I’m a tech interested guy. I’ve touched SQL once or twice, but wasn’t able to really make sense of it. That combined with not having a practical use leaves SQL as largely a black box in my mind (though I am somewhat familiar with technical concepts in databasing).

With that, I keep seeing [pic related] as proof that Elon Musk doesn’t understand SQL.

Can someone give me a technical explanation for how one would come to that conclusion? I’d love if you could pass technical documentation for that.

  • RabbitBBQ@lemmy.world
    181·
    4 days ago

    It’s more than just SQL. Social Security Numbers can be re-used over time. It is not a unique identifier by itself.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      i’ve heard conflicting reports on this, i have no idea to what degree this is true, but i would be cautious about making this statement unless you demonstrate it somehow.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          On June 25, 2011, the Social Security Administration changed the SSN assignment process to “SSN randomization”,[36] which did the following:

          The Social Security Administration does not reuse Social Security numbers. It has issued over 450 million since the start of the program, about 5.5 million per year. It says it has enough to last several generations without reuse and without changing the number of digits. https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html

          evidently they must be doing something else on the backend for this to be working, assuming there are quite literally 100M numbers, which is going to be static due to math, obviously, but they clearly can’t be reassigning numbers to 3 people on average at any given time, without some sort of external mechanism.

          There are approximately 420 million numbers available for assignment.

          https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomization.html

          that certainly doesnt seem like it would support several generations, possibly at our current birth rate i suppose.

          DDG AI bullshit tells me that there are a billion codes. https://www.marketplace.org/2023/03/10/will-we-ever-run-out-of-social-security-numbers/ this article says it’s 1 billion

          https://www.ssn-verify.com/how-many-ssns

          this website also lists it as approximately 1 billion.

          • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 days ago

            I think i see the change. They are mentioning the ssn is 9 numbers long, which is 1 longer than the 3-3-2 format wikipedia mentions. That does mean its around 999mil numbers, which ye allows for a few generations ( like, 1 or 2 lol )