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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.
Sounds like he got confused looking at a view of a join.
That man will be doing to same thing to important shit right now.
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.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961
thought the replies would be better. Some people deducted that it uses plain text.
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
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
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.
Ok genuine question, what is the difference between a SQL database and a simple Excel spreadsheet?
People yell at you if you use an excel spreadsheet as a database
Does anyone yell if I use SQL?
Only the programmers that have to run queries in it because that's their job. 😭
only is its sqlite.
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.
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, well, relations and constraints.
Imagine you have 2 tables (2 excel sheets) one with people, and one with home ownership. You can set the following constraint: (1) each person shows up only once in the people table. And the following relation: (2) every home owner must refer to an existing person in people table.
When modifying the table contents, the system checks if no constraints or relations 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.
I spent more than I'd like to admit wondering "what the fuck is a wel relation?!"
I get what you say but excel even the 98 version can do duplicate/missing data constraints.
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.
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.
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
The worst kind of stupid doesn't need to learn about databases because it's just common sense.
"Our databases only store in RAM because I AM THE ELECTRICITY BATTERY MASTER"
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.)