• sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
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    6 hours ago

    The FAQ on the user’s page says:

    1. They are not a bot, just neurodivergent

    2. 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.