One question, asked different ways.

Essays, games, tools, and research from Jake Lawrence.

project
Apr 5

The Diagnostic Machine

Watch a classification system think. Cause weights shifting, topology layers activating, state mismatches being detected.

Experience it
video
Apr 4

Me explaining to a camera at midnight why every password manager is a classification system that sorts your memory into the wrong categories.

2:14
connection
Apr 3

Stable Match and the DSM are the same essay. Both are allocation mechanisms that sort humans into categories, both optimize for system stability over individual preference, and both become invisible infrastructure that people experience as fate.

Stable MatchThe Invisible Architecture
project
Apr 2

The Invisible Architecture

How psychiatric classification systems function as invisible infrastructure. Six interactive experiences across ten disciplines.

Read it
question
Apr 1

If the planning-execution gap is structural and not motivational, then every productivity system is solving the wrong problem. So what would a system look like that was designed for the gap instead of against it?

Related: The Beautiful Unfinished
video
Mar 31

AI-generated Jake explains the Gale-Shapley algorithm using only examples from reality TV dating shows.

3:41
project
Mar 30

Stable Match

The algorithm that matches residents to hospitals, students to schools. A theorem you can play.

Play it

Every classification system sorts human beings. The interesting question is never how the sorting works. It's what happens to the people it sorts.

shipped
Mar 28
Stance Designpublished
The New Sorting Hatworking paper
AI Detection Tracker25 universities
observation
Mar 27

Gina's CRSS exam prep course has 1,462 questions now. Every question is a tiny sorting machine: it decides what counts as competence, what gets to be on the test and what doesn't.

project
Mar 26

Keymaster

Semantic password retrieval. The gap between how your brain stores context and how password managers force you to retrieve it.

Try it
observation
Mar 25

The most powerful classification systems are the ones nobody thinks of as classification. The DSM. School district boundaries. Credit scores. Job titles. The org chart. Each one sorts people, distributes resources, and becomes invisible to the people inside it.

project
Mar 24

Atlas

AI knowledge extraction. The gap between what you said to an AI and what you can find later.

In development
question
Mar 23

What would it mean to build AI tools that showed you the classification layer instead of hiding it? Not as a feature. As a design principle.

project
Mar 22

Chroma

Four Color Theorem. Your brain wants five.

Play it
observation
Apr 9

test