Programmer Humor

I get your point but I disagree. I think both Tony Stark and Justin Hammer are more competent than Elon.

Hammer was no where near as good as Tony but he did make some good stuff.

I would say he’s more like Obadiah Stane, an opportunist taking credit for others work.

In fairness he was able to recognise which companies to buy

I think this is just survivorship bias. There are millions of wealthy individuals investing in companies every single day. Occasionally these gambles pay off and make people extremely wealthy.

Most of the time the people who succeed just spend their incredibe wealth and live a quiet happy life.

But there are others who crave attention. These individuals bully their way into prestigious positions and pretend that they're leading the company.

Elon is that kind of person. He started wealthy, bet his money on companies that succeeded. Then took the CEO role so he would get credit for the companys' successes.

If ever people dare stop paying attention to him he'll do something drastic to recapture the spotlight on.

He's the kind of person who will stand on stage and do a nazi salute just because he wants you to look at him.

The excel file contains the data. It's equivalent to the database.

The excel program is how you interact with the data. SQL is how you interact with databases.

Doesn't matter how the data is structured inside the database. You can ask in the SQL language and you will receive an SQL answer.

In the context of this tweet most important differences are:

SQL is a language for querying databases.

Most common used databases are relational databases. With relational databases you can setup, well, relations and constraints.

Imagine you have 2 tables (2 excel sheets) one with people, and one with home ownership. You can set the following constraint: (1) each person shows up only once in the people table. And the following relation: (2) every home owner must refer to an existing person in people table.

When modifying the table contents, the system checks if no constraints or relations are violated.

Excel, just like a badly designed relational databse, would, for example, have no problem with duplicate people, or home ownership referring to non-existant people.

A whole lot. Too much to cover in one post in any kind of detail.

A modern relational database management system (RDBMS) is a highly optimized beast. How it accesses storage is very carefully considered. It has a whole mini language for defining relations between data. There are tools for debugging specific queries to make them faster. They index data with tradeoffs between read and write speeds. There are sophisticated locking mechanisms so multiple users can read and write at the same time. They have transactions where many alterations can be packed up together and written efficiently at once. Those transactional alterations are atomic, meaning there are guarantees that all of them happen or none of them happen. The entire thing is based on set theory, and it has survived attacks by many other pretenders to the throne for decades.

And if you're using Oracle, you can get all that while paying a highly optimized pricing model set up by the best financial advisors Larry Ellison can find to maximize value extraction from your company.

The amount of data, sql is designed to manage large datasets, millions of rows. Excel has its limits.

I think it was something to do with COVID stats during the initial outbreak, but yes, yes it was the UK government and their bizarre love affair with stupid tech choices.