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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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
2027 Bingo Card: US adopts BTC as reserve currency, replaces USD, both crash.
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
Pretty sure that was already something they announced that they’d do.
It’s not impossible. There are a lot of crypto grifters who have been prepping to scam the American government.
I wouldn’t be giving him any ideas unless I founded a company and he bought his way in
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?)
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
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…
Don’t forget Von Braun…
🤔 💭
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
OG Nazis were looking for aryans in Tibet.
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.
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…
All 3 of those. Yes.
the OG Nazis were dumb as bricks lmao. Weird nerds with massive egos half of which believed in magic.
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.
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.
Elon is basically what a dumb kid thinks smart people sound like
Sure as hell did when I worked there
if this troglodyte says it doesn’t you can be sure that it does.
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.
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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.
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.
https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus explains it pretty well
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
The entire number is garbage. Change the last digit and you have randomly guessed a perfectly valid SSN.
Less secure than a gift card
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, it’s an identifier, your problem if that you have been using it as some kind of access key
(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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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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 :(
Calling someone a retard for believing something that’s obviously true is straight out of the flat-Earther playbook.
And therefore Lemmy.World would like to give them a chance to speak their mind!:-P
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.
it CAN be imported and SQL’d on
This is not the same as it using SQL though.
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
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
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.
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.
Where do you guys get this rubbish? You’re literally just spreading lies.
https://www.aarp.org/social-security/faq/do-identification-numbers-get-reused/
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/
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”.
Ok genuine question, what is the difference between a SQL database and a simple Excel spreadsheet?
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.
