Voila! Youre done. The whole procedure should take only a few minutes.

Theres nothing like a great cover.

Youre rekindling angst at a Pearl Jam show and without any warning they go right into a Beatles song. You recognize some David Bowie lyrics on Spotify, and you discover its an unrecognizable version of Lets Dance by M. Ward. You listen to Tiny Cities by Sun Kil Moon several times before you even realize its an entire album of beautifully fermented Modest Mouse songs.

How often have you thought to yourself, I would love to hear this person sing this other bands song in their own style? For instance, I wish I could listen to Mike Doughty sing just about anything.

Over the past year or two, weve started to see artificial intelligence begin to approximate that dream (or nightmare, depending on your perspective). First it was eye-opening deep fake videos of past presidents appearing to say things they never said, but now its moved on to much more creative and cool endeavors like OpenAI Jukebox. You should read the full description on the site, but essentially they are training models to identify everything that goes into a song: instruments, lyrics, musical style, and a whole lot more. The models are primitive for now, but even at this early stage, they can start recombining things in interesting ways like having Ella Fitzgerald sing a Prince song but in the style of folk rock.

I spent a good part of the weekend messing around in Jukebox, and its mesmerizing. It really feels like the beginning of something big, and just as excitingly, something that could get orders of magnitude better within only a few years.

When you listen to it, it almost feels like the first words of a child or if you prefer, the first song from Jimmy Page.

A lot of the stuff in the library is pretty rough, but here are some of the most interesting ones I found:

Everything feels very Frankensteiny right now, but imagine a few years from now when these techniques are improved and expanded. We may reach a point where there is a virtually unlimited universe of concert-quality covers you can create with just a few taps. As a music lover, this is super intriguing, but on the other hand, I wonder how musicians will feel about it. And will their opinions change based on whether we can find a way to monetize it generously for them? I could see some artists rejecting this sort of thing outright because its not real music in the traditional sense, and I wouldnt blame them. But what if you told them that every time their voice was mixed into another song, they made a royalty off of it? That might change some opinions.

This is going to be a really fun space to watch closely over the next few years. Until then, I leave you with another great cover: Metallicas Orion — by Rodrigo y Gabriela. Incidentally, the header image for this page is from their Masonic Auditorium show in 2015. Pure luck but probably the best photo Ive ever taken.

I have never been less qualified to write about anything than I am about NFL labor negotiations, but I had a crazy idea a little while ago for how NFL players can win their labor dispute with owners and I want to get it out there for battle-testing.

Players put their bodies on the line every day to a degree that most of them are not fairly compensated for, so I will almost always side with players in terms of wanting them to get the best deal possible. This is a unconventional idea to help achieve that goal and get both sides to a good and equitable place as quickly as possible.

Before the start of the 2020 NFL season, all 32 starting quarterbacks should initiate a quarterback-only strike. Everyone else shows up to work and gets paid. If there is no acceptable deal in place by opening week, the games begin, the quality of play degrades dramatically, ratings/attendance/sales tank, and owners — unable to wait out a group of 32 players with many millions more in financial security than 99% of the league — are forced back to the bargaining table with a 16-game season, a true 50/50 revenue split, and a few other things players are quite reasonably asking for.

Athletes get out-negotiated by owners for a very simple reason: there are 32 owners and none of them ever need another paycheck again. Losing even vast amounts of their fortunes will not degrade their quality of life. There are 1696 active NFL players and most of them are materially affected every time they miss even a single game check. 32 billionaires vs over a thousand normal people who need paychecks is a recipe for exactly the sort of terrible deal that was signed ten years ago and threatens to be signed again. The goal of a Quarterback-Only Strike is to change the equation to 32 billionaires vs 32 of the most popular cash-rich players.

Do quarterbacks really have that much cash cushion? Lets take a look at lifetime earnings for the 32 starting quarterbacks in the league right now. Note that this doesnt even include endorsements, but also doesnt include taxes:

I have no idea how these guys invest or spend their money, but in my estimation, until you get down to the final few players (especially Dak sorry Dak!), you are looking at pretty good financial cushions. Certainly enough to weather a few games or an entire season especially if you include lost backpay in your deal requirements. Most position players in the league cannot afford this sort of holdout, but pretty much all starting QBs can.

Its also possible that other players who have lifetime earnings over, say $25m, decide to join this strike in solidarity, but its not strictly necessary. Some marquee names might include J.J. Watt ($85m), Richard Sherman ($69m), or the NFLs top selling non-QB jersey title holder Odell Beckham Jr. ($48m).

The other thing thats nice about this proposal is that its literally the only position in any sport that could pull it off. Football could easily weather a strike at any other position, but not quarterback. Baseball could weather a strike from any position — even pitchers. Fans love offense! Basketball could weather a strike from any position because superstars are spread out amongst all five positions. I dont watch a lot of hockey or soccer so I will just assume they fit my narrative too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Quarterbacks are almost always the face of the franchise, the entire game runs through them in todays pass-heavy NFL, and this is the perfect time to consolidate that power against owners and use it to improve conditions for the other 1664 players who dont hold the same cards they do.

When I initially came up with this cockamamie scheme a few months ago, the reason I thought it might not work is that of all players on an NFL team, you would think quarterbacks would be the coziest with owners. But now that I see my own teams QB, Russell Wilson, along with Aaron Rodgers, come out as strongly against the current CBA proposal, I think this thing could have some legs.

If players cannot get the very best deal they deserve this offseason, a Quarterback-Only Strike should be actively considered because it changes the negotiation from 32 vs 1696 to 32 vs 32. Additionally, you only need a majority of owners to cave, so if a few owners are insulated by the fact that they dont have star quarterbacks yet, the rest of the owners are still vulnerable.

Its also entirely possible someone else has already thought of this and kicked enough holes in it to show why it wouldnt work. Basically, I need some more eyes on this thing. Agents, players, sports attorneys, whoever. If you know of someone who you think would have an opinion about it, Id love to hear from them. The comment section is open below.

I remember about 15 years ago — before the launch of the iPhone — thinking quite resolutely that internet-connected phones were just a really unexciting transition phase between the desktop internet and immersive technologies like contact lenses and brain implants. We knew where we already were: amazing high bandwidth experiences on the desktop, and it seemed pretty clear where we were going in a couple of decades: even better experiences with no visible hardware whatsoever.

The new class of experiences on mobile phones at the time, however, was uninspiring. Palm Treos with barely functional browsers on them. Blackberries that handled email but little else well. T9 keyboards that were a pain to use. Barely any designers wanted to work on this stuff. It wasnt very fun to create, use, or even tell anyone you worked on.

When the iPhone came along in 2007, it was the first mobile device that was fun to design for and fun to use for a wide variety of things. As it grew more and more useful, I began to think of internet-connected phones as quite a bit more exciting but still ultimately a transition state to full cyborg land. It seems inconceivable that in 10 or 20 years, we will still be staring down at these glass rectangles instead of directly at the world with whatever augmented reality experiences we choose in between.

As phones have gotten more comically large and the services on them more tragically addictive over the past few years, Ive found myself wondering if there is more value in letting some of this connectivity go. Clearly smartphones provide a lot of value for us, but what is the true cost of all this convenience? Being able to receive a text from your spouse while youre at the supermarket is valuable, but the same device that delivers you that text can deliver a social network notification while youre driving that ends up killing you or others.

Attempting to quantify the large and small harm caused by smartphone use is a big project better suited to places like Tristan Harris Center for Humane Technology, but you dont need to quantify it to admit its doing you some amount of harm.

There is no shortage of advice about how to make your phone less addictive. Turn off a bunch of notifications. Flip on Do Not Disturb. Use Black White mode. Delete social networking apps. Its all good advice, but for me, having that giant, heavy glass brick in my pocket is a constant reminder of whats at my fingertips.

What Ive really grown to want is less at my fingertips.

Minimum viable connectivity.

Wherever I happen to be, I want the least amount of potential digital distractions and appholes around me. Its no different than the concept of eating healthier. When you want to lose weight, you dont keep a bunch of junk food in your pockets and just promise to never open it. You remove junk food from your house completely.

Until recently, there was no great way to stop carrying your smartphone with you without giving up a ton of benefits. Over the past two weeks, however, Ive begun using an Apple Watch without a phone almost all day long, and its been great. Its introduced exactly the amount of digital friction I need in my life and I dont imagine going back to hyper-connected smartphone world anytime soon.

The best way to guarantee success is by preemptively engineering systems to reduce friction for positive habits, and increase friction for negative ones. — Craig Mod, from the great piece I linked to above

I love that I am still generally reachable by phone or text when I wear it. I love that I can still navigate with maps. I love that I can track my runs without third party services and listen to podcasts along the way. I love that I can see when its about to rain.

And I love that thats about all I can do. I dont mind that texts are a little harder to send. I dont even mind that theres no camera. If Im on vacation in an interesting place, I will surely take my phone, but do I really need to be taking more photos around town? Probably not. This is the point many people will break with me on this whole strategy, but try it. You may be surprised.

In terms of things I dont like about about this experiment so far, it really just comes down to a couple of flaws with the watch itself: the LTE radio is pretty spotty and the Apple Podcast app is a usability disaster, both on the phone and the watch. Because the radio is weak, you really need to make sure anything you want to listen to is downloaded already, and because the apps are so bad, its very hard to ensure that actually happens. Youll generally have some podcasts downloaded and ready to listen to but they just arent always the ones you expected. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Even with those problems, I still feel great about this less-connected road Im going down. Somewhat surprisingly, I dont even feel like Im missing out on anything.

The hyper-connected future will probably still happen, but the form it will take doesnt feel so inevitable to me anymore. Ive learned in these two weeks alone that I dont actually want every distracting digital experience in the world at my fingertips. I only want what is helpful and stays out of the way.

The last time I wore a watch was in high school, and I distinctly remember how excited I was to finally get a cell phone my junior year.

27 years later, Im just as excited now to do the opposite.

It’s been exactly one year since I joined InVision, and after learning the ropes of remote work at an 800+ person all-remote company, I wanted to share some thoughts on how placelessness may affect the way we work in the future.

First, lets dispense with the easy part: despite what you may read on Twitter, remote work is neither the greatest thing in the world nor the worst. We are not moving to a world where offices go completely away, nor are we going through some sort of phase where remote work will eventually prove to be a giant waste of time. In other words, its complicated.

The way to look at remote work is that its a series of tradeoffs. You enjoy benefits in exchange for disadvantages. The uptake of remote work over the next decade will depend most on the minimization of those disadvantages rather than the maximization of the benefits. Reason being, the benefits are already substantial while many of the disadvantages will be lessened over time with technology and process improvements.

Instead of writing about the advantages and disadvantages separately, Im going to cover several aspects of remote work and discuss the tradeoffs involved with each.

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Last week was a good week for privacy. Or was it?

It took an article I almost didnt publish and tens of thousands of people saying they were creeped out, but Superhuman admitted they were wrong and reduced the danger that their surveillance pixels introduce. Good on Rahul Vohra and team for that.

I will say, however, that Im a little surprised how quickly some people are rolling over and giving Superhuman credit for fixing a problem that they didnt actually fix. From tech press articles implying that the company quickly closed all of its privacy issues, to friends sending me nice notes, I dont think people are paying close enough attention here. This is not Mission Accomplished for ethical product design or privacy — at all.

I noticed two people — Walt Mossberg and Josh Constine — who spoke out immediately with the exact thoughts I had in my head.

1/ This is a good *first* step. Better than doing nothing. But it’s not enough. I read the full blog post. It makes no mention of disabling tracking how *often* the recipient opens the email. It’s also full of the rationalization that secret tracking is ok in “business” software. https://t.co/c0PbCRLgdp

Walt Mossberg (@waltmossberg) July 3, 2019

I appreciate Superhuman’s changes, but the problem is recipients don’t know they’re tracked, and it’s still not going to warn them https://t.co/GPfUYVkBMs

Josh Constine (@JoshConstine) July 3, 2019

Lets take a look at how Superhuman explains their changes. Rahul correctly lays out four of the criticisms leveled at Superhumans read receipts:

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Over the past 25 years, email has weaved itself into the daily fabric of life. Our inboxes contain everything from very personal letters, to work correspondence, to unsolicited inbound sales pitches. In many ways, they are an extension of our homes: private places where we are free to deal with what life throws at us in whatever way we see fit. Have an inbox zero policy? Thats up to you. Let your inbox build into the thousands and only deal with what you can stay on top of? Thats your business too.

It is disappointing then that one of the most hyped new email clients, Superhuman, has decided to embed hidden tracking pixels inside of the emails its customers send out. Superhuman calls this feature Read Receipts and turns it on by default for its customers, without the consent of its recipients. Youve heard the term Read Receipts before, so you have most likely been conditioned to believe its a simple Read/Unread status that people can opt out of. With Superhuman, it is not. If I send you an email using Superhuman (no matter what email client you use), and you open it 9 times, this is what I see:

Thats right. A running log of every single time you have opened my email, including your location when you opened it. Before we continue, ask yourself if you expect this information to be collected on you and relayed back to your parent, your child, your spouse, your co-worker, a salesperson, an ex, a random stranger, or a stalker every time you read an email. Although some one-to-many email blasting software has used similar technologies to track open rates, the answer is no; most people dont expect this. People reasonably expect that when — and especially where — they read their email is their own business.

When I initially tweeted about this last week, the tweet was faved by a wide variety of people, including current and former employees and CEOs of companies ranging from Facebook, to Apple, to Twitter:

It was also met critically by several Superhuman users, as well as some Superhuman investors (who never disclosed that they were investors, even in past, private conversations with me). I want to talk about this issue because I think its instructive to how we build products and companies with a sense of ethics and responsibility. I think what Superhuman is doing here demonstrates a lack of regard for both.

First, a few caveats:

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Reading Craig Mods excellent piece The Future Book is Here, but Its Not What We Expected got me thinking more about newsletters. Ive never been a big consumer of newsletters, mostly because I still use RSS regularly and dont really need more stuff in my inbox.

Then the other day I happened to find the first new blog I wanted to subscribe to in years, and lo and behold, Aaron doesnt even have an RSS feed! Just an email newsletter.

So I added Aarons newsletter to a dedicated newsletter app Im testing called Stoop and now were golden.

Although I still use Twitter and RSS feeds for finding interesting links, theres something nice about a well-curated newsletter that aligns with your interests. I still dont subscribe to many of them, but my favorites so far are:

If anyone has any other recommendations, please feel free to leave them in the comments! I reserve the right to delete anything that looks spammy, self-promotional, or low quality, however. Only the good stuff, please! :)

A wonderful state-of-the-union for the design industry as we move out of the age of attention hijacking towards a mindset that puts users' health and happiness first. Great writing from Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga.

The comfort of our design jobs, especially in Silicon Valley, has, in many ways, limited our power to advocate for the right thing. We are comfortable in our expensive chairs, busy pleasing our internal stakeholders and pretending we can keep our responsibilities as citizens out of our work, and the impact of our work out of our personal lives. For a long time, we even ignored harassment issues in our offices.

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