Welcome to my personal blog.
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Gender-affirming health insurance coverage how-to
Trans people face a number of challenges in getting gender-affirming coverage. Some of these are political, such as living in states like Florida, which are actively hostile to gender-affirming care. Many challenges are largely apolitical, or occur even in politically friendly states.
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A call for a quantitative report card for AI bioterrorism threat models
Scientists and policymakers have expressed a great deal of concern recently about biosecurity risks posed by frontier artificial intelligence systems, especially large language models like ChatGPT and Claude. Yet these models also promise to accelerate many areas of work, including biotechnology.
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Four types of verbal consent
One of my many roles is teaching people about consent. We like to think that obtaining consent is a straightforward process, but all human interactions are inherently complicated. There are non-verbal cues, ways we touch each other, facial expressions, tones of voice, and so on. Each of these can produce confusion, particularly for people with disabilities that inhibit their ability to detect facial expressions or vocal nuances. And as I discuss in this article, certain people have figured out how to manipulate these systems to intentionally produce misunderstandings.