Post

Philip Bump
@pbump.com

When I heard Musk say this on Tuesday, my assumption was that it was a programming issue. Because I can code and have written to databases and because I am familiar with other examples of default values being misinterpreted. Yet somehow Musk isn't.

3.8K reposts12.9K likes

MyCabbages!!
@mycabbagesoo.bsky.social

sorry but this smells like disinformation. it doesn't actually make any sense. 1.) ISO-8601 is not an integer from epoch format, it's a calendar representation 2.) I've never heard of any system that uses 1875 as an epoch date. Spent a few minutes looking and didnt find any either

Wilhelmus Janus
@wilhelmusjanus.bsky.social

No, it's worse, much much worse. Apply Hanlon's Razor in Reverse; always, no exception. You might want to read up on the blistering analysis by his 14-year long buddy Philip Low @brainking.bsky.social . My synopsis: bsky.app/profile/wilh...

Wilhelmus Janus@wilhelmusjanus.bsky.social

It is rather challenging to find precedent to the incinerating declaration on Rasmuskputin by his 14-year long former buddy Philip Low @brainking.bsky.social , other than what was once hammered on the door of a church, by Martin Luther. #1/3

iclee3.bsky.social
@iclee3.bsky.social

I think Musk has risen waaaaaaaaaaay beyond his level of incompetence. I'm curious to see how his talent for self-owns plays out. He may accidentally actually drain the swamp. A big part of rich people controlling governments has been that they're discreet about it. Musk has blown that up.

Night Mists
@nightmysts.bsky.social

I remember this came up yrs ago. Under Obama's admin. So they know how it works. Just like they know no one was eating dogs and cats or that kids were using kitty litters in bathrooms. Or kids don't go to school and come home a new sex.

M
@msderohanes.bsky.social

Neither Elon Musk nor the creeps he hired to hijack the federal government systems are smart enough, much less qualified enough to do what they're doing. Each decision we're learning about shows them lacking the required merits to do such complex task & out of their depth. bsky.app/profile/jaso...

Jason Koebler@jasonkoebler.bsky.social

Scoop: The databases powering DOGE.gov are insecure, and people outside the government have already pushed their own updates to the site to prove it: www.404media.co/anyone-can-p...

404media.coAnyone Can Push Updates to the DOGE.gov Website"THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN."
ZoomZoom91
@zoomzoom91.bsky.social

I'm a 30 -year IT professional. No one involved in this is going to get a job in IT ever again. "Thank you for submitting your resume. Oh, you were part of the inept coup of the United States? Don't call us we'll get back to you".

M
@msderohanes.bsky.social

In a properly functioning govt, they would go to prison. Their breach of govt systems is unauthorized by law. Their reckless handling of our PII is unauthorized by law. A case can be made that they are in violation of a few laws already, regardless of whom they threatened to gain access, imo.

mrtoads.bsky.social
@mrtoads.bsky.social

He’s a forking idiot who believes he’s a genius because he’s grabbed a bunch of money. His acolytes are stupid kids who’ve been trained to hate anyone smarter or more human. Their only goal is to tear down what they don’t understand and was built by actual smart people.

Maureen Hickey
@maureenhickey.bsky.social

Please go to Settings/Accessibility and turn on Require ALT text before posting images. ALT text helps: vision-impaired; people for whom the image won't load; people for whom the font is too small; search engines.

Multiverse Wanderer
@multiversewanderer.bsky.social

So basically you're saying we have idiots at large in places they don't belong. Yes, we knew that. But also yes, WE NEED PROOF OF THEIR IDIOCY. This is EXACTLY the kind of info we need to get to what little media we have left that's telling the whole truth!

Multiverse Wanderer
@multiversewanderer.bsky.social

It's dangerous to paint with too broad a brush. (In fact that's what makes so many of their claims about the "radical left" so ridiculous.) There are MILLIONS of voters out there not very tuned into all this, who lean right but have no idea how dangerous 47 is. There are still some we can reach.

Sin
@snackney.bsky.social

I'm not saying Trump supporters don't care about evidence because I think they're stupid, I'm saying it because they have showed it to be true time and time again.

Sin
@snackney.bsky.social

The idea that there is some magical piece of evidence that would shock people who have been uninterested in the mountains of proof of Trump's lies and corruption we have to date is naive at best.

Sin
@snackney.bsky.social

I applaud your optimism that there is anyone who has ignored the past 9 years of Trump and his cronies but will for some reason now wake up and take notice. I'm imagining watching someone actively burning to death and being told "if we could only tell them they're on fire!"

StuffAboutHockey
@stuffabouthockey.bsky.social

When chatGPT first came out, people were posting their exchanges with it. This is one of my fave exchanges someone posted on that other place. Will put alttext request replies, don't gave access to source to copy/ paste. (Cont)

🐝 “Bee” 🐝
@bee990.bsky.social

Wouldn’t be surprising. Elmo is NOT the “genius” so many people believe him to be. The only thing he’s ever done is to bring money into a project, and then claim its prize for himself, while saying, “Look what I achieved!” Examples are, PayPal, Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX, et al

King of Cake Believe
@504spyboy.bsky.social

Elon Musk and his neo-Nazi pedophile-enabling hackers also apparently don't know anything about data models, or basic COBOL programming solutions to avoid and/or remove duplications. bsky.app/profile/504s...

King of Cake Believe@504spyboy.bsky.social

Anytime I hear someone say "de-duplicated" my immediate visceral reaction is to think this is an overly-ambitious boisterous spreadsheet monkey who knows nothing about actual normalized data models used in real databases, and to then discredit anything they say after that about data integrity. 1/

Carol Murchie
@carolmurchie.bsky.social

Social Security also maintains a "Death Index" that is a searchable database used in genealogy to verify people's date and place of death since its inception. My first guess is that they found that and didn't know. But lack of knowledge in assembly language I suspect is why these kids scare me.

Strategy Science
@strategyscience.bsky.social

I've worked heavily with government data sets. One of the primary factors in why analysis can take so long is bc of changes in how data was coded over the years taking a while to recode everything to clean the data. The fact they don't even know dates are a common issue in fed data is troubling.

Strategy Science
@strategyscience.bsky.social

If they're combining any different agency data sets at all, that's also going to be problematic since different agencies have different fiscal years (often some start in January, others in March, others in October). It's a real problem they have no one familiar with the data to check them.

parseword
@parseword.bsky.social

These are the bros who were trying to use an LLM to convert documents from one format to another. Who don't know to set the moderation bit on an enterprise-wide mailing list of 13,000 recipients. The fact that they're so siloed into "AI alone can fix it" may have briefly spared us more destruction.

John Hoyabembe 🦋
@johnhoyabembe.bsky.social

My programming experience is opening the control panel of windows, and even I'm aware that COBOL is an antiquated language that requires specialized knowledge to work and update. I fully expected these dumbass kids to break everything.

aequanimitas
@id10terror.bsky.social

LOL, would be comical if he didn't have more money than 50% of the countries on earth and 99.999999999% of people and he wasn't in the process of a hostile take over of the U.S. and wasn't in charge of a space program with satellite access and wasn't a Nazi.

Jason
@jtavt.bsky.social

If the birthdate is unknown why not set a null value and then a null value for age since it can't be calculated? That's how I'd handle it.

elaine
@elainealimonti.bsky.social

Yes he is immediately drawn to the wild and crazy explanation, it’s always maybe the husband of the speaker of the house was attacked because he’s in a gay love triangle. Somewhere along the way he turned into the neighborhood tin foil hat guy.

Robert Stross
@rstross.bsky.social

How can they be so f-ing stupid!? The hubris is astounding! All you have to do is look at a copy-book, or like 5 seconds of investigation. It’s not rocket science! Oh wait - I said something funny.

Stephanie
@steph-mondeau.bsky.social

Same. I am from IT as well. The bs they are selling bothers me being from the same industry as well. We need to start a big whistleblower group so there is some oversight. How he is playing on the ignorance of people with technology pisses me off. We see the intentional misleading. Layman cant.

Jame Dudy Jench
@diarrhea.pro

How many times are we going to be surprised at must obviously not having any engineer skills or knowledge. He buys shit and takes credit. That's all he does. That's all he's ever done. He calls himself a genius and an engineer, and calls the employees who create his wealth 'retards.' He's a con man.

Craig
@thelordgod.bsky.social

It's just a collection of the absolute dumbest, absolute most incompetent working the absolute most vindictive, absolute most banally evil pieces of shit that exist today.

VanillaRage
@vanillarage.bsky.social

The great American heist—not by spies in the night, but by polished hands in daylight. An unelected oligarch pulls the strings,and a simple fool nods along. The Treasury? Looted. Institutions? Hollowed. The thieves? Security-cleared, barely old enough to rent a car. No invasion needed—America wakeup

EllieBQueen
@ellebqueen.bsky.social

I worked w multiple HR/Payroll software migrations, including a custom COBOL system. Grok is right about source documents eg I-9docs (birth certs or passports). The assertion re dead people comes from a lack of experience engaging w soft upgrades/migrations w personnel systems.

Jadey Character
@lampjaded.bsky.social

Whenever I've coded engines to consider dates across various platforms, I usually end up looking at everything that's going to be supported and using the most recent one because the default/zero dates are different EVERYWHERE.

Jadey Character
@lampjaded.bsky.social

I swear right-wingers are often so much worse about security because they the confidence and presumption extends to their code, like a FORCE OF WILL AND AUTHORITY will prevent hackers from busting this Julius Caesar algorithm.

Ann Sharon
@annsharon.bsky.social

Or other things so they can control from a distance or little bombs to go off. You likely avoided giving access to those with cyber criminal connections or histories. krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen...

krebsonsecurity.comTeen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past associ...
Cats Working
@catsworking.bsky.social

Whenever anyone inside the government figures out what Elon's pimply incel punks have done to the computer systems, the kids will meet the same fate as that teen idiot Trump hired in Butler PA to fake an assassination attempt. Dead kids tell no tales.

Kendra Abel
@kendrama.bsky.social

Which is exactly why they’re recruiting inexperienced future scapegoats for all of this. Anyone with any experience being stabbed in the back by an evil boss would have taken one look & said, “Thanks, but naw.”

Jeffrey
@bwthemoose56.bsky.social

Much of the same thing would happen in our clinics, we had many refugees who lost their paperwork in the wars they were escaping, and didn’t know or prove their DOB— so we had a lot of 010119xx birthdays.

Omar Sultan
@omarsultan.me

Is not surprising--modernizing that would be 100s of millions of dollars over several years, which no one wants to pay for ("as long as it still works"). The dirty little secret is that enterprise IT is not a whole lot better.

🪑
@naturarerum.bsky.social

I believe 8601 is just a string representation of date without an epoch and 1969/1970 is the Unix epoch. But I agree with you that the claim looks wrong. A quick look at IBM's COBOL shows a DATE-OF-INTEGER function that has an epoch in January 1st, 1601 - also not a match.

Stephen "Chaotic" Neutral
@kneutch.bsky.social

It's important to note that the system they pulled this from doesn't need to currently be using that specific ISO standard. If the system used that format at any point in it's upgrade path, any records with the default date entered during that time period would still be in the current system.

Terraformer
@terraformer.bsky.social

ahh, but the nugget is "out there" now that 150-year olds are still getting SS checks and that's all their supporters need to hear. Same as it ever was: say outrageous thing, outrageous thing is clearly wrong, but outrageous thing has been heard - and those doing the hearing don't care about facts

Lorrie Leaver
@lorrieleaver.bsky.social

The age scam for pensions has been happening for decades and mainly by the insurance companies themselves. The information is being manipulated by T&M to make it look worse. In Australia a tribal group realised that they could pickle the thumb of their deceased leader and get money. AMP not USA!

Steve O'Donnell
@steveodonnell.bsky.social

That's why you need crotchety old—knowledgeable, highly skilled—workers around. The federal workforce may be bloated and its systems may be antiquated, but you don't fix the problem by offering take-it-or-leave-it severance packages and then letting teenagers to mess around unsupervised in the code.

Jo Sharp
@jofeanelwa.bsky.social

Of course he isn't. He's very good at one thing and that's getting credit for things. He's that person in the group project who gets the hard workers to do the maths so that somebody does it, and then pretends he did it.

DeniseKS_Syd 🇦🇺 🇩🇪 🇧🇷
@deniseks.bsky.social

You highlighted the danger of allowing DOGE to have access to government databases. Who are the victims? I imagine that black and native Americans are the group most likely to fall in the category of ‘unknown data of birth' and therefore show as born in 1875. Yet, Musk screams FRAUD! Despicable!

Daniel Farina
@danfarina.bsky.social

Ironically this is the kind of thing an LLM would have a good shot of researching instantly, if the questioner knew enough to be suspicious about the bunching of data representing a plausible default.

Alice Nomdefamille
@dnho.bsky.social

Maybe people should stop assuming the far right is just stupid. They play stupid in order to fool the people into thinking what they want. If it doesn't work, they can always pretend it was just a misunderstanding.

Jenny
@jaygirl80.bsky.social

I’ve been shocked they ere able to figure out at system code code would be written in an old language. My own company has issues with that. A friend is constantly working at his own company because he knows some ancient code. These kids aren’t as smart as they think they are. Elon too

Button
@boombutton.bsky.social

They haven't fired the legacy cobol engineers yet. Wired reported that they're babysitting the DOGE folks for fear that if they didn't, they'd break something catastrophically.

M Allen Pryor
@budvaropa.bsky.social

The issue began with UNIX systems Dates in most UNIX systems are stored as the number of seconds after midnight at the start of Jan 1, 1970 A ZERO DATE is Jan 1, 1970 In 2038, this will cause another "Y2K" issue for many UNIX systems since 32 bits of seconds end Jan 19, 2038 Musk doesn't know this?

Mandio
@artstruss.bsky.social

My husband was hired to teach COBOL at community college 15 years ago because almost all the insurance companies in town ran on it and coders were retiring. The company’s have finally upgraded but if this language stops them, I’m all for it.