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What is up with the bird at the end?
A bot strips away all spaces and letters that aren’t A, T, C or G, then treats the rest like a genetic sequence and checks it against some database.
Presumably, it runs through many terabytes of data for each comment, as the Gallinula chloropus alone has about 51 billion base pairs, or some 15 GiB. The Genome Ark DB, which has sequences of two common moorhens, contains over 1 PiB. I wonder if a bored sequencing lab employee just wrote it to give their database and computing servers something to do when there is no task running.
No, I won’t download the genome and check how close the “closest match” is but statistically, 93 base pairs are expected to recur every 2186 bits or once per 1040 PiB. By evaluating the function (4-1)m × mℂ93 ≥ 493 ÷ (pebi × 8), one can expect the 93-base sequence to appear at least once in a 1 PiB database if m ≥ 32 mismatches or over ⅓ are allowed. Not great.
This assumes true randomness, which is not true of naturally occuring DNA nor letters in English text, but should be in the right ballpark. Maybe fewer if you account for insertions/deletions.
The FAQ on the user’s page says:
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They are not a bot, just neurodivergent
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They’re using BLAST
ie, this
https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
They did not code anything beyond a very simple regex function that strips down posts to a t c g, and then they copy paste it into the above website, then copy paste the output.
Hell, you can see they aren’t even removing apostrophes and quotes, not even forcing it to all lower case or all upper case, removing spaces and line breaks…
… as a former database admin/dev/analyst, I was losing my fucking mind at the notion that someone with direct access to a genomics DB, would just hook it up to tumblr, via an automated bot, and spam the db with non work related requests, all on their own, when they can barely modify a string correctly.
Thank fucking god this is just using a publicly available, no doubt extremely low fidelity, watered down search via an API.
… You need literal, state of the art, absurdly expensive, power hungry, and secure supercomputers to be able to do genomic comparisons.
Probably one of the dumbest things you could do, quickest way to get fired, and then never be able to work in the field again, would be for a random genomics lab worker who does not know how to code to open up a whole bunch of security holes and cost god knows how much money (and damage if you write bad code) running frivolous bs searches in their state of the art genomics db… for a tumblr bot.
Not a bot, just neuro
Hilarious every time.
I mean, I am also autistic, so thanks for perpetuating the social stigma against neurodivergent people, I guess.
I thought it was funny. I’m a typical. Have had several relationships with neurodivergent people, including my wife.
I do find a lot of the quirks funny or cute. Was just giving my girl shit about the Princess and the Pea because she is extremely particular about her pillow situation. The pillows and stuffies have names. That shit is funny and it makes me grin when I have to help sort the pile.
Why do you find it offensive?
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