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[Turns off mobile phone]
In “How I use my phone”, and in two prior blog posts about greyscale and night shift mode, I spoke about how I customise some of the software I use. I was inspired to write my phone in large part by discussions with friends. I then realised that such blog posts are a means to...
Every episode of the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast has a transcript. The first episode was transcribed by me; future episodes are being transcribed by Zachary from Lunaseeker Press. The transcript has links to the time at which each speaker starts speaking. For example, 0:19...
Ran my 14th Bay to Breakers race in 1:57:12 this past Sunday.Almost 2min behind last year, from needing a 5min+ pitstop at the Panhandle.I skipped public transport (see previous years), and left at 7am to jog to the start. After ~3.5 miles I found my way to corral A and seren...
Saturday was a busy day; I was on my feet for most of the day, and then came home to participate in the IndieWeb Zine meetup. Today, however, is comparatively quieter. I started my day reading manga in bed, and then had a slow start to the day – making breakfast, continuing t...
On Saturday I joined an IndieWeb pop up about zines, hosted by Morgan. The meetup was about both zines and the intersection of zines and personal websites – the affordances of each medium, how the mediums compare, where the mediums intersect, and more. I helped take notes (no...
When I start writing, sometimes I go to the search engine on my website to see if I have written about a topic before. I did this when I was writing background; foreground. I had been thinking about the contrast between backgrounds and foregrounds for a while, so I wondered i...
In a way, I carry my website with me wherever I go. Technically, my website is a few keystrokes away on my phone, but I think the presence of my website extends beyond the technical. Having a website encourages me to write, I think, because I know I have a place to put and sh...
Oh! Listening to my favorite podcast @shoptalkshow reminded me that I forgot to connect the dots to another, probably totally unrelated detail: that Chrome just shipped with the Prompt API and a 4GB Gemini Nano model, despite pushback from other browser makers.
https://matthiasott.com/notes/lazy-and-prompt
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by cumulative layout shift.
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 ...
✍️ New post: Ad Infinitum
Google announced the biggest change to Search in 25 years at #GoogleIO. But where are the ads…? 🤔
https://matthiasott.com/notes/ad-infinitum
Of course, there will still be ads. And auctions as well. And not only will that determine which ads show up, but how many words the LLM is writing about a product. They call it “prominence allocation”. The ad is in the generated content.
(Thanks @sijmen for the hint!) https://blog.reachsumit.com/posts/2024/08/ads-llm/
So Google is basically killing their main product? The ingenious money machine that made them billions? Or am I missing something … I mean: where are the ads? 🤔
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/