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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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.
Thanks for (starting to) explain this concept to people not accustomed to how the US does their shit.
See, where i live, we used to have for example a Tax-Number. That was a thing the taxdepartment used to identify a person. But if you move from city a to city b, that numbers changes. So if you move a lot, you will have numerous of these.
Now, some 15 years back, the Tax-ID was introduced (fellow residents at this point will lnow it might be Germany) and this number is a one-in-a-kind ID that will only be assigned to you. They create it shortly after birth. My sons first registraion ID was this, before anyrhing else. You will also get a uniqie healthcare-ID that also works like that.So…how does that work in the US and why is habing a changing number that is not unique helpful? Or what is Elon not getting? I dont get it either because I dont know how this works for you.
Thanks in advance to shed light on this.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks, get it now.
So, Elon doesnt know this and thinks that multiple uses of SSN is a proof of a fraud when in reality it is just a sign for a bad system that is not used as intended or not designed as it is needed?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.
https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus explains it pretty well
Thank you!
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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.
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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.)
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.
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.
(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.
Elon is basically what a dumb kid thinks smart people sound like
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s absolutely the second one. They basically all had brain damage from ww1 (who knew explosions are bad for you) and several of them including Hitler were drugged the fuck up. Julius Streicher was a clown, but not like a funny or sad clown, more like pathetic, like honestly comparable to someone from 8chan. Goebbels was a creepy loser. Hitler was a meth addict with ibs and anger issues who spent his last days just destroying the air quality of the bunker he would die in and kept invading countries despite already being at war. Heidrich died by personally chasing after antifascists who happened to have a grenade. And that’s not touching on their archeological or spiritual beliefs which are on par with qanon for believability and sensibility
Yep, the actual competence was basically in the army (inherited from a long military tradition), so it’s important that those generals don’t cave.
Heidrich died by personally chasing after antifascists who happened to have a grenade.
That’s a fucked up way to describe the assassination.
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).
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.
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…
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.
The OG Nazis were actually bozos too.
All 3 of those. Yes.
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.
Elon’s shock and fury about the database key sounds like he got a report from an out-of-breath 20 year old DOGE kid who thinks they’re hot shit and discovered some massive flaw.
Elon also seems like the kind of person that believes a database schema is all that’s needed to govern a population.
Database schema = “Not fraudulant”, what’s so hard about that? Login credentials don’t even need to be encrypted if you say no fraud before you log in, and cross your fingers. It’s basic programming knowledge, come on man. Also throw some salt over shoulder and slaughter a goat for good measure just in case.
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
Login credentials don’t even need to be encrypted if you say no fraud before you log in, and cross your fingers
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?
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
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.
He is a fraud gamer. He is almost definitely a fraud coder.
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.
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.
i agree but would like to add that it’s generally good practice to stay away from rockets
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
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?
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!
The US government basically ONLY uses SQL…
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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.
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.
😅
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.
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.)
“Our databases only store in RAM because I AM THE ELECTRICITY BATTERY MASTER”
You save quite a lot of time when working on a database if it’s stored in RAM compared to tape, so it does make sense to use that technology
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.”
They already stopped providing passports to trans people, even if they’re willing to use their old name and gender. And I’m sure that policy will end up hurting women that changed their name after marriage as well, it anyone that changed their name for whatever reason.
Hurting women is ok for them, too.
He got community-noted for being wrong. Per usual, it’s only a matter of time before he deletes his post.
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 :(
He used to be regarded as tony stark. Nah he is Justin Hammer. Steals ideas implements them shit and has no idea about anything
I get your point but I disagree. I think both Tony Stark and Justin Hammer are more competent than Elon.
Hammer was no where near as good as Tony but he did make some good stuff.
I would say he’s more like Obadiah Stane, an opportunist taking credit for others work.
True. Atleast Hammer knew his weapons and could sell them alone
I used to think he was the modern Thomas Edison, but it turns out he’s actually the modern Thomas Edison.
Difference is, Edison had scientist that invented something useful. Elon, well…he came up with the idea of a shittier version for busses, trams and subways
That’s so fucking clever, I love it.
Phony Stark*
Dont forget openly bragging about his wide berth of knowledge
