Matthias Ott

https://matthiasott.com/articles

6 posts · 4 Votes

Tech 50% · History 33% · Writing 17%

Subscribe via RSS

  1. Ad Infinitum

    At Google I/O this week, the company announced the biggest change to Search in 25 years. The ten blue links? Gone. Instead, you get “generative UI” – custom interactive widgets, built on the fly by Gemini. You get “information agents” that monitor the web for you around the clock. You get mini-apps you can build right inside the search box, using natural language. And with Gemini Spark, you get a personal AI agent that runs 24/7, connected to your Gmail, your Drive, your calendar, your photos,…

    4
  2. At Machine Speed

    Yesterday, I opened Discord to a message from my friend Bastian Allgeier that I had never quite seen in all the years I’ve been building sites with his Kirby CMS. “Today we are releasing our biggest security release in the last 14+ years,” Bastian wrote. “The last few weeks have been intense, to say the least. We received 8 reports within just a couple of days.” Six of those eight security reports turned out to be valid vulnerabilities. The resulting Kirby 5.4.0 release ships with a list of…

    0
  3. Design and Engineering, As One

    In the winter of 1898, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor arrived at the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania with a stopwatch and a conviction. Taylor had been thinking for years about why industrial work was so inefficient, and he believed he had found the answer: the problem was that the people who did the work were also the people who decided how to do it. Workers brought their own habits, their own rhythms, their...

    0
  4. Hello Again, World

    On December 24, 1968, Christmas Eve, astronaut William Anders took what would become one of the most consequential photographs in human history. He was aboard Apollo 8, orbiting the Moon for the fourth time, when the spacecraft rotated and the Earth appeared in his window. A small, luminous sphere, blue and white, suspended in the blackness above the barren lunar horizon. Anders grabbed his Hasselblad camera, loaded a roll of Kodak Ektach...

    0
  5. This, Still Not for Everyone

    The new WebAIM Million report is out, the eighth annual accessibility analysis of the top one million home pages on the Web. And after eight years of data, the picture is as sobering as ever. In 2019, 97.8% of home pages had detectable WCAG conformance failures. In 2026, that number is 95.9%. That’s less than two percentage points of improvement in seven years – and this year actually reversed the (minimal) downward trend, climbing back u...

    0
  6. The Shape of Friction

    Dave Rupert just wrote a piece called People are not friction and I just had to write a short reaction blog post, because Dave names something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. His main argument: the AI marketing dream of a “frictionless” workflow – where you automate away every task you don’t enjoy, every job you don’t know how to do, and every person who slows you down – is not efficiency. And a dangerous place to end up. He’s r...

    0