this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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Curated Tumblr
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For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.
Image descriptions and plain text captions of written content are expected of all screenshots. Here are some image text extractors (I looked these up quick and will gladly take FOSS recommendations):
-web
-iOS
Please begin copied raw text posts (lacking a screenshot that makes it apparent it is from Tumblr) with:
# This has been reposted here to Lemmy as part of the "Curated Tumblr Project."
I made the icon using multiple creative commons svg resources, the banner is this.
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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 2^186^ bits or once per 10^40^ PiB. By evaluating the function (4-1)^m^ × mℂ93 ≥ 4^93^ ÷ (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.
That's hilarious, but I needed the explanation too. Thanks!