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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.
This sounds just like a former manager that thought nosql was the end all and that SQL had no place.
If course they developed their app that required frequent data migrations because they were in fact very dependent on all the records matching the latest schema.
There was a period in my life when I had to remind people frequently that NoSQL stood for 'not only SQL'.
See the post on BlueSky
No thanks, that alone says you're not going to get an honest unbiased discussion. Also when your evidence is "according to many comments" from a app filled with people that hate Musk with all their being as if it's their entire identity, it's not good evidence.
Being a developer who has done work for many governments in my country, you cannot just say "the government DOES use SQL" because they have many, many, MANY different systems that have all been built in different technologies over different decades by different people with different design philosophies and preferences. Will there be ones that use SQL? Absolutely. Will there be ones that don't? Absolutely.
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.
Problem is you can't shut down your account with the government because that's your everything. That's your identity, that's your retirement, that's your unemployment. And he's been given carte blanche to fuck with it in any way he feels like by the giant orange douchebag who thinks Elmo's a fucking genius. And the Republican Congress is either unwilling or too scared shitless of his billion$ to get in his way.
There's really just one way to close your government account and I really wish Elon would do it.
Yup, the bottom line is, there was this dude who, upon buying a website, fucked it up.
Upon attaining unprecedented government position, he got access to government systems, and fucked them up.
Did anyone vote for this? No, no one voted for this. Were there supposed to be checks and balances to stop this from happening? Well, theoretically, maybe, but, urgh, the Founding Fathers didn't expect anyone to unleash the Ultimate Idiot on crucial data infrastructure.
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.
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.
Sounds like he got confused looking at a view of a join.
SELECT holder_name, amount
FROM account JOIN transaction ON transaction.account_id=account.id;
-- WTF!! THERE'S DUPLICATES!!!
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.
Muskrat grew up as a trust fund baby on money from his dad's apartheid emerald mines. He's essentially clueless regarding technical skills and got where he is from just hiring people who knew what they were doing.
Unfortunately there's been a bunch of propaganda over the years making him out to be some super genius that's the lead engineer for all of his companies, and he's since bought into all of it
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.
SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned.
Not even that. If you were born before 2014 or so and you're from somewhere relatively populous theres a pretty good chance there's more than one living human with your SSN right now. SSN were never meant to be unique, the pairing of SSN and name was meant to be unique but no one really checked for that for most of the history of the program so it really wasn't either. The combination of SSN, name and age/birthdate should actually be unique though because of how they were assigned even back in the day.