• luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
    6·
    16 hours ago

    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·
      15 hours ago

      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: 🥇

  • RandomVideos@programming.dev
    251·
    1 day ago

    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

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    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·
      1 day ago

      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@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        22 hours 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!”

    • luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
      31·
      16 hours ago

      There are n types of people in this world: Those who don’t understand numeral systems, those who understand base x systems for x ∈ [2, n] and those who get pedantic about this meta-joke.

    • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      31·
      2 days ago

      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

      • stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        11·
        2 days ago

        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…

          • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
            5·
            1 day ago

            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.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      6·
      1 day 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.

  • logging_strict@lemmy.ml
    63·
    1 day 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

  • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
    20·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • flora_explora@beehaw.org
      2·
      1 day ago

      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?

      • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        13 hours ago

        All of these are measurable. I’m not sure what’s the source of your confusion. Yes the terminology becomes a bit ambiguous unless we make up a new word/term for the tuple, but gender identity is just one dimension of it. It can be measured with a standardized questionnaire.

    • Bumblefumble@lemm.ee
      4·
      2 days ago

      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·
        2 days 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.

    • shininghero@pawb.social
      4·
      2 days ago

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