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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?
Well, your story about finding certain attributes about your wife is an entirely different context, and you didn’t use the term as a pejorative.
The person I am responding to used the term as a pejorative, in reference to how a neurodivergent person could easily be confused with an automated bot.
This is inherently dehumanizing.
It’s dismissive, it equates neurodivergent people to being sterile, non emotional beings who only exist to perform complex technical tasks.
This in and of itself is a common stereotype of certain kinds of people with certain kinds of neurodiversity, but neurodiverse actually refers to a much broader range of… different styles of cognitive function, different disorders, whatever you want to call them.
So, now on top of using the term as a pejorative, contextually perpetuating a specific dehumanizing stereotype… it also equivocates a diverse group of people into an oversimplified conglomerate, which in and of itself perpetuates other stereotypes by erroneously associating aspects that may (or may not) apply to a specific subset of neurodiverse people… to all of them.
I guess I see where you’re coming from. Labels can hit different, especially when the label doesn’t fit all the recipients. Being labeled can cause offense. Especially if it’s derogatory. I don’t think it was meant to be derogatory by op, but it certainly wasn’t very sensitive.
The difficult part is that it’s a spectrum. Especially when it comes to level of function. Profound autism is a totally different animal from high functioning people. And there is a whole spectrum of differences in how the divergency manifests between individuals.
Savantism and savant-like actions are fascinating to a lot of typicals, myself included. That level of focus and ability to make the connections or internally churn the information is not an accessible state for most of us. It’s like seeing real magic.
(Obviously, not all neurodivergent folks have savant-like behaviors, most likely just a minority. No idea of the prevalence.)
So, a neurodivergent person inputting letters scraped from Tumblr posts into a genome search engine is funny as hell because it’s such a strange thing to do and produces an interesting result. Why would someone do that? Why would you even think to do it in the first place?
My wife does absolutely hilarious shit all the time. Our house is full of laughter. She’s wickedly sarcastic and full of black humor.
So, given that I think some of the behaviors are awesome while being hysterically funny, what is an inoffensive way to engage in humor about neurodivergent folks, in your opinion? Are there any preferred terms that are shorthand for: “Autistic person pulled some fucked up logic trick or other stunt”?
Wow. Just wow. Someone is still using CGI.
Wayback Machine’s earliest capture is from 2008.
It’s a cutesy, public facing, extremely limited and low fidelity ‘demo version’ of a genomic search, basically made as a PR / Science Education promotion gimmick… by government contracted web/backend devs, in 2008.
Honestly its a miracle its still functional at all.
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That’s hilarious, but I needed the explanation too. Thanks!
The genomes have likely been indexed to make finding results faster. Google doesn’t search the entire internet when you make a query :P
I know that similar computational problems use indexing and vector-space representation but how would you build an index of TiBs of almost-random data that makes it faster to find the strictly closest match of an arbitrarily long sequence? I can think of some heuristics, such as bitmapping every occurrence of any 8-pair sequence across each kibibit in the list. A query search would then add the bitmaps of all 8-pair sequences within the query including ones with up to 2 errors, and using the resulting map to find “hotspots” to be checked with brute force. This will decrease the computation and storage access per query but drastically increase the storage size, which is already hard to manage.
However, efficient fuzzy string matching in giant datasets is an interesting problem that computer scientists must have encountered before. Can you find a good paper that works well with random, non-delimited data instead of just using the approach of word-based indices for human languages like Lucene and OpenFTS?
As per my other post, this person isn’t doing any of that.
But, since you asked for papers on generic matching algorithms, I found this during the silent conniption fit you sent me into after suggesting that some random tumblr user plugged a tumblr bot directly into a state of the art genomics db.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11227-022-04673-3
Please note that while, yes, they ran this test on a standard office computer, they were only searching against 12 million characters.
A single tebibyte of characters would be more like 1 trillion characters. A pebibyte would be more like 1
quintillionquadrillion.… much, much, much longer processing times.
Edit: Used the wrong word for stupendously large numbers that start with q.
Yeah good point, not a trivial undertaking. I’m not an expert in that area but maybe elasticsearch or similar technology is able to find matches. Although I have no idea how that works under the hood
It’s probably just ncbi
hellsitegenetics is a gimmick blog on tumblr that looks through popular posts on the website and tries to identify genetic sequences with in them and then post the creature that the genetic sequence corresponds to.
They’re a bit like haiku bot, which scans posts to see if they’re haikus and then formats the haiku and posts it, but i think hellsitegenetics is an actual person cuz they have talked about it in the past
Implied fact: a baby is capable of having a religion, despite its inability to comprehend the concept.
7th implication: Religion is genetic
Implied fact: by distinguishing the baby as Christian, there must be non-Christian babies in close proximity.
Actual Implication: You’re supposed to care more about the Christian baby than a non-Christian babies.
Unintended Implication: non-Christian babies are less likely to be hurled.
Unimplied fact: all babies in this scenario are likely to hurl, regardless of their (parents’) denomination.
I mean, Jewish boys go through a ritual to mark them as part of the religion and christening occurs early too, so I would say that religious people usually assume the baby’s religion.
Non-jewish boys often go through the same ritual, even in a jew-hating religion, because of “tradition”.
Not in my country. But my point still stands as long as there is religious significance to the ritual for some.
7th implied fact: the baby’s religion somehow plays a role in your deciding whether or not to hit it with a bat.
Eigth implied fact: The baby is durable enough to be hit by a baseball bat hard enough to fling it out of the stadium, and remain in one piece.
I don’t see that implication
The baby is hardly going to make it out of the stadium if it splashes on impact.
Maybe not all, but individual parts should be far more aerodynamic!
Are there rules for that in baseball? If the ball breaks up I assume there’s no play and they do over.
Got bored and looked it up, and there aren’t, surprisingly. At least not in the 2019 revision of the Major League Baseball rules. But they do define what a ball is, and isn’t, and a baby is not considered a valid ball (3.01).
But at least according to Rule 5.01©(1), if part of the baby gets on the batter, they might be considered “hit by pitch”, and therefore eligible to advance to first base. (It would be considered a ‘dead’ ball, which is funny, given the context.)
The rules aren’t written expecting the ball to break into bits upon impact, so it’d depend on it actually happening to get precedent.
But at least going by 4.01(a,e), it’s the umpire’s fault for providing an invalid “ball”, and they might have to clean up, since they’re tasked with replacing the “ball” if damaged.
I would assume the baby’s head is what counts as the ball, here. If it detaches in a large piece and leaves the stadium, it should likely count.
Do they have spare Christian babies on hand though?
“So you’re playing baseball, and Martha Kent is the pitcher…”
So what OOP is saying with their question is that the important attribute about that baby is that it is christian.
Meanwhile to a sane person, the important attribute about the baby is that it is a fucking baby flying through the fucking air!
If its a budhist baby I’m putting that little shit out of the park. He will be reincarnated, my conscience is clear. /s
Clearly the moral option!
Pastor approves wholeheartedly!
But to be a Christian baby it must already be baptized and will therefore go to heaven instead of fucking around with reincarnation until it manages to not be a bad person and go to Nirvana.
broke: i’m not gay but $20 is $20
woke: i’m not an atheist but millions of dollars is millions of dollars
Also, using babies instead of balls would make the game a lot less boring.
And you’ll get really intense chants, which as far as I understand it’s a huge reason to go to live stadiums. Especially from the opposing team which in this case would be the thousands of protestors outside who would inevitably be very much against this whole thing.
Inside the stadium, while yes – technically there’s a separation of two teams – they’re both there because they want to see baby homeruns. They’re all on the baby-batting team.
Those babies are already born so the “save the babies” crowd won’t care.
If it’s a muslim baby it’s totally OK to bat at it, of course.
Well, if a pitcher pitches a baby, the baby is likely dead regardless if it’s going to make it all the way to the batter. Whether the impact with your bat or the catcher’s mitt is what ultimately causes the baby to die seems to me to be an unimportant detail.
That said, since the baby is entirely unaerodynamic, it’s going to move a lot more slowly than a regular baseball, meaning there’s a chance you could save the baby by bunting (especially if you avoid the head), and if you assume the catcher has an ounce of humanity, they’ll probably be more concerned with checking on the baby rather than tagging the runner coming from third or throwing you out at first base.
So here are the options as I see it:
- bunt
- hit it hard - nobody is going to catch a mangled baby
- refuse and take the L - irrational since the baby is a goner regardless
I’d go with 1, it’s the most humane, and probably no less likely to succeed vs 2.
i like that all you needed was a hit to win but when you see the christian baby, you shift to a home run stance.
That’s because the “millions” you’d win were never contingent on you winning the game. You just made an oddly-specific bet with some really fucked up sports gamblers.
What kind of Christian baby? If it’s Pentecostal I’ll hit it out of the park, but a New Southern Reform Anabaptist baby? No way!
I love that there is also the distinct possibility of non-Christian babies up there on the mound, with the pitcher as well.
What happens if the pitcher throws a baby of a different faith? Infield fly rule that leads to a game ending double play?
Some baseball scholars consider any contact between the bat and a Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist baby to be foul bunt, and therfore an automatic strike. A Scientologist, Church of Latter Day Saints or Jehova’s Witness baby on the other hand is considered a fair ball unless caught in flight with runners on first, first and second, first and third, or bases loaded (with less than two out).
I’m imagining a controversial new Ken Burns Documentary, with an emotional forward by Tommy Lasorda.
Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.
Die, heretic!
I’d smash that baby out the park. One way ticket to see Jesus.
another implied fact: the pitcher MEANT to throw a baby, they just didn’t mean to throw a CHRISTIAN baby
There’s actually no evidence the pitcher was ever using a ball. And based off all the information provided it seems likely the pitcher has been throwing babies the entire game!
It’s also never mentioned it’s a baseball game. It says you’re a baseball player, that’s it.
Eigth implied fact : this is truly a game of basebaby (christian league), in which the standard accessory is a strictly regulated baby. It’s a license game, Smokey
Wait, what? You guys play baseball with christian babies too? No way! I thought we made that up in our neighborhood. Cool!!
I think even the best pitchers would struggle to throw a floppy baby 60 1/2 feet into the strike zone.
But what if you got enough break on it to get the batter to swing at a baby outside the zone?
That would be super impressive and I’d love to see it! (Hypothetically, of course)
A swaddled baby is anything but floppy.
Except maybe the head.
Easy homerun.
