One question, asked different ways.
Essays, games, tools, and research from Jake Lawrence.
Thirty Pocket Knives: Why I Keep Building a Toolshed Nobody Asked For
The /utilities page on this site is thirty browser-based tools that don't leave your machine. Here's what's in it, why I built it, and the rules I gave myself.
Sixty Years on Hold: Two Essays on What the State Was Quietly Keeping
Invisible Infrastructure #5 ships as companion essays. One follows a sixty-year hold on US space nuclear capability from SNAP-10A to the April 2026 NSTM-3 memo. The other treats the federal state a...
I Asked Six Dead Thinkers to Audit the AI Industry
Can the frontier AI labs really govern themselves? I sat six twentieth-century thinkers around a seminar table, applied Ostrom's scorecard for managing a commons, and let Hayek send four dissents f...
Why Planning Feels Better Than Doing
Why does planning feel better than doing? Neuroscience, phenomenology, and behavioral economics keep pointing at the same structural answer — and it is not that you lack discipline.
I Built a Game to Test How Humans Recognize Consciousness
Seven philosophical chambers, one AI that argues for its own sentience, and the uncomfortable question at the center of it all.