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.
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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.
That’s phrased brilliantly, and capturey my own perception of Musk
this really needs more circulation because too goddamn many people still believe his PR
i agree but would like to add that it’s generally good practice to stay away from rockets
Even red ones?
ESPECIALLY red ones.
They go faster.
Thank you. I was trying to find this earlier today.
I hope the screenshot dude is also going to stop this unquestioning belief in the things people say or claim without evidence.
Those first two paragraphs look like a tendency to prefer hero-worship to critical thought; that seems to be a fairly widespread problem in humans from long before this latest batch of demagogues.
There’s also a hint of “I’m not an ‘expert’ in it so I can’t (be bothered) to understand anything about it” also a very depressingly common attitude.
We all have to rely on somebody to be an expert in fields outside our own. Years ago, if Elon said “Falcon 9 launch yesterday failed due to xyz”, I assumed he had the actual experts giving him notes. The Xhitter debacle showed how much he doesn’t listen to those people.
It’s kind of funny, but we all do this to some extent. I used to think most people on Reddit were super smart. If someone says stuff with authority, then it’s easy to believe what they’re saying and assume they know what they’re talking about.
But then every once in a while, I’d come across a topic that I know deeply about - and the comment would just be blatantly wrong, but still have tons of up votes. It really made me start second guessing all the other comments I had read and thought were smart, but it’s an easy trap to fall into.
I guess what I’m really saying, is that you all are a bunch of morons, probably.
Confirmed, am moron.
You say that with confidence so I’m going to trust you on that 100%.
I just dont get why you have to assume that though?
Maybe I’m a pessimist, but I’ve met and worked with enough humans that I think the best assumtion is that they’re all full of shit until they prove otherwise.
It’s fine to rely on experts for some things, but if those experts aren’t subject to independent scrutiny or directly independent of the claim or sunjecy under test, or can’t give clear testable /replicable evidence, I’d just not put much weight on their testimony as a source of evidence.
I don’t believe you
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
And if it isn’t tech he knows even less about it.
Remember when he said he knows more about engineering than anyone else on the planet?
Indeed. I’m starting to think I can’t trust what that Musk guy says.
Hey you’re looking for a new truck aren’t ya? Well do we have a deal for you!
This guy Elons
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.
He’s mad because it isn’t blockchain
Goddammit, now you’re giving him ideas.
He already wants to replace everything in the US with Blockchain and Crypto scam shit doesn’t he?
Did you want to trust a central authority for your Social Security? It’ll get censored! /s
I wouldn’t be giving him any ideas unless I founded a company and he bought his way in
2027 Bingo Card: US adopts BTC as reserve currency, replaces USD, both crash.
Pretty sure that was already something they announced that they’d do.
BTC? No way, that’s way too sane. It’s going to be DOGE.
Nah it’ll be Trump Coin. Gotta own the grift from the top down
It’s not impossible. There are a lot of crypto grifters who have been prepping to scam the American government.
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.
You just describe half of my career. 😅
You joke, but one of the programs at my work we use legit doesn’t need credentials, just a username. That one’s a head scratcher to me.
Login? Why would I do that? Aren’t the credentials in the code? I just hit the go button.
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.
(It was a fishbone… That caused a heart attack?)
As someone who has literally helped the government use SQL for over a decade, this is huge news.
Elon and DOGE should really look into all of those Oracle contracts the Fed pays for. Must be all inefficiency and fraud.
Please do. Most of my sales these days are people dropping Oracle due to cost.
Spinnaker? MongoDB? EnterpriseDB?
If Oracle works for the application and you want to save money, you’ll stick to SQL. Probably Postgres, MySQL, or MariaDB.
All of those are open source, so nothing to sell really (well, except MySQL, which is Oracle).
EnterpriseDB is the closest you can get to “selling” Postgres.
It would be one of the areas that would save the government a bunch of money. But, Ellison is in the Trump camp so it’s not going to happen.
At least they aren’t using Access???
Access can do (some) SQL! 😱
I’ve worked for US federal government, access to Access* was the only way I could do some things that wasn’t torture… severe torture.
*keep in mind that SQL is a query language. It can be implemented in different ways and not necessarily within an RDMS.
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:
- These bozos are going to find out, hard and soon.
- The OG Nazis were actually bozos too.
- Competence and intelligence doesn’t actually matter in running a fascist regime
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.
The best decision that nazis ever made was not to indiscriminately purge the military and bureaucracy. Purges certainly did happen but they were focused on the political class and very targeted elsewhere.
They kept the systems people depended on running well to not immediately create massive public backlash… they also got lucky as hell. The military and populace were deeply bitter after WW1 and they leveraged grand gestures to great effect while changing relatively little administratively. The fucks in the US are making flaccid grand gestures while tearing down systems people actually depend on.
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…
🤔 💭
What got President Musk & his sidekick elected, or rather what made their campaign successful?
Low IQ but high emotional intelligence or like sociopathic intelligence?
Turns out when you’re born with a silver spoon in hand and are a dumb sociopath, you win in life instead of living in prison.
Don’t forget Von Braun…
OG Nazis were looking for aryans in Tibet.
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.
All 3 of those. Yes.
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.
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.
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.
the OG Nazis were dumb as bricks lmao. Weird nerds with massive egos half of which believed in magic.
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.
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 OG Nazis were actually bozos too.
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
His response to the 2018 Thai Cave rescue is what made me realize how big of a shit stain on society he is.
He’s the Steven Segal of futurism
Now i Really want to see The Dipshit run.
Sure as hell did when I worked there
if this troglodyte says it doesn’t you can be sure that it does.
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More likely, he’ll delete the community note
More likely, he’ll delete the database.
Shit, I’d love for him to delete the twitter databases
That’s not the database they mean I fear :(
Everything Elon has ever said could be a top post in r/iamverysmart or r/confidentlyincorrect
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
Nah. It’s worked for 50 years and if we get another 30 then it’s done its job well. Government is supposed to review and adjust things as time goes on and Social Security Numbers weren’t intended to uniquely identify citizens. They probably expected an overhaul to be done by 2020.
They fact that we haven’t reworked portions of it and rely on SSNs to identify citizens shows that we haven’t had a forward-thinking Congress in the last 20 years at minimum.
The entire number is garbage. Change the last digit and you have randomly guessed a perfectly valid SSN.
Less secure than a gift card
Well, it’s an identifier, your problem if that you have been using it as some kind of access key
You can guess a phone number as well by changing the last number, but that information has 0 value unless it is coupled with other informations.
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well tbf, the standard coming from computing is doubling the bits until it stops being a problem, or with ipv6 practically having more IPs than there are atoms in the entire planet of earth (i think i did the calculation a while ago, and it was like, most of the atoms in earth, so like, not quite, but for all intents and purposes, might as well be)
According to XKCD about 40% of the earth
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.
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.)
(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.
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.
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.
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https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus explains it pretty well
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.
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.
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He’s complaining that a number isn’t unique and is being poorly used, but the number isn’t supposed to be unique and he’s complaining that it’s not being used in a way that experts are specifically warned not to use it in.
But on a second, stupider layer, this is the system those numbers originate from. So however they use them is how they’re supposed to be used.
But then, back above that first stupid layer, on an even more basic and surface level degree of stupid, the government definitely uses SQL databases. It uses just… so many of them.
This is a good summary. I had to go pull up wikipedia on it since I roughly knew that social security was a national insurance/pension kind of system but am actually hazy on details.
The major issue with it as id (aside from DBA’s gripes about it) is that credit agencies and banks started to rely on it for credit scores and loans. You see, the US has a social scoring system (what we always accuse China of) but the only thing it tracks is how reliable you are about paying off debts. So with your home address, name, and SSN, basically anyone can take out loans or credit cards in your name. This will then damage your credit score, making it harder to get loans, buy a home, rent property, or even get a job.
That’s why Americans are always concerned about having our identity stolen: because you don’t need a lot of info to financially ruin someone’s life.
It doesn’t. There is no truely unique ID in the US.
Source: myself. Worked on health insurance and it was hell.
It’s wild too. I’ve been in the hospital a lot lately and in addition to a bar-code wristband, every healthcare worker, before doing anything with me (the patient) will ask my full name and either birthday or address and then double-check it against the wrist band. This is to make sure, at every step, that they didn’t accidentally swap in some other patient with the same name. (Not so uncommon, lots of men have their father’s name.)
Meanwhile in like Iceland, everyone gets assigned a personal GPG key at birth so you can just present you public cert as identification, not to mention send private messages and secure your state-assigned crypto-wallet. Not saying such a system is without flaw but it seems a lot better than what we’re doing!
You want them to do that regardless of the how the country keeps track of individuals. The point of all that asking is to make sure they have the right patient for the right procedure.
You don’t want to have something amputated or removed unless you have to.
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
Elon is basically what a dumb kid thinks smart people sound like
Sounds like he got confused looking at a view of a join.
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!
Musk doesn’t understand database design (or the existence of
PRIMARY KEY ()), surprise.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
JOINenters the discussion though, chances are you actually wanna use sql nowJust so you know census data is very heavily queried. Everything from civil engineering to economics wants to look at that dataset every day.
Like I said, in the scale compared to actual high frequency data though, that’s still be infrequent.
High frequency DBs are on the scale of many queried per second
Even with tonnes of data scientists and engineers querying the data, that’s still in the scale of queries per minute, which is low frequency in the data world.
So you’re saying Relational DataBase Management Systems do really well as soon as Relations are involved?
What’s funny is that Relational Databases in fact sucks when somewhat complex Relations are involved. Moment you step out the of the realm of Tabular data you’ll have very miserable time. Like good luck modeling and querying simple nested product catalog.
Graph databases are better choice for truly relational data
And Structured Query Language is a handy language for querying structured data?
To nitpick, Census data is heavily queried. They use Oracle now, I believe.
Ah, a classic watch. :-)
Elon probably thinks that SQL is MS SQL Sever, MySQL, or some such.
Elon probably thinks
Not really sure he does, I think he’s clearly paying others to do that for him
My bad, I forgot he doesn’t have time to think.
Too busy being one of the best players at Path of Exile 2. Despite that he doesn’t identify the valuable loot. Or how to use the map. Or how levels work. But he’s top 50! All very believable.
