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Fiverr and Freelancers Union have thrown their weight behind announcing October 19 as the first-ever International Freelancer Day, along with launching the Freelancer Wellness Fund where you can apply for grants.
With Freelance Business Month, European Freelancers Week, and the Day of the Freelancer also scheduled for October, do you need more proof that this month will likely be perceived as a celebration of freelancing? Individual freelancers may not care much, but it is just great for raising awareness.
Side note: Since Freelancers Union discontinued publishing annual Freelancing in America surveys in collaboration with Upwork (which goes on producing its own Freelance Forward reports), teaming up with Fiverr seems to confirm its growing influence on the freelance economy.
There are hundreds of AI-based image enhancement tools, but the best we’ve used so far is GFPGAN. It can upscale low-quality, low-resolution photo portraits to almost unbelievable results.
Whenever you need to upscale an older headshot or restore a family photograph, you can use the free GFPGAN Inference Demo tool. Here’s how to do it:
Once in a while comes an article that explains some simple-yet-powerful idea of personal time management extremely well. Focus on Projects, Not Tasks, by our star member Mark McGuinness is one of those:
“We won’t remember [Beethoven, Picasso, Shakespeare, etc.] for the tasks they ticked off their to-do lists, only the major works they produced.“
Although written mainly for creatives and artists, Mark’s advice is also useful for other freelancers who find themselves distracted or spread too thin.
New McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey suggests there are 58 million (or 36%) independent workers in the USA.
That’s a huge number but also quite controversial: The category of “independent workers” grouped freelancers (both full-time and part-time) together with contractors (including those with a single client and likely to be misclassified employees), as well as gig and temporary workers who are rarely truly independent (of their platforms or other intermediaries). In other words, the classification treats all sorts of precarious work as “independent”, which is misleading and results in overblown estimates of freelance work.
The full report has not been released. However, it is quite obvious that the new survey represents a step down from the older, highly-regarded and methodically superior 2016 report Independent Work by McKinsey Global Institute.
Freelancing.eu’s founder Robert Vlach presented the opening keynote at the Dag van de freelancer conference (aka Day of the freelancer) in Brussels yesterday — a fantastic event organized by the joint Belgo-Dutch freelance community (Unizo, NextConomy, and Jellow) at a coworking center with an auditorium for 200 people. Gathering so many friendly freelancers in one place… what a blast!
The groundbreaking DALL-E 2 AI image generator opens for all, giving creatives worldwide an opportunity to play with its new exciting AI technology.
Upon signing up, you get 50 free credits during your first month, and 15 free credits will refill every month after that + you can always buy additional credits.
Example: Here’s the Dalle2-generated image of “a freelance copywriter walking in a city street full of people” — do you like it?
From 14 to 21 October, European Freelancers Week 2022 will take place, and you can easily join in. Just choose from the dozens of events coming up across Europe that week, or organize one of your own (even online).
We recommend #EFWeek every year because it's a really great way to connect with the local or international freelancing community.
The Kindle edition of The Freelance Way from HarperCollins is currently available for only $5.49 — a superb time-limited offer! (In Netherlands, it’s €3.80 for the ebook.)
Stable Diffusion is another hugely popular AI model for generating images from a text prompt.
What makes Stable Diffusion different from other text-to-image AI generators like Midjourney, DALL-E 2 or Imagen, is that it is open-source and you can install it on your computer — or try it for free in the cloud-based DreamStudio.
Meanwhile, so-called prompt engineering is ever more discussed as the career of future. Well, it may just as well be the “googling” of the future.
We haven’t published any news for a week, but for a very good reason: We’ve been busy finishing the new website of our Czech freelance community Navolnenoze.cz which was released yesterday. It’s been a year or so in the making, adopting many new features that we first tested here on Freelancing.eu.
Na volné noze is one of the most active freelance communities in Europe, currently supporting over 250,000 Czech freelancers, self-employed, and small-business owners in their business.