https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/12/the-batshit-crazy-story-of-the-day-elon-musk-decided-to-personally-rip-servers-out-of-a-sacramento-data-center/

That man will be doing to same thing to important shit right now.

He did the exact same thing after taking over Twitter, talking about "poorly batched RPCs" in the timeline which makes zero sense because that's obviously not how HTTP works.

The sad thing is Elon regularly shows how much of a very judgmental, "I'm so smart" idiot* he is, but somehow I keep meeting people who think he's a genius. I guess the assumption that money=smart still holds true in the US, despite being disproven time and time again.

*Do we not have a single word for this concept? I come across this kind of person so frequently there really should be one.

Oh, I'm calling it now. This one is going to be used as an attack of trans people. Throw out the archaic and manual process of updating names in federal databases, and keep it simple by making the records immutable. Then hit them with a lovely

"You MUST use your REAL NAME (MAIDEN NAME) on government forms. If the name does not match, you will be denied."

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.

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.

All government data is processed using sed.

He definitely doesn't know what deduplicated means...

"Our databases only store in RAM because I AM THE ELECTRICITY BATTERY MASTER"

A pretentious asshole billionaire is going to be preaching us about massive fraud. Because he totally earned all his wealth through back breaking honest hard work. Give me a fucking break.

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.

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

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.

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?

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