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)?
Maybe a byte using bitflags?
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: 🥇
Honestly, “I found this useful/interesting/amusing/worth leaving a positive comment avout” is the only award I need. Thanks for the words of appreciation ❤️
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
Those bits wouldn’t really provide the information to construct that gender though.
Neither would if you stored it as a bit
Ayyyyy wanna smash bros?
Mine is #1B4D3E
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 😞
No taxation without approximation!
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/ℇ
Ah so ur gender can be represented in UTF 8.
Everything can be represented approximatively.
e = π = 3
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.
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.
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!”
A lot of the userbase here thinks this way and it’s very tiresome
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.
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
I have PS2
Gender is not a boolean value, it’s a variable.
🚫
const gender👉
var genderAnd 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.
A boolean variable?
We may have discovered gender entropy, Shannon would be proud
0100100100100111011011010010000001100001001000000111001001101111011000100110111101110100001000000110000101110100011101000111001001100001011000110111010001100101011001000010000001110100011011110010000001101101011000010110011101101110011001010111010001110011
There are 2⁶⁴ genders
As it is not stable I’d go with a database.
Sqlite.
Better go with MySQL to ensure foreign keys comstrains
any “n-bit value” fails to model nontermination. clearly a pointed dCPO.
