• @[email protected]
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    15 months ago

    Isn’t it a payments database? One client could have multiple payments. You wouldn’t expect client IDs to be unique

  • @[email protected]
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    35 months ago

    It’s going to be so expensive to fix all the damage this government is doing when America next has sensible government

    So many skills lost, so many systems broken

  • Jorn
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    1215 months ago

    He got community-noted for being wrong. Per usual, it’s only a matter of time before he deletes his post.

  • Destide
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    155 months ago

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

  • @[email protected]
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    115 months ago

    Ok genuine question, what is the difference between a SQL database and a simple Excel spreadsheet?

  • Goldholz
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    495 months ago

    He used to be regarded as tony stark. Nah he is Justin Hammer. Steals ideas implements them shit and has no idea about anything

  • @[email protected]
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    225 months ago

    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?

    • Optional
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      45 months ago

      A lot of people decided not to vote this time. A lot of other people belived stupid shit their lighted rectangle told them.

    • @[email protected]
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      195 months ago

      That sounds surprising modern. That’s good! Or at least I would think it is good. So many things run on mainframes still.

  • @[email protected]
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    1335 months ago

    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

  • Salamander
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    745 months ago

    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

  • CodexArcanum
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      685 months ago

      Small correction to an otherwise great explanation: SSNs are not recycled after death.

      **Q20:  *Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?*****A:  No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.

      https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html

      • @[email protected]
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        55 months ago

        So they’ve issued almost half the possible numbers, current US population is actively using 1/3rd of them. I think unless there is a major drop in birth rates “several generations” is two. Either my great grandkids will be reusing dead people SSNs or there will be 10 digit numbers which is going to be a problem for any systems that coded it as char(9).

        • @[email protected]
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          15 months ago

          Ongoing trends would indicate a significant drop in birth rate is extremely likely. Major cities will most likely be facing population shrinkage by the end of the century

        • @[email protected]
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          245 months ago

          The entire number is garbage. Change the last digit and you have randomly guessed a perfectly valid SSN.

          Less secure than a gift card

          • @[email protected]
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            105 months ago

            You can guess a phone number as well by changing the last number, but that information has 0 value unless it is coupled with other informations.

          • @[email protected]
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            155 months ago

            Well, it’s an identifier, your problem if that you have been using it as some kind of access key

        • KillingTimeItself
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          55 months ago

          well tbf, the standard coming from computing is doubling the bits until it stops being a problem, or with ipv6 practically having more IPs than there are atoms in the entire planet of earth (i think i did the calculation a while ago, and it was like, most of the atoms in earth, so like, not quite, but for all intents and purposes, might as well be)

        • @[email protected]
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          445 months ago

          Nah. It’s worked for 50 years and if we get another 30 then it’s done its job well. Government is supposed to review and adjust things as time goes on and Social Security Numbers weren’t intended to uniquely identify citizens. They probably expected an overhaul to be done by 2020.

          They fact that we haven’t reworked portions of it and rely on SSNs to identify citizens shows that we haven’t had a forward-thinking Congress in the last 20 years at minimum.

      • CodexArcanum
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        125 months ago

        I’m hardly the king of databases, but always using a surrogate key (either an auto-incremented integet or a random uuid) has done me pretty well over the years. I had to engineer a combination of sequential timestamp with a hash extension as a key for one legacy system (keys had to be unique but mostly sequential), and an append-only log store would have been a better choice than an RDBMS, but sometimes you make it work with what you have.

        Natural keys are almost always a bad idea though. SSNs aren’t natural, which is one pitfall: implicitly relying on someone else’s data practices by assuming their keys are natural. But also, nature is usually both more unique than you want (every snowflake is technically unique) and less than you’d hoped (all living things share quite a lot of DNA). Which means you end up relying on how good your taxonomy is for uniqueness. As opposed to surrogate keys, which you can assure the uniqueness of, by definition, for your needs.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 months ago

      (if your id is stolen and you arduously go about getting a new one)

      I thought I had lost mine once and got a new SSN card, they don’t give you a new number, it’s the same number

      • @[email protected]
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        315 months ago

        The SSN is supposed to just be a number that you give your employers and the IRS so that your social security (the USs blanket retirement savings/pension system) contributions get logged correctly to you and then when you retire you can use that number to get the social security benefits that you paid into. The number has ended up being used for all sorts of things because the USA is slightly broken because it is SORT OF a unique ID number for each US citizen, except of course that it wasn’t intended to be that, SSNs are only supposed to be used from first social security contribution (first paycheck) to last social security payout (death) so naturally they can just be recycled.

          • CodexArcanum
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            135 months ago

            He’s complaining that a number isn’t unique and is being poorly used, but the number isn’t supposed to be unique and he’s complaining that it’s not being used in a way that experts are specifically warned not to use it in.

            But on a second, stupider layer, this is the system those numbers originate from. So however they use them is how they’re supposed to be used.

            But then, back above that first stupid layer, on an even more basic and surface level degree of stupid, the government definitely uses SQL databases. It uses just… so many of them.

        • CodexArcanum
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          135 months ago

          This is a good summary. I had to go pull up wikipedia on it since I roughly knew that social security was a national insurance/pension kind of system but am actually hazy on details.

          The major issue with it as id (aside from DBA’s gripes about it) is that credit agencies and banks started to rely on it for credit scores and loans. You see, the US has a social scoring system (what we always accuse China of) but the only thing it tracks is how reliable you are about paying off debts. So with your home address, name, and SSN, basically anyone can take out loans or credit cards in your name. This will then damage your credit score, making it harder to get loans, buy a home, rent property, or even get a job.

          That’s why Americans are always concerned about having our identity stolen: because you don’t need a lot of info to financially ruin someone’s life.

      • mesa
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        5 months ago

        It doesn’t. There is no truely unique ID in the US.

        Source: myself. Worked on health insurance and it was hell.

        • CodexArcanum
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          255 months ago

          It’s wild too. I’ve been in the hospital a lot lately and in addition to a bar-code wristband, every healthcare worker, before doing anything with me (the patient) will ask my full name and either birthday or address and then double-check it against the wrist band. This is to make sure, at every step, that they didn’t accidentally swap in some other patient with the same name. (Not so uncommon, lots of men have their father’s name.)

          Meanwhile in like Iceland, everyone gets assigned a personal GPG key at birth so you can just present you public cert as identification, not to mention send private messages and secure your state-assigned crypto-wallet. Not saying such a system is without flaw but it seems a lot better than what we’re doing!

          • @[email protected]
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            75 months ago

            This is a joke right? I really really hope that they aren’t trusting randoms to know how to manage a gpg key properly.

            It’s hard enough to get people actually interested in it to do it correctly.

            And using gpg to constantly identify yourself would mean needing to keep multiple copies of your private key all over the place. I find it unlikely that regular people are issuing new keys and revocation certs properly. Not to mention having canonical key servers (maybe the government could manage that, but the individual is responsible for maintaining a way to get the canonical most up to date key)

            Using gpg backfires because if you lose access to the key or it’s compromised (say by putting it on your phone) you lose everything. They work for people who know what they are doing because you are supposed to issue keys for specific tasks and identities, but there is just no way that that is happening.

          • @[email protected]
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            135 months ago

            You want them to do that regardless of the how the country keeps track of individuals. The point of all that asking is to make sure they have the right patient for the right procedure.

            You don’t want to have something amputated or removed unless you have to.

            • @[email protected]
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              25 months ago

              This has happened many times. In the last city I lived in, a man went in to have a leg amputated and they got the wrong one, so he ended up with zero legs.

      • @[email protected]
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        95 months ago

        When you die your social is reused and assigned to someone else eventually. This is what makes it not unique. If something were to screw up in the process the new person could have debt from the prior person for example even though it is not their debt. Another concept common is using the last 4. There are so many conflicts when using just last 4 in a database its bad design.

        • @[email protected]
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          15 months ago

          When you die your social is reused and assigned to someone else eventually.

          This is not true, but often repeated. From SSA

    • @[email protected]
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      135 months ago

      It’s supposed to be unique and might actually be now, but there are def duplicate ssns out there. Craziest identity situation I was told by a project manager of government system that is all about identities. Same First, Same last,same Date of Birth, same SSN; different people.

      • @[email protected]
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        65 months ago

        Weird story, and I have to assume this is data entry error, identity theft, or something else: I couldn’t sign up for a hospital billing platform because my name and full birthdate (including year) conflicted with someone else in the system. I called the hospital billing department and they were very confused about the whole situation. It didn’t really get resolved, and I basically had to let it go to collections so that I could pay because of the shitty system. I don’t have a very common name, and never have had this problem before.

    • Maeve
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      125 months ago

      I don’t know all the ways but my identity was stolen and I never knew until my attorney was looking at something else for me in conjunction with the social security commission where I lived, and it popped up under a different name. They then accessed my records using other information, and it was the same number. It took a long time to get it sorted. A few years.

      • @[email protected]
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        It’s happened twice to me, I’m now 41. I was able to get it resolved both times but it was not easy and in the first case seriously hurt my credit score for seven years.

    • @[email protected]
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      65 months ago

      Just curious, but if SSNs were not recycled after death, would there be any reason not to use them as a primary key?

      • tiredofsametab
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        45 months ago

        As the user posted, one human can have more than one SSN in their lifetime. Many humans will never have an SSN. Some of those humans may have a TIN. Some humans may have at least one TIN and one SSN at some point.

      • @[email protected]
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        5 months ago

        They’re sequential, so the values above and below yours are valid SSNs of people born in the same hospital around the same time.

        This would make it trivially easy to get access to records you shouldn’t

        • @[email protected]
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          65 months ago

          Isn’t that assuming you have access to doing arbitrary SQL queries on the database? Then you’d by definition have access to records you shouldn’t.

          • borari
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            No. You can have control over specific parameters of an SQL query though. Look up insecure direct object reference vulnerabilities.

            Consider a website that uses the following URL to access the customer account page, by retrieving information from the back-end database: https://insecure-website.com/customer_account?customer_number=132355 Here, the customer number is used directly as a record index in queries that are performed on the back-end database. If no other controls are in place, an attacker can simply modify the customer_number value, bypassing access controls to view the records of other customers.

    • hope
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      SSNs are not reissued after death and never have been. I’ve been seeing a lot of people comment this, but I’m not sure where they’re getting it from. (They’re not unique for other reasons, however.)

  • @[email protected]
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    5 months ago

    You know, the thing that always seemed really scary about the OG Nazis is that they were competent, intelligent, put-together people that were just fucking evil. Then you look at the US Nazis and the fucking bozo density is off the charts, but they seem to be succeeding anyway.

    Three possibilities come to mind:

    • These bozos are going to find out, hard and soon.
    • The OG Nazis were actually bozos too.
    • Competence and intelligence doesn’t actually matter in running a fascist regime
    • @[email protected]
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      495 months ago

      The nazis weren’t as competent and intelligent as you suggest, that work was outsourced to IBM - Yes, that IBM.

      You know that Watson product that IBM sells and advertises so often? R one that plays chess and was on jeopardy (Fun!) Turns out that Watson was the name of the dude that signed off on them accelerating the Holocaust for the nazis. Some believe the nazis couldn’t have been nearly as efficient at unrepentant large scale murder without IBM joining the fray, yet they skate on by…

      • @[email protected]
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        5 months ago

        The very first hacker purposely damaged the contact that read the value that stored if a citizen was Jewish on the punch cards of census data in occupied France (if I’m remembering correctly) it’s not known how many he saved but he did pay the ultimate price and died in the concentration camps for his sabotage efforts

        Edit: my memory was close. René Carmille specifically delayed the June 1941 report on the numbers of Jewish citizens and foreigners so that it still wasn’t complete by the time of his ultimate arrest in 1944, and utilized his position to create extremely real fake identities for escaping refugees amongst other resistance actions

    • @[email protected]
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      165 months ago

      I think some of the more intelligent US Nazis are letting the bozos do their thing and riding the coat-tails and avoiding direct blame if things turn. I’m looking at a good chunk of the House and Senate.

    • @[email protected]
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      1735 months ago

      The OG Nazis were actually bozos too, they just had very good propaganda. So good that you’re still seeing the effects today.

      • @[email protected]
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        685 months ago

        They were more competent bozos. They ran Germany the way that your stupid friend gets laid more often because they aren’t smart enough to be embarrassed by themselves and they know only one goal.

        Whereas these guys run America like an ugly stupid person that insists that no, actually, they have already in fact convinced you to sleep with them despite what your words say and the goal is to confuse you into bed.

        • @[email protected]
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          425 months ago

          The best decision that nazis ever made was not to indiscriminately purge the military and bureaucracy. Purges certainly did happen but they were focused on the political class and very targeted elsewhere.

          They kept the systems people depended on running well to not immediately create massive public backlash… they also got lucky as hell. The military and populace were deeply bitter after WW1 and they leveraged grand gestures to great effect while changing relatively little administratively. The fucks in the US are making flaccid grand gestures while tearing down systems people actually depend on.

      • @[email protected]
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        335 months ago

        Is it also a case of survivorship bias? Like, I am not super versed in Nazi history, but there are famous “smart” Nazis like Goebbels and Himmler and Speer, but are they only well known because a) they slowly emerged as influential and/or b) it became clear years later that they were the ones behind the wheel?

        'Cause I do think that trump and musk are dumb as bricks, but I don’t think Steve Bannon is, and there are probably others like him…

          • @[email protected]
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            45 months ago

            I’m no expert, but this podcast series seems to suggest Von Braun was mainly very focused on shooting rockets to the moon and fiddling the right guys to get crazy amounts of funding for that goal. I’m not saying he wasn’t a nazi, he was, but exterminating jews etc was probably not his mean focus in life… In the Von Braun case it was propaganda towards his own leaders, to get lots of money. The reason he’s well remembered is not propaganda but because what he tried actually worked out very well and was the basis for pretty much every rocket since. If he’ld happen to live in Soviet Russia, he would probably have become a member of the communist party, whatever would get him more money/free labor for shooting new trials towards space.

        • @[email protected]
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          25 months ago

          🤔 💭

          What got President Musk & his sidekick elected, or rather what made their campaign successful?

          Low IQ but high emotional intelligence or like sociopathic intelligence?

          • @[email protected]
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            25 months ago

            Turns out when you’re born with a silver spoon in hand and are a dumb sociopath, you win in life instead of living in prison.

      • @[email protected]
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        15 months ago

        The high leadership were absolute bozos, except for their propaganda guy (Goebel?). And at the lower levels, they had good engineering (still do). Thankfully the higher ups were more interested in building an über-weapon (because that’s good propaganda) than actually winning the war.

        Let’s hope the current crop of nazis se their downfall faster. Actually, fuck hope. Let’s make them.

    • NaevaTheRat [she/her]
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      705 months ago

      the OG Nazis were dumb as bricks lmao. Weird nerds with massive egos half of which believed in magic.

      • @[email protected]
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        415 months ago

        Hitler and Himmler believed in “World Ice Theory” which was put forth by some German crackpot who stated the base matter of all reality was ice.

        • borari
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          5 months ago

          Every German person I’ve ever met talks so confidently about shit that you just kinda assume they know what they’re talking about, until they start talking about a domain you’re an expert in and you realize they’re actually kinda dumb but with good vocabulary.

    • @[email protected]
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      225 months ago

      Hopefully all 3 but as the other poster said, Nazis really were clowns.

      Sure, Hitler had some early successes militarily - combined arms blitzkrieg was a new deal and effective - but it’s not like that won the war. Besides which there is just so much dumbass occult bullshit going on in the background with the Nazis like you would not believe.

      You don’t need to be smart or super competent to get a bunch of people killed. You just need enough people willing to pull the triggers and for the rest of the people to go along. Going along is easy until it ends with shit like the Holocaust.

      • @[email protected]
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        195 months ago

        Going along is easy until it ends with shit like the Holocaust.

        Have you seen the reactions every time someone suggests it’d be nice if Israel stopped shooting people and taking their land? We’re pro-genocide now.

        • KillingTimeItself
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          135 months ago

          to be fair, the israeli palestine conflict is significantly longer running than anything that the germans managed, and so far, hasn’t killed 6 million people, so there’s that.

          Part of the problem is that it’s really really difficult to see the magnitude of the issue until the dust has settled, part of the reason we know how many people died in the holocaust is due to the work of various jewish archivists/historians that have spent decades crawling through information trying to piece together what they can, paired with the reasonably meticulous documentation that the germans were known for. (though i can’t confirm that one)

          Up until we practically landed boots IN germany, we didn’t really have any idea what was going on, that’s part of why it took so long for anything to be done.

          Thankfully it’s 2024 and we have modern technology, so you can’t exactly just “hide” things like genocide anymore, it’s a lot more apparent.

          • @[email protected]
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            15 months ago

            Up until we practically landed boots IN germany, we didn’t really have any idea what was going on, that’s part of why it took so long for anything to be done

            There were people who specifically got themselves arrested to observe conditions within the concentration camps and then escape because some reports of conditions were too unbelievable

            • KillingTimeItself
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              15 months ago

              There were people who specifically got themselves arrested to observe conditions within the concentration camps and then escape because some reports of conditions were too unbelievable

              literally makes my point for me lol

          • @[email protected]
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            145 months ago

            It’s not 2024, and the inability to hide things has apparently just made it more blatant when we decide to ignore genocide.

            • KillingTimeItself
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              55 months ago

              lmao yeah it is 2025 now, still stuck in last years shit i guess lol.

              Anyway.

              and the inability to hide things has apparently just made it more blatant when we decide to ignore genocide.

              yeah, you would think with how easy it would be to expose and report genocide, that if genocide were happening everybody would immediately know about it and be worried about, and move to do things to prevent it.

    • @[email protected]
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      465 months ago

      It’s absolutely the second one. They basically all had brain damage from ww1 (who knew explosions are bad for you) and several of them including Hitler were drugged the fuck up. Julius Streicher was a clown, but not like a funny or sad clown, more like pathetic, like honestly comparable to someone from 8chan. Goebbels was a creepy loser. Hitler was a meth addict with ibs and anger issues who spent his last days just destroying the air quality of the bunker he would die in and kept invading countries despite already being at war. Heidrich died by personally chasing after antifascists who happened to have a grenade. And that’s not touching on their archeological or spiritual beliefs which are on par with qanon for believability and sensibility

      • @[email protected]
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        115 months ago

        Yep, the actual competence was basically in the army (inherited from a long military tradition), so it’s important that those generals don’t cave.

      • @[email protected]
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        25 months ago

        Heidrich died by personally chasing after antifascists who happened to have a grenade.

        That’s a fucked up way to describe the assassination.

    • @[email protected]
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      195 months ago

      Just look at the military decisions Hitler made, that was luckily an incompetent guy thinking he’s smarter than everyone else. That rings a bell, doesn’t it?

      In the long run, making less stupid decisions wouldn’t most likely have changed the outcome, but even more people would likely have died (and unfortunately the people executing the murder of the Jews weren’t as incompetent as their glorious leader).

      • Boomkop3
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        55 months ago

        A lot of behaviour in politics is emotionally driven, and sustained by the lazyness of voters not learning how the system they live in works.

        If anything, I think this requires more emotional intelligence and perhaps acting skills.

    • @[email protected]
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      175 months ago

      OG Nazis were master manipulators, dressed cool as fuck and their propaganda machine was one of the best ever. Intelligent? There is no hard evidence of that, and their military strategies were poorly thought. They had fucking cool weapons and equipment, so maybe good engineers were involved, but that’s it.