Maggie Appleton
Maggie's digital garden filled with visual essays on programming, design, and anthropology| maggieappleton.com
Maggie's digital garden filled with visual essays on programming, design, and anthropology| maggieappleton.com
On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions| maggieappleton.com
On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions| Maggie Appleton
Maggie's digital garden filled with visual essays on programming, design, and anthropology| maggieappleton.com
In a wonderfully dramatic change to my life, I became a mother two months ago. My son was born at the end of March via an unplanned but otherwise uncomplicated c-section. Parenthood has been predictably overwhelming, exhausting, and existentially glorious.| Maggie Appleton
A tiny tool to calculate when your baby might arrive| Maggie Appleton
Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice by Chris Stokel-Walker for the New Scientist| Maggie Appleton
Well, I've had a dramatic start to the year.| Maggie Appleton
Humanity's Last Exam by Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and Scale AI| Maggie Appleton
If you're not distressingly embedded in the torrent of AI news on Twixxer like I reluctantly am, you might not know what DeepSeek is yet. Bless you.| Maggie Appleton
Common Misconceptions About the Complexity in Robotics vs AI by Dan Ogawa| Maggie Appleton
A real-world test of artificial intelligence infiltration of a university examinations system: A “Turing Test” case study by Peter Scarfe, Kelly Watcham, Alasdair Clarke, Etienne Roesch| Maggie Appleton
Unbaited by Daniel Petho| Maggie Appleton
Welcome to the smidgeon stream. This is a new kind of content on the Garden. One that was| Maggie Appleton
How to use Zotero's translator and Tana Paste formatting to easily import papers into Tana| Maggie Appleton
Reflections on the strange experience of growing a human from scratch, without any conscious understanding of how you are doing it| Maggie Appleton
We're back in that glorious post-Christmas, pre-New-Year's liminal period when the days blur together and I'm allowed to spend inordinate amounts of time tinkering on side projects and laying on the couch eating handfuls of Twiglets.| Maggie Appleton
My fairly banal, basic, but beautiful command line setup| Maggie Appleton
Reflections on two years of working at Elicit and why it's time to leave| Maggie Appleton
Despite the regular drizzle, this summer is looking splendid. The tories are out of power. London is out in force enjoying the warm weather. I'm temporarily funemployed and thoroughly enjoying doing almost nothing.| Maggie Appleton
The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it| Maggie Appleton
Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse| Maggie Appleton
How to open pieces of narrative non-fiction writing, conference talks, and sticky jars| Maggie Appleton
Gaining a strange disease and losing my ability to see straight| Maggie Appleton
Collecting people I know who work at the intersection of design and engineering, in an attempt to figure out what a design engineer is| Maggie Appleton
How to gather people and create communities in ways that are low-stress and high-payoff| Maggie Appleton
Designing tentative calendar events to solve complex scheduling problems| Maggie Appleton
Giving people a visible, useful trail of where they've been over the course of an exploratory journey| Maggie Appleton
The limbo-like lull in-between Christmas and News Years is my favourite period of the year. I never know what to do with myself. I arrive back from chaotic, overstimulating family visits and sit amidst my pile of gifts, half-unpacked bags, and leftover chocolate, wondering what in the world I used to do with my days. I've long forgotten what it's like to have any semblance of life structure. Despite it only being a week since I was on a focused, tight schedule.| Maggie Appleton
London flipped from sweltering summer back to drizzling grey yesterday. Autumn was overdue. Summer was a little too manic for my taste anyway. I spent a bunch of time in Maine, New York, and San Fransisco. A mix of long back porch hangouts with family, collaborator coffees, and in-person problem-solving with the Ought team.| Maggie Appleton
Designing with Language Models| Maggie Appleton
Sketchy ideas for interfaces that play with the novel capabilities of language models| Maggie Appleton
The last six months have felt like a disorientating blur. While bouncing between overseas trips, writing conference talks, organising events, and keeping up with work, I ended a long-term relationship and moved across London. My writing took a hit – I haven't published much this year. I feel like I'm still trying to figure out what to do when I get up every morning.| Maggie Appleton
An exploration of the problems and possible futures of flooding the web with generative AI content| Maggie Appleton
Shareable, browser-based documents that can compile and run code| Maggie Appleton
An archive of my high school desktop designs, circa 2009| Maggie Appleton
Using language models to generate reverse outlines of writing drafts| Maggie Appleton
Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content| Maggie Appleton
On the fuzziness of calling things “artificial intelligence” and moving the goalposts| Maggie Appleton
Command line bars you can quickly summon with a keyboard shortcut| Maggie Appleton
It's a weird week. Twitter is (possibly) entering a slow death march and much of my community is reluctantly slouching over to Mastodon. I've started cross-posting there as well: indieweb.social/@maggie. The Elon-escapades only drive home how important it is to own and control the platform you're publishing to. Which means writing on your own website first and cross-posting to external platforms. The IndieWeb community has a catchy acronym for this: POSSE. Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicat...| Maggie Appleton
People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems| Maggie Appleton
A new role at an AI research lab working on tools for open-ended reasoning| Maggie Appleton
I've decided to join Ought, a non-profit research lab. I wrote about the move here, but TLDR:| Maggie Appleton
How block-based interfaces can help us create more structured data on the web| Maggie Appleton
Daily notes as a frictionless default input for personal knowledge management systems| Maggie Appleton
Bringing visual explanations and embodied knowledge to programming tools| Maggie Appleton
Agent-based note-taking systems that can prompt and facilitate custom workflows| Maggie Appleton
Exploring ways to build social infrastructure around books and reading on the open web| Maggie Appleton
Adding spatial affordances to the experience of browsing the web| Maggie Appleton
Narrative essays that I consider ideal models of the medium| Maggie Appleton
Providing clear metadata on the epistemic validity of content| Maggie Appleton
A history of our metaphorical understanding of the web| Maggie Appleton
Algorithms that make their reasoning visible| Maggie Appleton
After five years of working with egghead, I decided it was time to move on. I started as an illustrator in early 2016. By 2018 I had moved into an art director and leadership role. By 2020 I'd shifted to focusing on UX and product design.| Maggie Appleton
How to write macros without touching the terminal| Maggie Appleton
An anthropological look at the cultural norms of the React community| Maggie Appleton
With lockdown easing in London I've spent most of summer outside throwing tennis balls around in the park, rather than sitting in front of screens writing words. It's been a good break, but I've missed researching. The British winter will descend again soon and I'll be back inside tending to the digital garden.| Maggie Appleton
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens| Maggie Appleton
Longing for the paleolithic past in the Anthropocene| Maggie Appleton
Why there is nothing natural about the idea of 'nature'| Maggie Appleton
A Hyperlink Academy writing club where we mimic the work of others| Maggie Appleton
A collection of observations on the rise of soft, sparkly, baby pink aesthetics among developers| Maggie Appleton
Developer self-expression through coloured switches, keystroke actuation, and LED light displays| Maggie Appleton
What's wrong with linear, static programming mediums and how might we improve them?| Maggie Appleton
Data is currently dislocated – our narratives and metaphors around it try to convince us it is immaterial| Maggie Appleton
Notes on how to use the position property in CSS to make scrollytelling stories| Maggie Appleton
How to customise Roam Research with your own CSS themes| Maggie Appleton
A few favourite books from the field of digital anthropology| Maggie Appleton
A collection of laws named for specific people in the field of programming| Maggie Appleton
A collection of interesting words that have recently been coined| Maggie Appleton
How to use the Greensock animation library inside React using React hooks| Maggie Appleton
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens| Maggie Appleton
Notes on the basics of the Greensock animation llibrary| Maggie Appleton
Digging into the work of Barbara Tversky and reading the literature around embodied cognition. I've been a long time fan of George Lakoff so much of it us familiar. Tverksy's new book Mind in Motion builds off many of the same themes.| Maggie Appleton
Illustrated notes on the key concepts of how Gatsby.js works| Maggie Appleton
The failure of drawing materials without mediums and meat| Maggie Appleton
How to offend everyone with boundary-crossing steak and nuggets| Maggie Appleton
Illustrations made for a set of episodes of the Cultivated Meat podcast| Maggie Appleton
Illustrated notes on the idea of Gift Economies and cultural historys of economic exchange| Maggie Appleton
Notes on the metaphorical varieties of synecdoche and metonymy| Maggie Appleton
A video tour through how I build the old version of this site| Maggie Appleton
Mary Douglas defined dirt as matter out of place – the crossing of boundaries| Maggie Appleton
Illustrated notes on the concept of 'Evergreen notes' and how to write them| Maggie Appleton
Illustrated notes on the Knowledge Hydrant guide to collaborative learning| Maggie Appleton
Questions I am often asked to answer| Maggie Appleton
Notes on the academic field of CSCL and major papers in the discipline| Maggie Appleton
Notes on how to run silent meetings and reading sessions| Maggie Appleton
Illustrated notes on how React suspense works| Maggie Appleton
Some insights into how I collaborative with experts to create illustrated notes on technical topics| Maggie Appleton
Illustrated notes on how data unions work and what problems they might solve| Maggie Appleton
Notes on pattern languages and Christopher Alexander's legacy on software programming| Maggie Appleton
A walkthrough of how I manage and tend Evergreen notes in Roam| maggieappleton.com
Naming your invisible audiences to free yourself from unspoken obligations| maggieappleton.com
Notes on the history of cyborgs and why the idea still holds historical weight in Western narratives| maggieappleton.com
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web| maggieappleton.com
Seventy years ago we dreamed up links that would allow us to create two-way, contextual conversations. Why don't we use them on the web?| maggieappleton.com
A discipline at the intersection of cultural anthropology and binary logic| maggieappleton.com
A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web| maggieappleton.com
How to build a digital garden without touching code| maggieappleton.com
