Lol talk about burying the lede… The issue here is that the government absolutely uses SQL to traverse a DB and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot.
Comment on How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 months ago
[deleted]
Dkarma@lemmy.world 2 months ago
DahGangalang@infosec.pub 2 months ago
Naw, I definitely meant to be asking about duplication of data in databases (vs if the government actually uses SQL).
Sorry to have communicated that so poorly. Everyone seems to be taking the angle you’re arguing though. Guess I’ll need to work on that.
orcrist@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Elon Musk is also an idiot. He thinks he’s smart enough to quickly understand complex situations and complex problems about which he knows next to nothing, within just a few minutes.
Most people would only try to claim that level of understanding in areas with which they have professional experience or about which they’re extremely geeky. He does it with everything, and nobody can be an expert in everything, and everybody knows that except for narcissistists.
I suppose for non-tech people it might be convenient to assume that because someone knows something about some kind of tech, they therefore know a lot about all kinds of tech, and the reality is that’s just not true. There are so many fields that are totally different. But if it did, actually he would look even more idiotic, because Twitter is a train wreck, so clearly he’s incompetent in tech field, right?
DahGangalang@infosec.pub 2 months ago
The Social Security FAQ page says that they do not do this.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
The SSN is 9 digits long; so technically they would have to start re-using them after the billionth one. Given the current population size, and how many people have been born/died since its implementation - it’s fair to say they haven’t had to re-use any figures yet.
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The number is structured though. Some positions represent things like the geographic region you were born in, others relate to the year you were born. That drastically cuts down the available numbers as the entire range isn’t available in all situations.
ECB@feddit.org 2 months ago
Not to mention, anyone who has worked in the US gets a SSN, not just citizens or current residents.
I know a bunch of people over here in europe who have them after working a few months/ years in the US.
DahGangalang@infosec.pub 2 months ago
Right. Fingers crossed we figure out national IDs before then.
Spacehooks@reddthat.com 2 months ago
Papers please
QuarterSwede@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They have several generations to go. Literally not a problem for us or our grandchildren.
MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Elon Musk’s degree is in economics. He might be a script kiddie.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 2 months ago
But I was assured he was a materials engineer, rocket scientist, computer programmer, and businessman extraordinaire!
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Elin musk is a (criminal) scammer, he always has been.
He was fired for incompetence from his own company
Pretty much everything he’s promised for every company he has headed had been a lie. Tesla full self driving? Lie. Hyperloop? All lies to successful kill high speed rail and start a movement that wasted billions of dollars including tax payer money. Even SpaceX, the least shit of all, is shit. Once you really look at it, its all promises with no results and lots of cheering when millions of tax payer dollars -yet again- blow up in the sky.
The guy has one quality: convincing people that he’s smart even though he literally doesn’t know shit
Aeao@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m not arguing that Elon musk is anything but an absolute tool.
SS numbers have 999 million options. Are we already repeating them?
vonbaronhans@midwest.social 2 months ago
We have over 300 million people in the US right now. Social security started in the US in 1935 with just over 127 million people then.
Yeah, we probably have gone through 999 million options by now.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I don’t think we’ve gone through 999 million options yet. Only about 300 million people have been born since 1933, so even if we add all 127 million US citizens alive in 1935, that’s still less than half of the possible social security numbers.
The reason we’ve likely reused numbers is because they weren’t randomly assigned until like 2011. Knowing that I was born in 1995 in Wichita, KS, you could make an educated guess at the first three digits of my SSN
vonbaronhans@midwest.social 2 months ago
We have 350 million people in this country literally right now. I don’t think “350 million born since 1933” makes sense. There gotta be a lot of churn just from early deaths alone.
DahGangalang@infosec.pub 2 months ago
Said this elsewhere, but wanted to be sure you had the chance to see the linked material. The Social Security FAQ page (Q 20, specifically) says that they do not do re-use of old SSNs when people die.
vonbaronhans@midwest.social 2 months ago
Just read that, and it says they’ve only issued 453 million numbers so far. Huh. I really thought it would’ve been a lot more than that.
DahGangalang@infosec.pub 2 months ago
I don’t want to come off as a bot spamming this in a bunch of different comment threads, but The Social Security FAQ page (Q 20, specifically) says that they do not do re-use of old SSNs when people die.
Snothvalpen@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Wait, SSNs weren’t designed to be GUIDs? I mean, I fully follow that they aren’t and we’ve had to reuse them when the circle of life does its thing, but I thought they were just designed poorly and we found out the hard eay they don’t work as GUIDs. What purpose were they designed for if not to act as GUIDs?
jonne@infosec.pub 2 months ago
They were designed to be only used for the administration of social security. Since they were sending monthly checks, they needed a way to know that the person going to the office and saying their address changed was who they said they were. This was at a time before driver’s licences were common and they didn’t have any other type of ID, and there were just a lot fewer people.
Later on the SSN started to be used by banks and other entities even though it was never meant for that, and the risks associated with the relatively insecure design just compounded, because instead of just fraudulently claiming someone else’s social security checks (which, unless the target died, would probably be figured out within a month), it opened up all sorts of extra avenues for fraud.
SloppyPuppy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Also he doesnt know what an SCD is.
bitchkat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The sheer size of the federal government and its age would mean there are thousands of databases out there. Some may be so old that they predate RDBMS/SQL.
That alone makes his comment come from a place of ignorance. Of course it’s confident ignorance. The worst kind.
massacre@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Definitely “Confidently Incorrect” material.
lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
I don’t follow. Wouldn’t that lend credence to his assertion that it’s incorrect to assume that everything in government is SQL?
bitchkat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What’s he’s arguing is that the government doesn’t use SQL at all.
lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
Were those his exact words? When words are ambiguous, are we selecting interpretations that serve best in the contention? Does the context suggest something obvious was left unstated? Yours seems like a forced interpretation.
Always, sometimes, here? In typical Twitter fashion, it’s brief and leaves room for interpretation.
In context, always or here makes the most sense as in “This dumbass thinks the government always uses SQL.” or “This dumbass thinks the government uses SQL here.” Does it matter some other database is SQL if this one isn’t? No. With your interpretation, he pointlessly claims that it does matter for no better reason than to discredit himself. With narrower interpretations, he doesn’t. In a contention, people don’t typically make pointless claims to discredit themselves. Therefore, narrower interpretations make more sense. Use context.
All I did here was apply textbook guidelines for analyzing arguments & strawman fallacies as explained in The Power of Logic. I welcome everyone to do the same.
The fact is there’s very little information here. We don’t know which database he’s referring to exactly. We don’t know its technology. Some of us have worked enough with local government & legacy enterprise systems to know that following any sort of common industry standards is an unsafe assumption. No one here has introduced concrete information on any of that to draw clear conclusions, though there’s an awful lot of conjecture & overreading.
He seemed to use the word de-duplicated incorrectly. However, he also explained exactly what he meant by that, so the word hardly matters. Is there a good chance he’s wrong that multiple records with the same SSN indicate fraud? Without a clear explanation of the data architecture, I think so.
I despise idiocy. Therefore, I despise what Musk is doing to the government. Therefore, I despise it when everyone else does it.
Seeing this post keep popping up in the lemmy feed is annoying when it’s clear from context that there’s nothing there but weak reasoning.
Wow! It’s fucking nothing!
We don’t have to become idiots to denounce idiocy.