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.
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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.
this really needs more circulation because too goddamn many people still believe his PR
That's phrased brilliantly, and capturey my own perception of Musk
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.
Yeah. If you ever fly a rocket, you want to fly low and slow to be safe.
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
Cool! I wish there were, and hope there will be, more like you.
Thank you. I was trying to find this earlier today.
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
Remember when he said he knows more about engineering than anyone else on the planet?
How about the submarine he was going to build to save kids in a cave that obviously would have drowned long before he could have even really started work? But it's okay, he could just accuse the guy who actually saved their lives of being a pedo
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
The US government basically ONLY uses SQL…
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.
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
It's not impossible. There are a lot of crypto grifters who have been prepping to scam the American government.
Pretty sure that was already something they announced that they'd do.
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
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.
Would that almost be OK if it were like 40 characters long? Like, you can view any photo on Google Photos if you have the right alphanumeric string
Would still be saved insecurely in password managers and other issues though
Don't forget to unset the evil bit as well!
Login? Why would I do that? Aren't the credentials in the code? I just hit the go button.
In plain text I assume right? You're not crazy..
If they weren't in plain text how could we check to make sure it's still there?
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.
IIRC they kicked him out of PayPal because he wanted to run everything on windows instead of the Unix/Linux servers they were running on. And the reason for it was because he couldn't figure out Linux.
He is a fraud gamer. He is almost definitely a fraud coder.
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.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
"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.
I am not sure if you are agreeing with me or not, but DOB and location where you were born are additional informations as I mentioned in my replie before.
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
https://xkcd.com/865/
yeah that sounds about right, someone should make an XKCD search engine i think.
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).
Ongoing trends would indicate a significant drop in birth rate is extremely likely. Major cities will most likely be facing population shrinkage by the end of the century
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.
This has happened many times. In the last city I lived in, a man went in to have a leg amputated and they got the wrong one, so he ended up with zero legs.
This is a joke right? I really really hope that they aren't trusting randoms to know how to manage a gpg key properly.
It's hard enough to get people actually interested in it to do it correctly.
And using gpg to constantly identify yourself would mean needing to keep multiple copies of your private key all over the place. I find it unlikely that regular people are issuing new keys and revocation certs properly. Not to mention having canonical key servers (maybe the government could manage that, but the individual is responsible for maintaining a way to get the canonical most up to date key)
Using gpg backfires because if you lose access to the key or it's compromised (say by putting it on your phone) you lose everything. They work for people who know what they are doing because you are supposed to issue keys for specific tasks and identities, but there is just no way that that is happening.
I'm being sarcastic but not by much. Nordic countries do have much better digital id systems and the EU overall looks to be following their model.
https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/
https://www.openbankingexcellence.org/blog/eid-and-the-eu-digital-identity-frameworka-scandinavian-perspective/
This is the first I've heard something like that about Iceland; but I do know a little bit about Icelandic personal ID numbers.
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.
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.
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.
This is not true, but often repeated. From SSA
https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus explains it pretty well
Came here looking for Grey, was not disappointed.
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'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.
For a minute i thought you were talking about Elon and was completely following.
Ah, so data exchange between databases is a slightly different matter. First, I would recommend against using ssn as a number you exchange back and forth to sync data, as it exposes you to a greater risk of data theft. However, forcing your internal DB keys onto someone else is a a synchronization nightmare. Your internal data schema might look totally different even for the data overlap you might have.
My usual suggestion would be to assign a random uuid to each person and then just agree with each other on either which system creates new records (originates ids) or which system has priority (is the system of record) for people if there's a collision. Ultimately, you'd end up needing to compare names and addresses or phone numbers or birthdays etc. to unify records anyway. SSN is an easy cheat that gets you a lot of the way there (for Americans born after 1935) but like I said it's a security/legality risk and you still actually need to check that other stuff to verify anyway.
There's a reason why systems that join person records together is big business (mostly for advertising!) It's tricky stuff.
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.
It's happened twice to me, I'm now 41. I was able to get it resolved both times but it was not easy and in the first case seriously hurt my credit score for seven years.
It's not fun.
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
Isn't that assuming you have access to doing arbitrary SQL queries on the database? Then you'd by definition have access to records you shouldn't.
No. You can have control over specific parameters of an SQL query though. Look up insecure direct object reference vulnerabilities.
Consider a website that uses the following URL to access the customer account page, by retrieving information from the back-end database:
https://insecure-website.com/customer_account?customer_number=132355Here, the customer number is used directly as a record index in queries that are performed on the back-end database. If no other controls are in place, an attacker can simply modify the customer_number value, bypassing access controls to view the records of other customers.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.
What are the situations where you can have more than one SSN?
I'm referencing this, but I'm not actually sure: https://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/handbook/handbook.14/handbook-1401.html
right I did hear the lifelock guy had to get a new SSN, and also Hilda Schrader Whitcher who's SSN was 078-05-1120 and needed to be reissued after her SSN was used as a placeholder in wallets. These seemed to be very uncommon though, and not something I'd expect most systems to be able to handle.
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.
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.
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...
I'm no expert, but this podcast series seems to suggest Von Braun was mainly very focused on shooting rockets to the moon and fiddling the right guys to get crazy amounts of funding for that goal. I'm not saying he wasn't a nazi, he was, but exterminating jews etc was probably not his mean focus in life... In the Von Braun case it was propaganda towards his own leaders, to get lots of money. The reason he's well remembered is not propaganda but because what he tried actually worked out very well and was the basis for pretty much every rocket since. If he'ld happen to live in Soviet Russia, he would probably have become a member of the communist party, whatever would get him more money/free labor for shooting new trials towards space.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/04/19/the-space-race-began-with-16000-nazi-prisoners-slaving-away-on-wernher-von-brauns-v-2-rockets/
Stop carrying water for Nazis, liberal.
Even fucking Forbes thinks it makes you a clown.
Von Braun had a choice where he went to go. He chose the state with segregation and not the one with your "infinite labor supply" that beat America into orbit because he was a fucking Nazi.
Stalin had a nasty habit of putting some of his best designers into gulags. Von Braun probably would have ended up in one of them.
🤔 💭
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.
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 OG Nazis were dumb as bricks lmao. Weird nerds with massive egos half of which believed in magic.
Hitler and Himmler believed in "World Ice Theory" which was put forth by some German crackpot who stated the base matter of all reality was ice.
Every German person I’ve ever met talks so confidently about shit that you just kinda assume they know what they’re talking about, until they start talking about a domain you’re an expert in and you realize they’re actually kinda dumb but with good vocabulary.
Oh, Redditors. That explains ich_iels popularity per capita.
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.
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.
Have you seen the reactions every time someone suggests it'd be nice if Israel stopped shooting people and taking their land? We're pro-genocide now.
to be fair, the israeli palestine conflict is significantly longer running than anything that the germans managed, and so far, hasn't killed 6 million people, so there's that.
Part of the problem is that it's really really difficult to see the magnitude of the issue until the dust has settled, part of the reason we know how many people died in the holocaust is due to the work of various jewish archivists/historians that have spent decades crawling through information trying to piece together what they can, paired with the reasonably meticulous documentation that the germans were known for. (though i can't confirm that one)
Up until we practically landed boots IN germany, we didn't really have any idea what was going on, that's part of why it took so long for anything to be done.
Thankfully it's 2024 and we have modern technology, so you can't exactly just "hide" things like genocide anymore, it's a lot more apparent.
It's not 2024, and the inability to hide things has apparently just made it more blatant when we decide to ignore genocide.
lmao yeah it is 2025 now, still stuck in last years shit i guess lol.
Anyway.
yeah, you would think with how easy it would be to expose and report genocide, that if genocide were happening everybody would immediately know about it and be worried about, and move to do things to prevent it.
There were people who specifically got themselves arrested to observe conditions within the concentration camps and then escape because some reports of conditions were too unbelievable
literally makes my point for me lol
I wasn't arguing with you but adding to your point
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.
All 3 of those. Yes.
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.
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.
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.
I’m sure EDB isn’t the only one in town selling support contracts for open source applications. It is a lucrative business.
Not the only one, but the closest one.
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
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...
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.
Sure as hell did when I worked there
That sounds surprising modern. That's good! Or at least I would think it is good. So many things run on mainframes still.
51 year old SQL sounding surprisingly modern for government tracks.
Haha, TIL that SQL is 51 years old. IBM mainframes were still all the rage in the 70s. My assumption is that government would have not been an early adopter, but I could obviously be wrong.
if this troglodyte says it doesn't you can be sure that it does.
Jesus Fucking Christ !!!
What does Elmo think the government use ? MongoDB, because its Web Scale [0]?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
Ah, a classic watch. :-)
Elon probably thinks that SQL is MS SQL Sever, MySQL, or some such.
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.
He's clearly not paying enough then
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 nowSo you're saying Relational DataBase Management Systems do really well as soon as Relations are involved?
And Structured Query Language is a handy language for querying structured data?
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
Eyup, it's intuitive overall but there's just weirdly some people out there that are all or nothing, and don't understand "right tool for the job" lol
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.
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.
I wouldn't put it past them to experience numbers in the per second realm, especially as new data posts and everyone is rushing to grab it.
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
UPDATEwithout aWHEREclause 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.
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.
https://github.com/nuno-faria/tetris-sql
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.
You'd be shocked to hear that much the same is true of many or even MOST of the world's largest companies.
Not shocked at all.
Source: Check list of ransomware attacks daily.
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
His first venture was a business directory on the internet (ie. The yellow pages, but online). No idea if he or this brother actually wrote any code for it, or if they hired someone. Wouldn't surprise me if he didn't do any actual work for that project either.
He came from some hella rich parents, and he does not have the skills. I doubt it was his work
“Your tax dollars are being stolen”
Rare moment of clarity from our global barony.
Right for the wrong reasons.
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
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
Way to throw disabled people under the bus because you aren't clever enough to find another way to insult their intelligence.
Also using the phrase "civilized people" makes you sound like you'd fit in with the other Republicans.
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.
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.
thanks for the writeup, makes sense!
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.
TIL about the legislation, thanks!
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/
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
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).
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.
He sure is loose with that r-word…
DROP TABLE Musk
Little Bobby tables, we call him
Tax dollars are definitely being stolen... by this unelected buffoon
This retard thinks the government doesn't use SQL...
He used to be regarded as tony stark. Nah he is Justin Hammer. Steals ideas implements them shit and has no idea about anything
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.
Sounds like he got confused looking at a view of a join.
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.
REAL GOVERNMENTS USE EXCEL SHEETS /j
Wasn't it the uk or something that messed up a vote due to excel's row limit?
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
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/12/the-batshit-crazy-story-of-the-day-elon-musk-decided-to-personally-rip-servers-out-of-a-sacramento-data-center/
That man will be doing to same thing to important shit right now.
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.
All government data is processed using
sed.lol. You mean vba macros.
I feel personally attacked right now.
Microsoft Access,
unironically.
Doesn't MS Access still use SQL?
No idea. The only reason I ever used it was to convert an "Access DB Application" to a modern application for a client.
I received the original application and a dump of the all the data for my work, but I have no idea where it came from.
Still more efficient than DOGE.
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."
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 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.
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.
Maybe it’s all just one big .xlsm file?
Using pivot tables.
Nah, that’s too fancy. It’s all held together by some arcane Visual Basic macro someone wrote 25 years ago right before going to retirement and no one has dared to touch it ever since.
Qbasic, if that.
Biden is a blue dog and never cared about infrastructure. Trump cant spell the word. Obama did, but for overpriced drones and oil. Bush only did for oil and deregulated to make things worse. Clinton cut thing Bush Sr cut things. Reagan fucked everything up with "trickle down"
Meaning the last president that did major infrastructure spending is at best Carter, Ford or Nixon.
I laughed but really I know when the last good database and systems people left government to be replaced by contractors. It was Bush's first term. Since then everything has been just putting a new front end on the back end government programmers created in the 1990's.
Glad you laughed, wasnt entirely serious
I don't think we can be. We'd be paralyzed if we tried to be wholly serious.
Holy mother of visual basic
*visual basic for applications
being corrected by a nsfw acc was not on my lemmy bingo list lol
I like boobs and I came in contact with way too many horrible languages ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh god, like Hungarian?
More like php, VBA or Scala. I know, many like Scala, but... Nah.
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.
"Our databases only store in RAM because I AM THE ELECTRICITY BATTERY MASTER"
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.
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.
Where did this come from? Is this a precursor to pushing some blockchain shit or something?
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
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.
As someone who does systems administration which includes numerous government owned database servers, this is news to me.
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'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?
😅
Everything Elon has ever said could be a top post in r/iamverysmart or r/confidentlyincorrect
The worst kind of stupid doesn't need to learn about databases because it's just common sense.
Is retard a bait/dog whistle word?
When Elon was in his early teens, that word was a common pejorative.
If you look at Elon and interpret his behavior as if he was 13, it all makes a lot more sense.
So his emotional growth was literally, uh… well… you know…
Held back by his environment.
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.
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
He is the embodiment of big-money trolling in politics, right?
Isn't it a payments database? One client could have multiple payments. You wouldn't expect client IDs to be unique
What is that a database is not de-duplicated?