Akerlof asks us to imagine ourselves buying a used car. Some cars on the lot are reliable, well-maintained gems. Others cars are lemons, the kinds of cars that can make it off the lot but are disasters waiting to happen. The sellers know which cars are which, but you, as a buyer, can’t tell the difference. That information asymmetry affects the average price in the market and eventually impacts the overall market dynamics.

The thinking goes like this: if a buyer can’t distinguish between good and bad, everything gets priced somewhere in the middle. If you’re selling junk, this is fantastic news—you’ll probably get paid more than your lemon is worth. If you’re selling a quality used car, this price is insultingly low. As a result, people with good cars leave the market to sell their stuff elsewhere, which pushes the overall quality and price down even further, until eventually all that’s left on the market are lemons.

I think we’re in the lemon stage of the internet.

(I’m super happy Frank is writing again)

I recently added a little feature to artivles and notes on this site to make things easier to share. At the bottom of every article and note, there are three links:

1. Share - uses the browsers Web Share API to open a share-sheet.
2. Copy as markdown - copies the content of the article/note as markdown
3. View as markdown - opens the current URL with an .md extension which returns the above with Content-Type: text/markdown;

Thanks to tools like Claude Code, I’m finding myself working more and more with markdown, so it makes sense for me to make any content I write available in that format too.

You can try these out on this note ↓

This article by Mitchell Hashimoto very closely describes how I tend to work with AI tools to “vibe code”.

(It’s not really vibe-coding, because I’m watching the AI work and reading a lot of the code.)

I used to read The Oatmeal religiously, but somehow stopped years ago.

This is a Good Take on AI Art, as I’d expect from Matt.

As I’m getting older a lot of my social circles are becoming ever more conservative. The focus shifts from building with ambition to fiercly protecting what one has achieved. Shifting the mind on protectionism makes one consider all that can cause damage. It puts the focus on the negative, it makes those negative thoughts feel much more significant than they are and one dwells on the past, instead of envisioning of what opportunity might lie ahead.