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
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Those bits wouldn't really provide the information to construct that gender though.
Neither would if you stored it as a bit
lets burn down our civilizations by spending all our wealth discussing this
The issue is based on legal terminology. Gender isn't a legal thing only pushed into our vocabulary.
Allocate an unbound memory blob and sit back for the herd of the Rust coders to line up. Sell them a soda while they do their best chicken parody
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.
A lot of the userbase here thinks this way and it's very tiresome
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.
No Y = 0
Presence of Y = 1
Looks like you can express it with binary if you want, though you would need an interpreter
You can have a partial Y chromosome or transfer of Y genes to the X chromosome during meiosis which can result in a person with both sets of sex organs, or more rarely, no sex organs at all. Even genetic sex cannot be accurately represented as one bit (let alone gender identity).
That's a chromosome you encoded there which is one of a few markers that define sex, not gender.
Same thing
It’s meaningless to who the individual is, unless you’re a conservative that believes playing with dolls or wearing makeup makes you a girl but then I don’t care for your opinion
Yes, chromosomes are meaningless to who someone is (except edge-cases).
No, sex and gender aren't the same.
Imagine confusing gender and sex in 2025
Imagine enforcing gender roles by treating them as separate things
We could do laps on this all day. In the end if a trans person says they're trans and this is what it means to them, I'll take them at their word.
Of course we’re taking people’s words for it
It would be weird to force people to do a genetic test every time they meet someone new
That’s not relevant to the discussion
Least sensible discussion I've been in in a while
Suit yourself bigot
except that genetics isn't that simple, there's many many things that go into structuring your body. Even biological sex isn't binary, there's plenty of overlap. People can literally be born with both sets of genitals afaik.
That’s already accounted for in my example
Maybe it can be represented by 1qbit
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.
literally discussed with my friends the other day that gender is like a vector in Hilbert space
There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
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
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...
I might be a slow learner but I'm catching on...
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
- 10
- 11
In base 16 (hexadecimal) it is the 16th.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- 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.
ah I see, you are the 10th kind!
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My gender is e, which can be represented by neither integers nor floating points.
Can it be expressed or represented approximately in IEEE-754 form?
Always approximated, never truly represented 😞
Unless your encoding has a special value that, by definition, is euler's constant :p
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Everything can be represented approximatively.
e = π = 3
Choose one class of gender:
- Natural
- Rational
- Irrational
- Complex
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:
- Sexual Development Index: Encodes chromosomal sex, genitalia, and other primary sexual characteristics (X/Y chromosome ratio).
- Hormonal Balance & Secondary Sexual Characteristics: Combines hormonal levels and the resulting secondary traits (body hair, muscle mass, etc.).
- Brain Structure: A dimension indicating how a person's brain structure aligns with typical male or female patterns.
- Gender Identity: A measure of self-identified gender, representing the psychological and social dimension.
- 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.
In how far does gender change in your hypothetical metric with transition. If I take hormones for example, I would influence this metric.
Another confusing point would be how you try tracking gender, but having a gender identity value inside the metric. How would you even track this gender then?
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We may have discovered gender entropy, Shannon would be proud
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