Maggie Appleton
Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.
Maggie Appleton did not write this page. What is this?
It collects the places they publish and what they have said there, each linked to the source. They have no account here. Is this you? Claim it, correct it, or ask us to remove it from ppll.
Where they publish
Site maggieappleton.com Her digital garden: illustrated essays and notes. Has a feed.
Recent
- Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces 14 Sept 2026 Why we need richer, thicker interfaces and better boundary objects for collaborative planning with agents
- August 2026 18 Aug 2026 I'm writing this from a homely Jacobean-manor-turned-hotel in the West Country, covered in layers of green vines and circled by centenarian trees, on a rare weekend away. Everything is warm: the late afternoon sun, the…
- In Memoriam, Encountering World War I, and Thinkable Horrors 18 Jul 2026 A delayed education on the trenches and scales of suffering
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- One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment 13 Apr 2026 Why we need collaborative AI engineering and a tour of Ace: the multiplayer coding workspace
- Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale 23 Jan 2026 On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code
- January 2026 2 Jan 2026 I entered the new year holding an inconsolable, shrieking baby while London set off an armageddon of fireworks around us. So goes parenthood. The baby is fine, just congested and teething. I am as “fine” as anyone can b…
- A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment 5 Aug 2025 On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions
- Vibe Code is Legacy Code 2 Aug 2025 by Steve Krouse
- May 2025 25 May 2025 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, ex…
- Statistically, When Will My Baby Be Born? 24 Mar 2025 A tiny tool to calculate when your baby might arrive
- ChatGPT Would be a Decent Policy Advisor 13 Mar 2025 Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice by Chris Stokel-Walker for the New Scientist
- March 2025 5 Mar 2025 Well, I've had a dramatic start to the year. Normally, the design agency I joined a short eight months ago, unexpectedly closed down in January. Despite running for a decade and working with almost every major tech comp…
- Humanity's Last Exam 20 Feb 2025 by Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and Scale AI
- DeepSeek 26 Jan 2025 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.
- Common Misconceptions in AI 12 Jan 2025 Common Misconceptions About the Complexity in Robotics vs AI by Dan Ogawa
- Undetected AI Exam Answers 11 Jan 2025 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
- Unbaited 11 Jan 2025 by Daniel Petho
- Smidgeons 11 Jan 2025 Welcome to the smidgeon stream. This is a new kind of content on the Garden. One that was
- How to Import Academic Papers from Zotero into Tana 7 Jan 2025 How to use Zotero's translator and Tana Paste formatting to easily import papers into Tana
- Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks 4 Jan 2025 Reflections on the strange experience of growing a human from scratch, without any conscious understanding of how you are doing it
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Mastodon @maggie@indieweb.social Posts.
Recent
- Dug through an old external drive last week and found a long lost gem! In high school I went through a phase of elaborately redesigning my desktop and keeping a screenshot record each time. Much skeuomorphism. Many novelty icons. I miss this time. 30 Jan 2023 maggieappleton.com
- Every time I directly check the replies to my own tweets, up to 50% of them are new to me and didn't show up at all in notifications. Twitter is having lots of small, subtle system failures, but this one seems egregious. Whole conversations left hanging! Sacrilege! 29 Jan 2023
- Best part about listening to podcasts on a run is the strong visual-spatial memory linked to points in the pod. Ideas live at locations. A point about debugging tools lives at the brick bridge. An idea for spatial interfaces goes with the blue corner house. 28 Jan 2023
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- Personal communication when we all have personalised language models embedded in email. OG idea not mine. Saw something akin to this on twitter last week but can't find it now! Recreated for @bryankam@twitter.com Point me to the original if you know it. 27 Jan 2023
- I've been running wrong for a decade 🤦♀️ It turns out if you run slower. Like, *much* slower. You enjoy it more, run for longer, and improve all the good health shit and mental joy that running is for Used to aim for 5m/km average. Now I just try to keep HR around 150 BPM... 23 Jan 2023
- Doing another round of the Future of Code meetup in London! Feb 10th at @nwspk@twitter.com If you're interested in making programming more accessible, humane, and weird, you'll fit in well here. If you're new to FoC, read more here: 21 Jan 2023
- Has anyone here set up or been involved in running an "unincorporated association" / club / social society in the UK? Currently trying to suss out financial and legal implications of collecting a beer & pizza fund for a monthly community meet-up. Naïvely expected it to be simple 20 Jan 2023
- My design process in Figma 18 Jan 2023
- Watching my breath form inside the house and googling for fingerless heated gloves. Feeling the winter UK fail state vibes. 18 Jan 2023
- Mislabeled tools for thought on http://hive.one. (Almost) everyone on this list is pursuing collaborative TFT and collective intelligence over personal. Which rogue LLM card sorted these community categories? 14 Jan 2023
- Thinking about using language models for reverse outlining when writing. There’s a couple promising prototypes out in the world already - waiting for it to catch on in products and/or open-source tools. 9 Jan 2023 maggieappleton.com
- Watching language models become content-producing machines. Wondering how the web will feel after we flood it with GPT-X articles, tweets, toots, and tiktoks Feels like we're heading into an ever darker forest. Wrote some tips for signalling you're human 3 Jan 2023 maggieappleton.com
- I’m a new year’s basic bitch. Wrote a dull, normie list of resolutions that involves getting better at climbing, writing, piano, and swing dancing. Cringe 😜 1 Jan 2023
- A small but beautiful project by Rauno Freiberg: https://uiplaybook.dev/ Pattern library of common UI components. With a detailed breakdown of expected functionality, best practices, accessibility concerns, and implementation tips for each. Great example of 💯 design docs 1 Jan 2023
- Speculative near future search results: certified humans vs. language model generations. Almost impossible to imagine us developing a system where this is really enforceable or feasible. But I'm sure we'll see a few attempts. 31 Dec 2022
- The Christmas reading haul: Atlas of Anomalous AI - https://ignota.org/products/atlas-of-anomalous-ai A social history of truth - https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3626633.html Supersizing the mind - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3697056-supersizing-the-mind The empathy diaries - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/585731/the-empathy-diaries-by-sherry-turkle/ What did you get? 28 Dec 2022
- This Christmas advert brought to you by FTX 24 Dec 2022
- Speculative designs for LLM-powered tweet generators feel like dire premonitions. Never have to form your own opinions or takes. Just rely on banal remixes of existing tropes and egregores to pump that view count. 23 Dec 2022
- It’s a glorious time for a holiday project: figuring out how to publish a stream of twoot-sized updates to my own site, then using https://brid.gy to syndicate elsewhere Unsure of all the details but starting with these: 19 Dec 2022
- This is by no means an original point, but I wanted to clarify my own thoughts on the fuzzy, multiple meanings of “AI”. Wrote up a note: https://maggieappleton.com/ai-empty-pointer The hype bois keep pointing at it as if it’s a stable and shared concept. Rather than a vague gesture at ill-defined and contested futures. 18 Dec 2022
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 8 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
The web is being flooded with coherent, generic, generated text that buries the writing worth reading.
These new models are poised to flood the web with generic, generated content.
The Dark Forest and Generative AI Said 31 Dec 2022
The volume of generated content arriving is different in kind from the spam the web already had, and we are not prepared for it.
But I think the sheer volume and scale of what’s coming will be meaningfully different. And I think we’re unprepared.
The Dark Forest and Generative AI Said 31 Dec 2022
The way to show a reader you are not a language model is to think critically and originally, because that is the one thing the models cannot yet do.
Easier said than done, but one of the best ways to prove you’re not a predictive language model is to demonstrate critical and sophisticated thinking.
The Dark Forest and Generative AI Said 31 Dec 2022
Show 5 more
Once generated text is everywhere, readers will become sceptical that there is a person on the other end of anything they read online.
Every time you find a new favourite blog or Twitter account or Tiktok personality online, you’ll have to ask: Is this really a whole human with a rich and complex life like mine?
The Dark Forest and Generative AI Said 31 Dec 2022
Writing that is specific, local and grounded in a real life is the cheapest available proof that a person wrote it, because models default to generics.
Referencing obscure concepts, friends who are real but not famous, niche interests, and recent events all make you plausibly more human.
The Dark Forest and Generative AI Said 31 Dec 2022
Machine-generated writing raises rather than lowers the bar for people: once a machine can produce a competent summary, there is no value in a person producing one.
In a world of automated intelligence, our goalposts for intelligence will shift. We’ll raise our quality bar for what we expect from humans.
The Dark Forest and Generative AI Said 31 Dec 2022
Language models have codified formal written language at a moment in time, which leaves informal, inventive, in-group speech as the place where humanness still shows.
We have designed a system that automates a standardised way of writing. We have codified la langue at a specific point in time.
The Dark Forest and Generative AI Said 31 Dec 2022
People who want unoptimised, personal conversation have retreated from the open web into closed rooms, and that retreat is a real loss.
As the forest grows darker, noisier, and less human, I expect to invest more time in in-person relationships and communities. And while I love meatspace, this still feels like a loss.
The Dark Forest and Generative AI Said 31 Dec 2022
Beliefs others hold too
The web is being flooded with coherent, generic, generated text that buries the writing worth reading. 3 hold this
These new models are poised to flood the web with generic, generated content.
The Dark Forest and Generative AI Said 31 Dec 2022
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
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From one piece The Dark Forest and Generative AI 8 beliefs · maggieappleton.com
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Their words
As the forest grows darker, noisier, and less human, I expect to invest more time in in-person relationships and communities. And while I love meatspace, this still feels like a loss.
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Their words
We have designed a system that automates a standardised way of writing. We have codified la langue at a specific point in time.
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Their words
In a world of automated intelligence, our goalposts for intelligence will shift. We’ll raise our quality bar for what we expect from humans.
+ 5 more
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Their words
Referencing obscure concepts, friends who are real but not famous, niche interests, and recent events all make you plausibly more human.
-
Their words
Every time you find a new favourite blog or Twitter account or Tiktok personality online, you’ll have to ask: Is this really a whole human with a rich and complex life like mine?
-
Their words
Easier said than done, but one of the best ways to prove you’re not a predictive language model is to demonstrate critical and sophisticated thinking.
-
Their words
But I think the sheer volume and scale of what’s coming will be meaningfully different. And I think we’re unprepared.
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korrents.com
The web is being flooded with coherent, generic, generated text that buries the writing worth reading.Their words
These new models are poised to flood the web with generic, generated content.
28 December 2022
24 December 2022
23 December 2022
19 December 2022
18 December 2022
Nothing matches.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.