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
385 points (91.4% liked)
Programmer Humor
32877 readers
1213 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
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!
load more comments
(2 replies)
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
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
Good point. Specifically code point U+2107 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%84%87
Ah so ur gender can be represented in UTF 8.
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.
Also genes is only half of it. Expression of genes is another, complicated story.
load more comments
(4 replies)
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).
Why are conservatives so obsessed with people’s genitals?
In both of those cases you can determine whether a y is present or not
for one, a person's genitals are not necessarily a direct indication of their biological sex, even without considering bottom surgery
You’re confused, I was saying that
The person above me was saying otherwise but I think they’re a mean person because if someone was in an accident and lost their parts then they would say they aren’t their gender anymore
I might not fully grasp what you said, but from my understanding, they were discussing intersex people. In these cases, it's not an either/or situation at birth regarding sex characteristics or chromosomes. It could be a mix of various combinations, or sometimes none at all. The Y chromosome might not be fully present, which means a penis might not exist at birth, or it could be very small (and possibly non-functional for urination), but there may still be internal testicles (which I understand is quite common for some "types" of intersex ppl). In your interpretation, does this mean that there are individuals with a Y chromosome and then there is the rest of the population?
So, we have XY, XYY, XXY versus the others, who might have just one X, two Xs, or a partial Y (I think there were other combinations too). That doesn't seem very binary to me. It's like saying you're either a kid (under 18 in most countries) or an adult, which doesn't cover everyone and doesn't say much either. But maybe we took your comment too serious.
However, labels have always been a tool to simplify life, and they have never been strictly binary. It's similar to organizing a home with labels, there is always at least one drawer labeled other/miscellaneous.
There are as many intersex people as there are redheads, and they can have two sets of sex organs, no organs, or a combination of organs. This wide category range is why the person you responded to mentioned the parts, as these visibly influence how one's sex is documented. Intersex conditions can sometimes make this categorization extremely challenging.
I appreciate the depth of your answer
Under my system they would still fall under the “has Y” or “Y absent” grouping
I do think a genetic blood test at birth would fix that issue of misidentification but since gender (y vs no y) should be meaningless to the majority of people, because everyone is equal and free to express themselves, it’s not worth the cost of doing it until there’s a need to affirm someone’s gender
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.
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
Gender is not a boolean value, it's a variable.
🚫 const gender
👉 var gender
khm, khm
let gender
please don't use deprecated syntax
May be gdscript
And liable to type conversion errors and precision loss.
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
We may have discovered gender entropy, Shannon would be proud
view more: next ›