Field Notes

Ideas, products, and research I keep coming back to.

ResearchIdeasNotes
Research·Mar 30, 2026

The Insurance Problem in Utility App Design

The insurance problem shows up in products people install for reassurance, not routine. Backup tools, VPNs, password managers, and other utility apps are supposed to stay quiet until something breaks, which means the usual obsession with engagement can actually make the product worse. I get into why these products need trust more than attention, and what good design looks like when the most important moment is rare, stressful, and hard to predict.

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Research·Mar 29, 2026

The Permanent Underclass: Origins, Theory, and Modern Echoes

The idea of a "permanent underclass" has been around since the 1960s, but it keeps showing up in conversations I didn't expect. The core argument: some people aren't temporarily poor, they're structurally stuck. Bad schools feed into bad jobs feed into bad neighborhoods, and the loop doesn't break on its own. This piece traces where the concept came from, how it's been debated across economics and sociology, and what changes when you layer tech and capital concentration on top of it.

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Research·Mar 28, 2026

The Hypertail: Why the Future of Software is Personal, Niche, and Built by Everyone

The long tail suggests we're not stuck with a handful of giant products forever. The next wave might be smaller tools: narrow use cases, tight communities, sometimes even one person. I wrote about what that implies, and whether depth can matter as much as scale.

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