Marc Chambers

30 Followers
151 Following
254 Posts

Working at Google for now. Formerly helped devs ship their games to Stadia. Shitposting about gaming and football or otherwise posting like it's Twitter in 2007.

Interests & Hobbies: #VideoGames #GameDev #BoardGames #Film #Screenwriting #Space #StarTrek #NASA #Football #FulhamFC #USMNT #MST3K

Sitehttps://marc.london
YouTubehttps://youtube.com/@spiffymarc
LocationLondon, UK
Pronounshe/him
In a truly shocking move, OpenAI has launched the next big closed ecosystem.

The UK government increases the film and TV expenditure credit from 25% to as much as 34%, with the qualifying threshold for high-end TV shows held at £1M (Jake Kanter/Deadline)

https://deadline.com/2023/03/uk-film-and-tv-tax-credit-raised-1235300050/
http://mediagazer.com/230315/p5#a230315p5

Budget: UK Raises Film & TV Tax Credits & Maintains Threshold

The British government has provided a boost for the UK film and TV industry by announcing that it is increasing tax breaks and maintaining the qualifying threshold. Jeremy Hunt, the British Chancel…

Deadline
At the current rate of innovation, pace of release and reduction in transparency with each release, by mid-2024 we’ll be getting GPT-17 which can instantly create a real life human, and the press release will just be a photo of Sam Altman smiling
BBC editor: “this is obviously important, but can you refine it to be more relevant to a UK audience?”

The UK awards a one-off £20M payment to the BBC World Service to protect all 42 of its language services over the next two years and counter disinformation (Kylie MacLellan/Reuters)

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-gives-bbc-world-service-20-mln-pounds-support-english-language-broadcasting-2023-03-13/
http://mediagazer.com/230313/p8#a230313p8

UK gives BBC World Service 20 mln pounds to support English language broadcasting

Britain said on Monday it had awarded a one-off payment of 20 million pounds ($24.13 million) to the BBC World Service as part of its efforts to support English language broadcasting and counter disinformation.

Reuters
After three months of watching TV with a sleeping baby, I've come to one important conclusion: streaming boxes suck. All of them. And that's a real bummer. https://www.theverge.com/23621907/streaming-tv-boxes-roku-amazon-google-apple-nvidia
All the streaming boxes suck now

Streaming boxes have gone from promising little gadgets to ubiquitous headaches. No matter if it’s a Roku, Amazon, Google, or even Apple device, they all suffer from poor user experiences that haven’t matured in the past decade.

The Verge

An NLRB director rules that Google is a "joint employer" with YouTube subcontractor Cognizant and must bargain with Cognizant workers if they vote to unionize (Josh Eidelson/Bloomberg)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-03/google-must-negotiate-if-contract-staff-unionize-nlrb-official-rules
http://www.techmeme.com/230303/p23#a230303p23

Alphabet Must Negotiate If Contract Staff Unionize, Labor Board Official Rules

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is legally the boss of YouTube contract staff and must collectively bargain with the workers if they vote to unionize, a US labor board official ruled.

Bloomberg
Everyone in the north tonight racing to social media like
So much of this echoes my experience. I gave up on voice assistants entirely, in large part due to the "user education" prompts they started providing on unrelated queries. https://www.readmargins.com/p/alexa-what-happened
Alexa, what happened?

Sometimes innovation just ain't enough

Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk

An aspect of #Google that makes things even more complicated is -- again, this is just my one guy opinion -- is that Google has never really been effective at speaking to the public at large, and explaining to the public -- not just techies and other high-level stakeholders -- in ways that will be understood and appreciated.

And this leaves an information vacuum that gets filled with misinformation and disinformation from others. That's why so many people still think Google sells users' personal information to advertisers (they don't and never have) or that advertisers can buy organic search result rankings (they can't and have never been able to).

When I explain these kinds of issues and many others (e.g., relating to #YouTube) I almost always get "gee, how come nobody ever explained this to me this way before?" responses.

I've been bugging Google about this situation for many years and unfortunately have made very little headway. And now this problem is more important than ever for Google to solve.