Maggie Appleton
Design engineer exploring applied AI and hacky prototypes.
Adores digital gardening, end-user development, and embodied cognition. Makes visual essays about design, programming, and anthropology.
📍 London
🌱 maggieappleton.com
- Much FOMO that I'm missing out on Local-First Conf @localfirstconf.com this year. One of my fave conferences. A smaller crowd (~200?) where everyone cares a lot about the problem. Lots of friendly collaboration and collective problem-solving. In Berlin, May 26-28th – www.localfirstconf.com
- The next time I'm invited to a baby shower, rather than bringing baby clothes, I'm gifting earplugs, a nice thermos, super comfy button-down pyjamas, and a bum bag. IYKYK.
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- Product idea for new parents: temporary tattoos that say fun catchphrases like… “Comparison is the thief of joy” “This too shall pass” “Babies aren’t problems to be solved” “Don’t listen to anyone on Instagram trying to sell you a baby sleep guide for £60”
- Appreciate the people crunching numbers on this. The outrage over personal LLM energy usage seems overblown. Especially for the number of queries most of us run (<1000 / month?) Picking any other climate soap box is a better use of outrage: driving cars, eating meat, green energy providers, etc.
- Stop stressing about the energy and carbon footprint of ChatGPT. It’s not a big deal www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-foo...
- My new toxic trait is believing it’s a better deal for me to spend 12 hours vibe code my own version of an app from scratch, rather than pay £12 for it.
- Finished growing a human and met them a few weeks ago. Wild to have your life rearranged in an instant. Walked into hospital one person and left as someone else. Learning I’m more resilient and capable than I thought. Never properly tested it before. Utterly in love and extremely sleep deprived ❤️
- Earned my first impersonation account: @maggieappleton.bsky.social Cool 🙃 Already reported, but just a heads up if they follow you, it’s not me. Seem to be systemically going through my contacts and following folks hoping for a follow back.
- Instabuy. @nayafia.bsky.social’s new book “Antimemetics” on ideas that don’t spread. Love all her ideas and research. darkforest.metalabel.com/antimemetics...
- Spending my due date limbo time making elaborate predictive charts calculating the likelihood of giving birth on any particular day. The tiny tool is available here: maggieappleton.com/birth-probab... Probably only useful if you're pregnant, but fun to play with anyway.
- At the stage of pregnancy where random women in the street kindly yell “Hang in there! Not long now!” at me.
- There is absolutely no world in which this is a "setting" What ontological universe is Apple living in? If only we had some existing design pattern like "notifications" or "banners" to show users what's new??
- Going to be building a little research aggregator with Steve and Valtown on Friday. 10am EST / 2pm GMT Come hangout. Not sure how far we’ll get but we’ll definitely learn some new things about building with Valtown
