this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Always approximated, never truly represented 😞

[–] LegoBrickOnFire 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] idunnololz 5 points 2 weeks ago

Ah so ur gender can be represented in UTF 8.

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[–] Valmond 20 points 2 weeks ago

Everything can be represented approximatively.

e = π = 3

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Obviously, there is True, False and FILE_NOT_FOUND

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 weeks 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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks 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...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks 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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

ah I see, you are the 10th kind!

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Choose one class of gender:

  • Natural
  • Rational
  • Irrational
  • Complex
[–] affiliate 13 points 2 weeks ago

this is p-adic gender erasure

[–] AeonFelis 5 points 2 weeks ago

That's a very quaternionphobic list.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 weeks 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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

Neither would if you stored it as a bit

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Maybe it can be represented by 1qbit

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Gender is not a boolean value, it's a variable.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

🚫 const gender

👉 var gender

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

khm, khm
let gender

please don't use deprecated syntax

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

May be gdscript

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[–] Atlusb 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

And liable to type conversion errors and precision loss.

[–] NocturnalMorning 9 points 2 weeks 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 5 points 2 weeks ago

A boolean variable?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks 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.

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[–] LovableSidekick 13 points 2 weeks 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 5 points 2 weeks 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.

[–] LovableSidekick 3 points 1 week ago

It's been said that indecisiveness and perfectionism are liberal weaknesses, and decisiveness and being willing to ignore imperfections for the sake of the team are conservative strengths. I think Michael Moore put it best... Liberals say, "What should we do about dinner? I don't know... do you want to go out? I dunno, do you? Well, if you do. Okay, where should we go? I dunno, where do you wanna go?" A conservative slams his hand on the table and says, "Get in the car, we're goin' to the Sizzler!"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week 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)?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week 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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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

We may have discovered gender entropy, Shannon would be proud

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

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

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