Maggie makes visual essays about programming, design, and anthropology. Designer, anthropologist, and mediocre developer Currently exploring AI & software engineering at GitHub Next The Garden A digital garden is a collection of imperfect notes, essays, and ideas growing slowly over time. Learn more Essays Opinionated, longform narrative writing with an agenda A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions Essay 12 Months Ago Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks Reflections on the strange experience of growing a human from scratch, without any conscious understanding of how you are doing it Essay Over 1 Year Ago The Dark Forest and Generative AI Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content Essay Over 3 Years Ago Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens Essay Over 3 Years Ago Notes Loose, unopinionated notes on things I don't entirely understand yet. In Memoriam, Encountering World War I, and Thinkable Horrors Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale Statistically, When Will My Baby Be Born? How to Import Academic Papers from Zotero into Tana Aesthetic Command Lines with Hyper, Spaceship, and Oh My Zsh Leaving Elicit Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars The Finest Narrative Non-Fiction Essays Spinning Worlds, Seasickness, and Dealing with Vestibular Neuritis A Collection of Design Engineers Gathering Structures Patterns Design patterns gathered from my own observations and research. Ambient Co-presence Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web Pattern Over 2 Years Ago Historical Trails Giving people a visible, useful trail of where they've been over the course of an exploratory journey Pattern Over 2 Years Ago Computational Notebooks Shareable, browser-based documents that can compile and run code Pattern Over 3 Years Ago Command K Bars Command line bars you can quickly summon with a keyboard shortcut Pattern Over 3 Years Ago Programming Portals Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes Pattern Over 3 Years Ago Folk Interfaces People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems Pattern Almost 4 Years Ago Daily Notes Pages Daily notes as a frictionless default input for personal knowledge management systems Pattern About 4 Years Ago Programmable Notes Agent-based note-taking systems that can prompt and facilitate custom workflows Pattern Over 4 Years Ago Library Books I've read and books I like the idea of having read. View on Google Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling Jason De Leon View on Google The Good Mother Myth Nancy Reddy View on Google Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty Patrick Radden Keefe View on Google Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf Oliver Sacks View on Google Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution Cat Bohannon View on Google Annals of a Former World John McPhee View on Google Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent Meredith E. Small View on Google The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots Kate Darling