this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Programmer Humor

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[–] davel@lemmy.ml 40 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My gender is e, which can be represented by neither integers nor floating points.

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 26 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Can it be expressed or represented approximately in IEEE-754 form?

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 42 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Always approximated, never truly represented 😞

[–] LegoBrickOnFire@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Unless your encoding has a special value that, by definition, is euler's constant :p

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] idunnololz@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

Ah so ur gender can be represented in UTF 8.

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[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago

Everything can be represented approximatively.

e = π = 3

[–] Thorry84 36 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Obviously, there is True, False and FILE_NOT_FOUND

[–] shininghero@pawb.social 6 points 1 month ago

Better than having your gender datatype being a Bobool3ol and evaluating to "Tru(🍒🎂🍒)lse".

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 33 points 1 month ago (4 children)

There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.

[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 31 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who get ternary; those who don't; those who thought this was going to be a binary joke

[–] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who get quaternary; those who don't; those who thought this was going to be a ternary joke; those who can see where this is going...

[–] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I might be a slow learner but I'm catching on...

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Regardless of what base you're using, 10 is always the nth number. In base 10 (normal numbers), 10 is 10th. In base 2 it is the 2nd.

  1. 1
  2. 10
  3. 11

In base 16 (hexadecimal) it is the 16th.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. A
  11. B
  12. C
  13. D
  14. E
  15. F
  16. 10

The original joke is "there are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't l" because 10 in binary is 2 in base 10. But they're pointing out that a similar joke works for all bases of numbers.

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[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 month ago

every base is base 10

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[–] thisfro@slrpnk.net 27 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Choose one class of gender:

  • Natural
  • Rational
  • Irrational
  • Complex
[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

this is p-adic gender erasure

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

That's a very quaternionphobic list.

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[–] RandomVideos@programming.dev 24 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Even if every single person in the world had a unique gender, you could store that in 33 bits

You can store that in a small QR code

[–] Floey@lemm.ee 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Those bits wouldn't really provide the information to construct that gender though.

[–] RandomVideos@programming.dev 7 points 1 month ago

Neither would if you stored it as a bit

[–] AnnaFrankfurter@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Maybe it can be represented by 1qbit

[–] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 month ago

literally discussed with my friends the other day that gender is like a vector in Hilbert space

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I don't think so, because with qubits the intermediate values can be non binary but the end result must be binary when read. Unless you wanna make a joke about filling out government forms I guess lol.

[–] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

I've been thinking about this now and again. IMO gender, if one insists on tracking it at all (which I mostly find counterproductive), would need to be a vector / tuple of floating-point values. The components would be something like:

  1. Sexual Development Index: Encodes chromosomal sex, genitalia, and other primary sexual characteristics (X/Y chromosome ratio).
  2. Hormonal Balance & Secondary Sexual Characteristics: Combines hormonal levels and the resulting secondary traits (body hair, muscle mass, etc.).
  3. Brain Structure: A dimension indicating how a person's brain structure aligns with typical male or female patterns.
  4. Gender Identity: A measure of self-identified gender, representing the psychological and social dimension.
  5. Fertility/Intersex Traits: A combined measure of fertility potential and the presence of intersex traits (e.g., ambiguous genitalia, mixed gonadal structures, etc.).

Ideally it would track the specific genes that code for all of the above factors, but unfortunately science hasn't got those down yet.

[–] thisfro@slrpnk.net 9 points 1 month ago

Also genes is only half of it. Expression of genes is another, complicated story.

[–] shininghero@pawb.social 4 points 1 month ago

Gender Identity, now with linear algebra. Those 3b1b videos are going to be super useful, but not in the way the author intended.

[–] Bumblefumble@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A good way would be to create as many variables as possible that map anything relevant, genes, upbringing, sexual and gender expression, etc., and then doing a PCA to reduce the defining vector to as few elements as possible.

[–] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 month ago

I like how you think but I'm not sure if that alone will hold water. A variable can vary wildly even though it's not very relevant to the property you're interested in, and PCA would consider such a variable to be very significant. Perhaps a neural network could find a latent space. But ideally we want the components to have some intuitive meaning for humans.

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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Gender is not a boolean value.

[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

🚫 const gender

👉 var gender

[–] flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

khm, khm
let gender

please don't use deprecated syntax

[–] Alfenstein@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago

May be gdscript

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[–] Atlusb@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

And liable to type conversion errors and precision loss.

[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

Jesus, why'd you have to bring floating point and machine precision into the conversation? Now I won't sleep. And the nightmares will be worse than before.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

A boolean variable?

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

So many other things are also non-binary, but people insist that not being 100% on their side means you're a million percent on the extreme opposite hateful wrong side.

[–] madcaesar@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Absolutely. My baseline is that I want everyone to be treated equally and with respect. I want everyone have the same protections from the government and everyone to be allowed to be and to love whoever they want.

Past that, it gets into minutia I just can't get on board with and it's hurting the left as a whole because people are trying to force language and thought policing on people, which I don't like, it's authoritarian, and I think it's a losing strategy.

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[–] rabber@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 month ago

A lot of the userbase here thinks this way and it's very tiresome

[–] leaky_shower_thought 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] luciferofastora@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Approximation is an important tool for compressing information into useable forms. All labels are limited approximations too. Such compression is inevitably lossy, but that is a sacrifice for the sake of practicality. The important question is what level of compression is acceptable for a given context. If I describe the location of a chess piece on the board, I don't need to specify how far off-center on its square a given piece is, so a 0-7 offset along each of the two axes is enough for game purposes.

When it comes to gender, I think we all agree that [0, 1] is insufficient, but how do we determine what is sufficient? Do we argue that a 2-bit vector (masc, fem) is enough to describe {neither, fem, masc, both} for rough rounding, or do we need more detailed values along those axes, or perhaps a third axis too (or more)?

[–] DeadMartyr@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is a very nice and effective blurb, I'm saving this comment for future use

There's no awards/medals here but take this: 🥇

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[–] enbipanic@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 month ago

We may have discovered gender entropy, Shannon would be proud

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