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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He sure is loose with that r-word…
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
That man will be doing to same thing to important shit right now.
When Elon bought Twitter, I realised right away I’d need to close my account.
What made me hurry up exporting my data and closing the account were the reports of Elon Musk personally fucking with the systems, and the subsequent glitches and outages. Had to get it done while the site was still moderately functional.
And they just let this guy get his hands on actually important national computer infrastructure? Fucking hell.
Sounds like he got confused looking at a view of a join.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961
thought the replies would be better. Some people deducted that it uses plain text.
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.
They should just publish every SSN at once with names. That’ll make them useless as “secret” numbers and useful as identifiers.
In college, early 90s, our student IDs had our photo and SSN on it
I’ve operated ever since under rhe assumption anyone and everyone has access to it.
Then with all the data breaches over the last 10/15 years? Freeze credit reports with the 3 reporting agencies for free. Check for extra accounts with the free annual credit report pulls.
For all practical purposes, our SSNs are easily obtained by someone who wants it.
I’m not sure what the solution is, but a unique identifier has to be housed somewhere where in can be accessed in a format humans can read, which means it can be accessed and dumped so it’s no longer private or secret.
I’m not a fan of biometrics, and I tolerate 2FA. I really think it’s more important we change how we think about and use personal, unique, identifiers (like SSNs)
hasnt that already happened with a data breach? i remember reading something about it
The worst kind of stupid doesn’t need to learn about databases because it’s just common sense.
Ok genuine question, what is the difference between a SQL database and a simple Excel spreadsheet?
The excel file contains the data. It’s equivalent to the database.
The excel program is how you interact with the data. SQL is how you interact with databases.
Doesn’t matter how the data is structured inside the database. You can ask in the SQL language and you will receive an SQL answer.
Storage data structures. Database tables are designed for fast read/write. Excel is designed for fast simultaneous parallel computation.
To get a sense of what this looks like, you can read more about their data structures; Databases typically store data in what’s called a “B Tree” and spreadsheets typically store as a format that can be easily converted into a “Directed Acyclic Graph” (although Excel lets you turn off the “acyclic” part if you allow circular references).
Although, with Excel specifically, there’s probably not much difference since it has some database functionality now.
A whole lot. Too much to cover in one post in any kind of detail.
A modern relational database management system (RDBMS) is a highly optimized beast. How it accesses storage is very carefully considered. It has a whole mini language for defining relations between data. There are tools for debugging specific queries to make them faster. They index data with tradeoffs between read and write speeds. There are sophisticated locking mechanisms so multiple users can read and write at the same time. They have transactions where many alterations can be packed up together and written efficiently at once. Those transactional alterations are atomic, meaning there are guarantees that all of them happen or none of them happen. The entire thing is based on set theory, and it has survived attacks by many other pretenders to the throne for decades.
And if you’re using Oracle, you can get all that while paying a highly optimized pricing model set up by the best financial advisors Larry Ellison can find to maximize value extraction from your company.
In the context of this tweet most important differences are:
SQL is a language for querying databases.
Most common used databases are relational databases. With relational databases you can setup, wel, relations and constraints.
Imagine you have 2 tables (2 excel sheets) one with people, and one with home ownership. You can set the following constraints: (1) each person shows up only once in the people table. (2) every home owner must refer to an existing person in people table.
When modifying the table contents, the system checks if no constraints are violated.
Excel, just like a badly designed relational databse, would, for example, have no problem with duplicate people, or home ownership referring to non-existant people.
SQL is a language used to manage and interact with most relational databases so it is used often to describe relational databases. There are many tables in a relational database, each is very much like an excel tab. The excel spreadsheet can have many tabs relating to each other. So kinda similar. However a relational database is better defined, more functions and forced relationships, and most important space efficenct. Excel takes probably 100-1000 times more space, and that is best case.
The amount of data, sql is designed to manage large datasets, millions of rows. Excel has its limits.
People yell at you if you use an excel spreadsheet as a database
Does anyone yell if I use SQL?
Does anyone yell if I use SQL?
If you use MySQL, Maria DB people yell
If you use Maria DB, Postgres people yell
If you use Postgres, the nosql people yell
If you use Excel, the MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres and nosql people yell.
Only the programmers that have to run queries in it because that’s their job. 😭
only is its sqlite.
It’s hard to figure out what he’s talking about , when he says the “whole social security database”. Like in which tables are they duplicated? Does it mean the entire row is duplicated or just the SSN, it might make sense to be duplicated depending on the schema. Is it an append only db, so there might be updated columns on the same ssn and you need to filter by the latest update timestamp? Who knows.
But also, saying that there’s a “social security database” and then following that up by the govt “doesn’t use SQL” so… the db is actually just a spreadsheet? A .txt file? The SSNs are just written down in someone’s notebook? Lol
He looked over the shoulder of one of the script kiddies he hired and saw 2 lines with the same SSN, freaked out, remembered some database words he picked up somewhere and hopped on twitter.
SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned. The database could easily be keeping track of all previous assignments for any given SSN.
Remember, SSNs are designed for social security and nothing else. They got picked up as a unique ID by private interests as a hack. They were never supposed to be as widespread in use as they are. The federal government using it this way is the specific, designed use case.
Yep, and any attempt to replace them with a purpose designed government ID has gotten conspiracy nuts to shut it down
It’s LotusNotes all the way down
Or mongoDB 🙄
Probably something bespoke/legacy.
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.
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
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
He is like tony stark in a timeline where Tony stark decided to join the terrorists instead of building the suit to escape. Oh and in this timeline Tony Starks brain has been rotted away by ketamine
Yeah. That is Hammer
“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
Yeah in memory databases can be super fast.
till the power goes out
It in Elon’s case, catches fire and locks you in
Then you lose your database quickly, so it’s still fast
At which point you have to slurp down a few hundred terabytes from the other datacenters when the power turns back on.
This is why Google datacenter managers hesitate to turn off the power even when an employee is in the process of getting electrocuted.
You have to link a source for something that offhandedly horrific
Sadly I cannot, since the source is an ex-Googler I know in person who was there personally. While I fully believe the story, I’m just some rando on the Internet, so you’re welcome to take it with the appropriate pile of salt.
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.
