certificate denying women's rights?
But wouldn't that target Trump since his original name was Drumpf or something?
I hope they clash hard over it
Nope, women are safe It's the homosexuals & Transgenders they're after
The Conservatives made it abundantly clear
They already stopped providing passports to trans people, even if they're willing to use their old name and gender. And I'm sure that policy will end up hurting women that changed their name after marriage as well, it anyone that changed their name for whatever reason.
Hurting women is ok for them, too.
He definitely doesn't know what deduplicated means...
Maybe Musk needs to learn about data normalization and natural keys.
I'm curious what the actual data looks like. I've spent quite a bit of time auditing large data systems.
I would expect these databases to be largely denormalized with very wide tables, I would expect them to favour natural keys like a SSNs, and built around per department use cases.
I would not expect them to be highly normalized because then when you need something from another department you need them to ensure consistency.
These systems probably have like 50 years of legacy code or more in them too.
I'm curious what the actual data looks like.
I'm sure it will be available for purchase shortly.
A pretentious asshole billionaire is going to be preaching us about massive fraud. Because he totally earned all his wealth through back breaking honest hard work. Give me a fucking break.
SSNs are literally just handed out to hospitals and social security offices in batches and given out in sequential order. They were specifically and intentionally designed to be a terrible system of ID numbers because people actually used to care about their privacy. There are countless people who've gone their whole lives using the wrong social security number and gotten their benefits just fine, because unlike everyone else in this dumpster fire of a country the social security office has never been stupid enough to rely on just a single number.
I'd bet that the government is probably the largest user of SQL. Unless there are really old systems that predate SQL. I'd imagine they have shitloads of COBOL for example.
There absolutely will be many, many old systems that predate and don't use SQL there. Anyone denying this has zero idea about how many extremely old legacy systems are still in use in big corporations and governments. Hell I've done work for companies with revenue in the billions who were still using a legacy Access database program that they didn't have the code for, nor any documentation, so trying to automate data imports was an absolute nightmare - but they insisted on not replacing it because "that's the system we know and it works".
Maybe it’s all just one big .xlsm file?
with vlookups across multiple sheets to get around row limitations, that's just common sense in MyExcelDB
I could see it all being a big vendor specific XML file with XSLT for the application layer
Of course. Everyone who's ever used a DB knows it's BS. As long as the data is structured - which it a) is because he was able to make assertions about it and b) fucking Excel files are enough - it CAN be imported and SQL'd on. Even Excel has built in support for fuck's sake, not to mention Python and PowerQuery.
The dude is a self-certified moron - he probably struggles with the concept of PKI, too.
He was baffled a building he was opening had a water use plan. You know. That thing everyone who's built a building larger than a shed has to deal with.
Half of your secret key pair is just out there for any one in the public to see! Which enables MASSIVE FRAUD!!
it CAN be imported and SQL’d on
This is not the same as it using SQL though.
Seemingly every interaction this man has with a normal person is him finding newer and more interesting ways of declaring himself an absolute moron.
How the fuck is he the de facto president of the USA?
Well, the president represents the people...
A lot of people decided not to vote this time. A lot of other people belived stupid shit their lighted rectangle told them.
Also that's not how deduplication works.
He means/thinks that SSN is not unique (which is not a problem, just different design).
Of course he's wrong about lots of stuff, just the nerd in me could not not explain it.
I imagine he’s looking at a payments table where there is a non-unique key to relate a citizen to each payment.
Yeah, I was thinking something similar. I'm not a DBA but it's the easiest way (that I can think of) to record all transactions for a certain user.
Where did this come from? Is this a precursor to pushing some blockchain shit or something?
Yup.
This sounds just like a former manager that thought nosql was the end all and that SQL had no place.
If course they developed their app that required frequent data migrations because they were in fact very dependent on all the records matching the latest schema.
There was a period in my life when I had to remind people frequently that NoSQL stood for 'not only SQL'.
I've worked on projects for the government as a contractor. There is SQL; SQL as far as the eye can see. I'm sure the NSA has some novel solutions to crunching shittons of big data, but day to day, at least in my experience, it is a lot of relational CRUD and reporting queries.
For the curious, it does clearly exist:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/latest/UserGuide/govcloud-rds.html
As someone who does systems administration which includes numerous government owned database servers, this is news to me.
Felon Musk is such a fucking moron lol
dis what you get for working with 19 year old kids with inflated egos whom you only hired to worship you. Also when someone who is not an expert in a field has the confidence to make grand claims about practices in that field, it is a very nice litmus paper telling you that person is generally bullshitting.
You guys are idiots, they use dbeaver and pgadmin not sql.. Or maybe its Acess yes they use Acess
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961
thought the replies would be better. Some people deducted that it uses plain text.
"I have a lot of respect for you Elon, please don't be a name-caller." What an idiot.
The dBase III joke was pretty good. But dBase IV would have been much, much funnier.
I'm sure he has an alternative, like tattooing it on the forearms of 'undesirables'.
Too expensive. Just put this sticker of a lolipop on your shirt.
Ok genuine question, what is the difference between a SQL database and a simple Excel spreadsheet?
In the context of this tweet most important differences are:
SQL is a language for querying databases.
Most common used databases are relational databases. With relational databases you can setup, well, relations and constraints.
Imagine you have 2 tables (2 excel sheets) one with people, and one with home ownership. You can set the following constraint: (1) each person shows up only once in the people table. And the following relation: (2) every home owner must refer to an existing person in people table.
When modifying the table contents, the system checks if no constraints or relations are violated.
Excel, just like a badly designed relational databse, would, for example, have no problem with duplicate people, or home ownership referring to non-existant people.
Sql Database:
Excel Database:
A whole lot. Too much to cover in one post in any kind of detail.
A modern relational database management system (RDBMS) is a highly optimized beast. How it accesses storage is very carefully considered. It has a whole mini language for defining relations between data. There are tools for debugging specific queries to make them faster. They index data with tradeoffs between read and write speeds. There are sophisticated locking mechanisms so multiple users can read and write at the same time. They have transactions where many alterations can be packed up together and written efficiently at once. Those transactional alterations are atomic, meaning there are guarantees that all of them happen or none of them happen. The entire thing is based on set theory, and it has survived attacks by many other pretenders to the throne for decades.
And if you're using Oracle, you can get all that while paying a highly optimized pricing model set up by the best financial advisors Larry Ellison can find to maximize value extraction from your company.
And alternatively, for excel once you leave the realm of a single person entering data for a single project over time sizes you start entering the "why does this take 10 minutes to open" territory
The amount of data, sql is designed to manage large datasets, millions of rows. Excel has its limits.
The excel file contains the data. It's equivalent to the database.
The excel program is how you interact with the data. SQL is how you interact with databases.
Doesn't matter how the data is structured inside the database. You can ask in the SQL language and you will receive an SQL answer.
SQL is how you interact with databases.
How you interact with some or even most databases, but not all.
SQL is a language used to manage and interact with most relational databases so it is used often to describe relational databases. There are many tables in a relational database, each is very much like an excel tab. The excel spreadsheet can have many tabs relating to each other. So kinda similar. However a relational database is better defined, more functions and forced relationships, and most important space efficenct. Excel takes probably 100-1000 times more space, and that is best case.
Basically the difference is with a SQL database you have way more options for how to create, manage & interact with the data.
Spreadsheets are great for sharing snapshots of data, and there's a level of automation you can build into them, but the scale of what you can do goes up dramatically when your data is in a proper database instead of just an excel file.
Storage data structures. Database tables are designed for fast read/write. Excel is designed for fast simultaneous parallel computation.
To get a sense of what this looks like, you can read more about their data structures; Databases typically store data in what's called a "B Tree" and spreadsheets typically store as a format that can be easily converted into a "Directed Acyclic Graph" (although Excel lets you turn off the "acyclic" part if you allow circular references).
Although, with Excel specifically, there's probably not much difference since it has some database functionality now.
Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally
SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.
You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one's an integer and that one's text.
It's designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.
You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.
It's much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database
You can do transactions.
There's a lot. That's just off the top of my head.
So they both store data in a table like structure, but that's about where the similarities end. Excel is useful for handling smaller more flexible data sets, but has performance, scalibility, storage, and structural deficiencies compared to SQL, it's also harder for computer languages to communicate with a shared excel dataset and modify it vs SQL.
One of the major issues with excel as a database is data limits, excel only allows for ~1 million rows. Considering there are ~1 billion possible SSNs, excel would not be a great medium for them for that reason alone.
One big advantage of SQL is you need to structure your data on the creation of the table and it's designed with the expectation that all data will fit a structure, including unique keys, format, and other limits and structures. This allows you to enforce database rules easily and massively reduce storage size and query times.
There are a bunch of other reasons for using SQL but most of it boils down to either it's faster, easier for multiple computers to access and read/modify simultaneously, or better for enforcing rules and structures when modifying it.
😅
The worst kind of stupid doesn't need to learn about databases because it's just common sense.
Everything Elon has ever said could be a top post in r/iamverysmart or r/confidentlyincorrect
Is retard a bait/dog whistle word?
Used by the guy who did two Nazi salutes at the inauguration? It absolutely is
I bet he thinks SQL = MS SQL Server. And nothing else in the front end.
He is the embodiment of big-money trolling in politics, right?
It's going to be so expensive to fix all the damage this government is doing when America next has sensible government
So many skills lost, so many systems broken
What is that a database is not de-duplicated?
Isn't it a payments database? One client could have multiple payments. You wouldn't expect client IDs to be unique
See the post on BlueSky
No thanks, that alone says you're not going to get an honest unbiased discussion. Also when your evidence is "according to many comments" from a app filled with people that hate Musk with all their being as if it's their entire identity, it's not good evidence.
Being a developer who has done work for many governments in my country, you cannot just say "the government DOES use SQL" because they have many, many, MANY different systems that have all been built in different technologies over different decades by different people with different design philosophies and preferences. Will there be ones that use SQL? Absolutely. Will there be ones that don't? Absolutely.
That's weird, I thought I used SQL databases from government agencies regularly. Guess I was mistaken.
If you and Elon disagree about something, just assume he's wrong about it. If you both agree on something, THEN you might be mistaken.
If it's tech he doesn't know shit about it, I learned that years ago during the Twitter acquisition days
He sounds like a CEO who "knows enough to fuck shit up, not enough to know how to fix it, but thinks they do" AKA the worst executive known to IT
Indeed. I'm starting to think I can't trust what that Musk guy says.
This guy Elons
The US government basically ONLY uses SQL…