• Jorn@lemm.ee
    8·
    11 days ago

    He got community-noted for being wrong. Per usual, it’s only a matter of time before he deletes his post.

  • i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca
    7·
    12 days ago

    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.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
        2·
        11 days ago

        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?)

  • CodexArcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • senkora@lemmy.zip
      3·
      11 days ago

      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.

      https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html

        • KamikazeRusher@lemm.ee
          5·
          11 days ago

          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.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          11 days ago

          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)

          • Evotech@lemmy.world
            1·
            11 days ago

            Well, it’s an identifier, your problem if that you have been using it as some kind of access key

          • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            11 days ago

            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.

            • CarbonBasedNPU@lemm.eeEnglish
              1·
              11 days ago

              You can reverse engineer a good bit of an SSN if you just have someone’s birth date and where they were born.

    • Zannsolo@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 days ago

      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.

    • Maeve@kbin.earth
      1·
      11 days ago

      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.

    • vormadikter@startrek.website
      0·
      11 days ago

      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.

      • kerrigan778@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 days ago

        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.

        • vormadikter@startrek.website
          1·
          11 days ago

          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?

          • CodexArcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            11 days ago

            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.

        • CodexArcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          11 days ago

          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.

    • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
      0·
      11 days ago

      Just curious, but if SSNs were not recycled after death, would there be any reason not to use them as a primary key?

      • franzfurdinand@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 days ago

        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

  • dan1101@lemm.ee
    6·
    12 days ago

    That’s weird, I thought I used SQL databases from government agencies regularly. Guess I was mistaken.

    • Susaga@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      61·
      12 days ago

      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.

      • cm0002@lemmy.world
        0·
        12 days ago

        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

          • Laurel Raven@lemmy.zipEnglish
            1·
            11 days ago

            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

  • Salamander@mander.xyz
    4·
    11 days ago

    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

    • Sabata@ani.social
      2·
      11 days ago

      Easy. Just defragment the kernel flux, water root but do not saturate the soil, and then set the virtual tensors to sigWumbo++. If you saturated root then set the tensors to asyncoMumbo-- to account for the extra conductivity. After that refragment the kernel flux because it was happy that way.

    • athairmor@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 days ago

      Elon and DOGE should really look into all of those Oracle contracts the Fed pays for. Must be all inefficiency and fraud.

        • athairmor@lemmy.world
          1·
          11 days ago

          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.

  • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
    3·
    7 days ago

    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

  • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
    3·
    11 days ago

    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

  • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
    3·
    11 days ago

    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).

    • glitches_brew@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 days ago

      Here’s a video out there where he’s talking to Twitter devs telling them they need a total rewrite because their stack is too complicated.

      Someone gives him the slightest amount of pushback by asking what exactly he means by a rewrite and he cannot give a coherent answer. Someone else asks him to clarify what it is about their stack that is ‘crazy’. Elon gets very flustered and can only respond by calling the guy a jackass.

      He knows absolutely nothing about programming.

    • BlueBockser@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      11 days ago

      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!

  • rational_lib@lemmy.world
    2·
    10 days ago

    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.

    • Snowclone@lemmy.world
      1·
      7 days ago

      No no, billionaires would never steal money after closing down oversight and watchdog agencies, then brazenly starting a new ‘‘office of mysterious authority you don’t get to background check that operates in the dark’’ and using it to access the most sensitive parts of US government functionality. That’s crazy talk!

      • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
        0·
        10 days ago

        You guys are literally fighting against government transparency and stopping wasteful spending of your (or at least someone elses) tax dollars because you have an irrational hatred for the guy. Absolutely insane. No one should be against what DOGE is doing - unless of course you’re one of the many people profiting from the blank cheques being handed out wastefully.

        • kungen@feddit.nu
          0·
          10 days ago

          the blank cheques being handed out wastefully

          What blank cheques exactly?

          And I’m not sure how you do it down in oz, but in most other countries, the government creates budgets for each agency, and those agencies then decide how to allocate their funds. If the government thinks that some agency is wasting too much money, they reduce their budget. There’s not supposed to be a king who decides all that on a whim.

          And how many “blank cheques” to the defense industry have been investigated? Surprise, because it’s not about cutting “wasteful spending”.

          • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
            01·
            10 days ago

            What blank cheques exactly?

            The ones where USAID literally just approved every single thing that came into their inbox.

            It seems like the USA government didn’t even have a real budget, they just kept handing out money to all the NGOs that threw most of it back their (the politicians) way. They definitely don’t have an auditable budget.

            Is there massive waste in the defense industry? Absolutely - and DOGE will get there. They’ve been at the job for like 2 weeks, they haven’t gotten to every single nook and cranny.