Cafes in the United States seek to discourage remote workers staying all day

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Cafes in the United States seek to discourage remote workers staying all day

22 May 2025

Some coffee shops in the United States have begun cracking down on people who use their place for hours, maybe even all day, as an office. Some store owners are imposing time limits on remote workers, switching off WI-FI, or blocking access to powerpoints.

Fair enough too. Australian cafe operators are acutely aware of the challenges of running a profitable business, and having someone hogging a table all day, only makes matters worse.

Some owners hope a table will generate perhaps forty dollars an hour, on the expectation several parties occupy that table over the course of an hour. It seems doubtful to me that a remote worker, sitting at a table for, say, eight hours, would even spend forty dollars all day.

Authors deeply divided over use of generative AI says BookBub

21 May 2025

United States based book discovery service BookBub recently asked twelve hundred writers about their thoughts on generative AI. Unsurprisingly, opinion was sharply divided, with an almost exactly half of respondents either against the technology, or in favour of it.

Overall, opinions among authors are deeply divided — many consider any use of generative AI unethical and irresponsible, while others find it a helpful tool to enhance their writing and business processes. Some authors remain conflicted, and are still negotiating their own feelings about the utility and morality of this technology.

It seems to me these findings sum up the way people in general, not just authors, see generative AI.

Half of Australians use AI, but many mistrust, even fear it

17 May 2025

The findings come as part of a global study into the use of, and attitudes to artificial intelligence (AI), carried out by multinational professional services network KPMG, in conjunction with Professor Nicole Gillespie and Dr Steve Lockey, of the University of Melbourne.

“The public’s trust of AI technologies and their safe and secure use is central to acceptance and adoption,” Professor Gillespie says. “Yet our research reveals that 78% of Australians are concerned about a range of negative outcomes from the use of AI systems, and 37% have personally experienced or observed negative outcomes ranging from inaccuracy, misinformation and manipulation, deskilling, and loss of privacy or IP.”

While the benefits of AI use in the workplace are understood, many Australians harbour concerns the technology may result in job losses. These fears are justified to an extent however, and not only in Australia, with some freelance IT and creative professionals reporting declines in work availability, something that they are attributing to the prevalence of AI technology.

AI coding tools will make vibe code output a thing of the past

14 May 2025

Mark Sullivan, writing for Fast Company:

Google DeepMind research scientist Nikolay Savinov said in a recent interview that AI coding tools will soon support 10 million-token context windows — and eventually, 100 million. With that kind of memory, an AI tool could absorb vast amounts of human instruction and even analyze an entire company’s existing codebase for guidance on how to build and optimize new systems.

When a developer uses an AI technology to produce some code, but has no regard for the quality of the generated code, there you have vibe coding.

It might be bad code of the worst sort, but who cares? Not that particular developer. Future coding tools however will eventually — one day — be so proficient that all the code they create will be top notch. Bad code, and vibe coding, will be a thing of the past.

Or will it? The super-duper code these super-duper AI tools generate will be so good, no one will need to worry about its quality any more. That will be vibe coding, but an entirely different form of vibe coding. If you enjoyed the joke, you can start laughing now.

Is artificial intelligence taking work away from freelance designers, developers?

14 May 2025

Serbia based SEO consultant Nenad offers a grim assessment of the industry:

The number of available jobs is dwindling. Companies are tightening their budgets and relying more on AI to handle basic tasks. Why hire a freelancer for graphic design when you can get an AI to whip up something decent in seconds? Decent? Yesterday I tested a new Ai service called Readdy, and I got a landing page in 5 minutes that looks like a $1,000 job (5 years ago).

I’ve been hearing anecdotal reports locally (NSW), in recent months, of freelance design and development professionals taking on gig-economy work, point-to-point driving, and food delivery, to help make ends meet. There’s people saying AI will bring about new work opportunities in time, but it seems like there will be a fair few job losses before that happens.

The motherf***ing website, the way all websites used to be

13 May 2025

A long time ago, that is. But the motherf***ing website (hopefully them asterisks slip this post through them filters wherever they may be) is lightweight, responsive, and works.

Websites aren’t broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them.

Designed by someone called Barry Smith, the motherf***ing website has been around for over ten years — the Digiday article I linked just then, is dated December 2013. I don’t know how I missed seeing this before.

Needless to say, NSFW on account of strong language.

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design, technology

Mark Zuckerberg says one day our friends will be AI chatbots

12 May 2025

Way back in 1979, a British new wave band called Tubeway Army asked the question: Are ‘Friends’ Electric. Note the band’s use of scare quotes around the word friend. Are they suggesting friends that are electric are not real friends? Listen to the song and see what you think.

Forty-six years later, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, believes the majority of people’s friends will soon be AI chatbots of some sort. These AI ‘friends’ might be okay to talk to, but there wouldn’t be much else you could do with them. For example, you couldn’t really go out to dinner together.

Zuckerberg thinks most Americans only have three friends — I wonder what the average friend count is for Facebook members? — but is pretty sure they would like more. He thinks fifteen is the optimal number. The way then to make-up the shortfall is to generate AI companions.

An AI ‘friend’ might be a bit like an imaginary friend who could think for themselves. The Facebook co-founder goes on to suggest therapists and business agents will also be AI chatbots. I’m not sure if chatbots would be ideal therapists, but as business agents they might work.

Generative AI does not reduce work, it creates more. Fiverr workers excepted

9 May 2025

Benj Edwards writing for Ars Technica:

A new study analyzing the Danish labor market in 2023 and 2024 suggests that generative AI models like ChatGPT have had almost no significant impact on overall wages or employment yet, despite rapid adoption in some workplaces.

It’s early days of course, and AI technologies are really still only seeping into workplaces. But the suggestion here is, by taking care of other tasks, AI leaves us free to do other things. Things it presumably can’t yet do.

Yet we’ve been here before, The arrival of successive technologies over recent decades, computers among them, were meant to reduce our workloads, freeing up more time for leisure activities. Here we are though, spending ever more time working, because with new technologies doing more grunt work, we can do more, I don’t know, meaningful workplace tasks.

But Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, sees the picture differently. In an email to staff, he warned AI is “coming for” the jobs of everyone — including his — at the online freelance marketplace:

It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person — Al is coming for you.

This is For Everyone, a memoir by Tim Berners-Lee

29 April 2025

This is For Everyone, being published this September, is the memoir of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. The title, I think, belongs on the TBR list of anyone with any interest in the web.

The most influential inventor of the modern world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a different kind of visionary. Born in the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Berners-Lee famously shared his invention, the World Wide Web, for no commercial reward. Its widespread adoption changed everything, transforming humanity into the first digital species. Through the web, we live, work, dream and connect.

Not only did the British computer scientist bring us the web, he also created HTML, URLs, and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), all of which makes it possible to see this very web page.

AI-host presents Australian radio show undetected for six months

28 April 2025

CADA, a Sydney based radio station, was, without a word said, using an AI-generated DJ to host one of their shows, for possibly as long as six months. The ruse came to light after Australian writer Stephanie Coombes, acting on a tip off, was unable to track down any bios, press releases, or social media presences for Thy, the twenty-something presenter of the four-hour, weekday show.

Australian Radio Network (ARN), who owns CADA, later said in a statement to Mediaweek, that Thy was part of a “trial” of AI audio tools. Thy’s voice, according to the statement, was based on that of a woman working in the ARN office.

There’s a few things at play here. One is the broadcaster’s failure to disclose their presenter was AI-generated. Another is the time it took to pick this up. I don’t listen to CADA, and never heard Thy’s show, but the AI avatar must have been convincing in the extreme, if others listeners didn’t think anything was amiss, even after six months.

There’s also the point that this is the direction broadcast media might be moving in, that is, away from people as presenters, to AI-created entities. In addition, the suggestion has been made that other broadcasters might already be using AI hosts for shows, that have not, so far, come to light.

One well known AI-radio presenter however is Debbie Disrupt, a newsreader on Melbourne based radio station, Disrupt Radio. In this instance though the station made it clear from the onset that Debbie was not a real person. That particular stance seemed to move in Disrupt’s favour.

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