Pretending to be soft engineer doesn’t makes you one
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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Jesus, it’s pretty damn amazing to see the potential downfall of America and how fucking ludicrously dumb it is. I thought we’d be nuked or invaded by RusFranChiMexCanAlia, but no, we’re going to be taken apart by two of the dumbest fucks that ever fucked.
He’s the mechanic who tells your ignorant granny she needs a whole new engine.
Elon likes to use new words after he learns them. Like a toddler.
No way this is right.
For those who don’t know:
Deduplication is a process in which backups of files are stored essentially with a “master” copy of that file, then each backup after that is just what has changed. So instead of 2 files that are almost identical, you have something that is the size of the original file and the changes between the first and second. So if all of your backups of a file are almost identical they take up much less space than carbon copies of each. The advantage being space savings, the disadvantage being more complexity in restoring a backup of the database in an emergency, also greater possibility of data loss if the storage media gets corrupt or damaged enough.
This is not an exact description of what deduplication is actually doing. There’s a lot more technically going on, but is enough for the layman to get a general idea of what that process looks like.
In reality there are multiple ways deduplication can exist, some are incredible like only saving unique strings/blocks, then constructing the files out of pointers to those unique blocks. So all you have is a single copy of a unique set of data, and any time that unique block comes up again, it’s referencing that golden copy of that block and is saved as a pointer to that block.
I’m not a storage expert, so this is just my understanding. But hopefully this clears up some confusion on what Elon is saying and why it is absurdly incorrect.
If what he is saying is true, then what he meant to call it would be something like the database does not use the SSN as a primary key, which would mean it is not required to be unique. At least for the “users” table (or whatever we would be called to the Treasury).
What I’m assuming is that someone said they could reduce storage costs by using deduplication on the database to reduce the overall file size of the database plus the backups and he ran to Twitter without understanding what the hell any of this means.
Also, wouldn’t there be records of the same SSN associated with original and changed names? Not that benefits would be duplicated, but the number would be associated with more than one name
Crap, one of the first lessons I teach in a relational algebra course is that SSNs are NOT unique. they are reused when someone dies. SSN and DOB are unique. The databases are keyed with this functional dependency.
I always thought Gates was an idiot (missed the significance of the network, security, internet, etc.) But Musk takes teh cake.
This months SS checks should hit the bank on Wednesday. We’ll see if he’s f’d it all up.
This is a completely meaningless statement. Star Trek technobabble. “Fire the photon torpedoes!” “We can’t, sir! They’ve deployed their tachyon field dampeners and deduplicated their database!” It’s like when he claimed that he saved CPU cycles by not running a web server but instead listening to port 8080 directly, which is exactly what a fucking web server does. Just a conman who knows a few technical phrases.
Musk going hard at fraud after blatantly influencing election votes by media manipulation is quite something.
DOGE is a con
What an absolute moron.
Given the way SSNs were issued up until the 1970s, it should not be surprising at all that duplicates might exist.
Is he trying to say there no unique constraint in the social security number field of the database? Then why not just say that? Does he not know that that is?
Sure. That’s the reality.
Presumably he ran a select * on some table, found duplicate entries and assumed it’s duplicate SSNs
The real question tho is why does he have access to all of our SSNs. I suspect many of us are going to be signed up for Tesla leases.
Well one thing he said there is true. It’s just that he’s the one doing the stealing.
If what he said was true people would be getting multiple social security payments each month, they aren’t. I have no doubt the social security database is a mess, but they don’t have the relevant knowledge needed to determine if what they claim to have found is actually a problem. And if they make a change to dedupe the data as they see fit there is no telling what downstream processes they will crater.
This will turn out to be an excuse to cancel the SS payments to the neediest and investigate them for fraud. It’s certainly a useful thing to threaten protesters with.
Ah yes, the moron who asked Twitter engineers to “print out” their code is going to clean up a system he knows nothing about.
He’s such a dumb fucker.
Holy shit, they put the entire ssn database into excel and pressed the ‘find duplicates’ button. Genius Engineer! As an IT Director, I can assure this is absolute bullshit.
What is he even talking about? Married people or changed names to the same ssn? Or is he confused about how block level deduplication works on a DB or storage array? Either way, this makes him look like an idiot to anyone with a brain. Seriously.
I think he wants access for the next election…i feel like he will play with things that make some voter ineligible to vote
Elmer actually started believing that hero worship bullshit about being a “super genius” and now he’s got an even bigger God Complex than Donnie…
As Americans, we need to stop falling into the trap of thinking the obscenely wealthy are smarter than the rest of us, better than the rest of us, and only want what’s best for the rest of us…
Does he even know how Social Security works or he just inventing shit as he goes along?
The soon to be reality of this country. Jesus.
Reminds me of people who use “remove duplicates” because it was being “annoying”
The guy claiming to be a software engineer is incorrect. Not taking Musk’s side here, just stating programming facts.
Assuming it’s a relational database, which it likely is given how old it is. The column containing the SSN can absolutely be a non-unique key. Meaning several rows can contain the same SSN. I mean realistically, most databases allow for a column, even an indexed column, to be non-unique (As in can have duplicates).
It’s also very likely they allow for duplicates intentionally. In case they need something like “pending”, or “revoked”, etc.
I once had an identity theft client who shared a SSN with someone who had the same name and DoB and was born in the same county. They both got the same SSN assigned at birth. So it can possibly happen.
But how often is questionable. And whether it happens to people who dont share other NUMIDENT data points is even more questionable.
I was given a duplicate SS# at birth and didn’t find out until I filed for student loans. They didn’t hesitate to contact me. The other person had more history, so I had to change and am on my 2nd SS#.
One of the little kids he has on his team has never written a join query or used a group by clause and dumped a csv and now he’s tweeting out idiocy. Awesome.
Elon The SSN system is shit for several reason already. No need to make up new ones
Does he ever shut up
Step1. Let’s deduplicate the SS database!
Step 2. ….
Step 3. Now anyone who has had their identity stolen is an illegal alien
Step 4. Profit.
Dear fucking god this guy has never implemented a large software system with shit data, that’s obvious.
Americans are gonna be deleted off the system and there’s gonna be zero recourse. Mark my words.
His ideas sound like mine during my first internship at college year 2 😂😂
My wife immigrated from Vietnam. One step in the process was applying for a Social Security number. This seemed to go smoothly, and she was sent a new card. We didn’t realize there was a problem until I tried to file our tax return electronically, and it was rejected. We were told there was an issue with the Social Security number, and we had to file a paper return.
At that time, SSA was still sending annual statements to everyone. When my wife got her first statement we were stunned to find 15 years of work history. She had only been in the US for a little over a year. We went to the local Social Security office to find out what was going on. After explaining what we had found, and showing them her statement, they asked to sit in the waiting room. We waited more than an hour before we were called back to the window. After that, a supervisor called us back into the office area and seated us in a cubicle.
It turned out that the Social Security computer system had looked at my wife’s full name and date of birth, and found another person with the exact same full name and date of birth. The system then presumed they were the same people, so my wife was given the other person’s SSN. What was really strange is that the computer system was told my wife hadn’t received her green card or EAD yet, so the card said “VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTHORIZATION”, even though the other person had been living and working legally in the US for more than a decade.
They finally got it sorted out, and my wife was issued a new SSN. They also gave us a letter on SSA letterhead explaining the mixup so that we could get my wife’s SSN changed on things like her job and bank accounts. We haven’t had any trouble with tax returns since then.
The point is that the computer system presumes that the humans are catching the duplicates, and the humans presume that the computer is catching them. The reality is that the customers have to catch them and point them out to the humans, who can then work around the default assumptions made by the computer.
Correct me if im wrong based on what little code ive written
But doesnt have multiple of the same variable written as seperate variables all under the first variables name cause constant errors and generally crash the system
Maybe as AI has not been trained for this situation so it makes it difficult for him to use.
De-duplicated seems to mean that the base state is that everything’s doubled? I know nothing of what he is talking about and inherently know it’s garbage.
Tell me you know nothing about databases without saying you know nothing about databases