Programmer Humor

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

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.

You guys are idiots, they use dbeaver and pgadmin not sql.. Or maybe its Acess yes they use Acess

I'm sure he has an alternative, like tattooing it on the forearms of 'undesirables'.

He is the embodiment of big-money trolling in politics, right?

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?

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.

SSNs are literally just handed out to hospitals and social security offices in batches and given out in sequential order. They were specifically and intentionally designed to be a terrible system of ID numbers because people actually used to care about their privacy. There are countless people who've gone their whole lives using the wrong social security number and gotten their benefits just fine, because unlike everyone else in this dumpster fire of a country the social security office has never been stupid enough to rely on just a single number.

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

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

Maybe it’s all just one big .xlsm file?

What is that a database is not de-duplicated?

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.

Is retard a bait/dog whistle word?

As someone who has literally helped the government use SQL for over a decade, this is huge news.

That's what he does. Not understand things.

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.