Link Roundup: January 2026

This month, the ace journal club discussed a quoiromantic manifesto, translated from Japanese!  Probably not the easiest read if you don’t have prior familiarity, but we thought it was great stuff.

The World of Pride and Prejudice is Not the World of Purity Culture | Tell Me Why the World is Weird – Christian purity culture frames itself as a continuation of centuries-old practice, but if you look back at history there are many differences.  This is a pretty insightful look at the idiosyncrasies of purity culture, by way of comparison to Jane Austen’s famous 1813 novel.

Exposing a $10,000,000,000 Debt Industry | Coffeezilla (video, 16 min) – Hey, I know a bit about the debt settlement industry.  When someone is having trouble with debt, a debt settlement company will offer to step in between the lender and debtor, and negotiate to pay only a fraction of the debt (maybe about half).  In return, the debt settlement company takes a cut.  It ruins your credit score, but could in theory reduce your debt.  But I wasn’t familiar with the abuses and scams in the industry.  That’s something that should be pursued by the consumer financial protection bureau (CFPB) as a violation of UDAAP oh wait

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Experience with AI coding

In the past year, myself and many other people who program for a living started using AI coding assistance. I’m just going to plainly discuss my experience, and ramble about some related issues.

This explanation is primarily for the benefit of people who do not code professionally, and thus have little idea what’s going on. If you code professionally, then you already know, and have formed your own opinion about it, which you are welcome to keep. But it’s worth noting that lots of different kinds of people code for a living. It’s not just software engineers, you know. I code on a daily basis but I’m a data scientist. The reader should be cautious about generalizations because what’s true of one profession may not be true of another.

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Origami: Free pleating

Free pleating

A free pleating model, made in a workshop with Goran Konjevod

I made this a couple months ago in an origami workshop with Goran Konjevod.  The subject of the workshop was how to pleat paper without pre-creasing.  It’s an improvisational technique where you don’t worry about making folds equally spaced or parallel.  You just approximate, and watch how it distorts the paper.  And since you’re approximating, you can do stuff like making the lines slightly non-parallel.

My style generally involves more careful planning and precreasing, but I like this technique too!  I imagine if you do it enough, you gain some ability to predict how it will turn out.