NYC Phil

Rob invited me out to the NYC Philharmoic on Saturday. We started the night with dinner at Jeju in the West Village, an excellent Korean place I'd return to. I had the gochu ramyun, Rob the donkatsu, and we split the fried chicken app. We had extra time, so we grabbed some scotch at the old Art Bar; place was still packed and going strong.

The performance was really nice. I don't have the words to appropriately describe the pieces, but I did learn plenty from Rob, not only about the music, but how orchestras and players work as an industry and career. 

The program:

• Mozart: K.505 aria
• Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major
• Mahler: Symphony No. 4

Beirut on AI

Michael Beirut with a great take on a benefit of AI:

"A majority of the world is boilerplate, and that's a good thing," Michael says. "Because all of us are motivated by two opposing kinds of needs. One is the need for predictability and comfort. And the other is the need for surprise and excitement. If you get that balance wrong and everything is just comfortable and predictable, you get bored. And that's not good. But on the other hand, the antidote to that isn't 100% unpredictability, surprise, and entertainment, because then you get too overstimulated and start to freak out. There's a certain reason why you wouldn't want every building on Fifth Avenue to look like the Guggenheim. It just would be too crazy in an unpleasant way. This architect was admiring some anonymous building somewhere in Manhattan, and they said, 'You know, what makes a city great is its ability to put up and maintain something like this, a perfectly good kind of background building that actually does its job well and isn't calling attention to itself.' But if you examine the details, you see that they're sound and built to last, and the tenants are satisfied. And then down the block and around the corner, there's something more special and showy that provides a great foil for that.”

So maybe ChatGPT, Midjourney, and all of those other new generative AI programs can be responsible for doing the boilerplate really well. Now, you've got time to do something a little more interesting. "Everyone dismisses boilerplate as crap that's not worth anyone's time," Bierut says. "You could argue boilerplate makes the world go round, whether it's in architecture, design, or writing. Boilerplate makes things that are special look and feel more appropriately special. Maybe that's an appropriate way to think about the promise of AI, but I don't know."

This tracks with how I've been thinking about AI with respect to design (or any creative profession). It's going to be a tool which helps with boring, rote elements of a process. It'll be able to recreate and fuse older iterations of a craft in order to more quickly produce what had come before. It's just not going to be reliably able to make something humanist and new. At some point, the boundaries of what AI can produce will be obvious, and human beings will bend culture back to what is more fully human.

You can't believe the tech bros about this. They're going to claim AI will be possible of anything — including self-awareness and then becoming our new god. Whatever AI creatures they do eventually create will look and act like them, because people are only able to create gods in their own image. In the case of AI, that god will also be white, male, and techno-centric.

Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing how art and society eventually push back on the upcoming AI-obsessed culture. It should be really human. Really tactile and emotional. Think about how Grunge reset the table on music as we turned into the 1990s. AI stuff will always look clean and rich. It'll have a pristine quality to it, even when prompted to not. Because it's expensive. And it's run by rich people. The pushback to it is going to be a good time. It's going to be the Guggenheims on a street full of forgettable buildings.

Advice from Gaiman

Posted by Jennifer Grand on BlueSky.

[E]xquisite advice from [Neil Gaiman]
“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

The End of Pitchfork?

Pitchfork magazine is being folded into GQ. I've been a reader for over twenty years now, and so this is a bummer. I read maybe one out of every 300 reviews, but it was still a good place to catch wind of new artists, or which older artists are putting out new material.

Kornhaber does a pretty good job of capturing my attitude towards it:

The irony of Pitchfork is that although it has long been thought of as a keeper of cool, the site itself has never been particularly cool; one admits sheepishly to reading it. This is not just because of its reputation for snobbery and its sometimes exasperating prose. It's also because to absorb the logic of Pitchfork is to believe in the authority of each individual's ears and brain. Saying you're a Pitchfork person can be mistaken for saying you take its opinions as your own, when ideally it just means that you want a discerning companion for making your own discoveries and judgments.

I never really cared what Pitchfork said about anyone. I'm able to have my own studied opinions. But if they cared to write about someone, I figured they were worth the attention, for good or bad.

This is probably the end of the site, but the real Pitchfork killer would be the sunsetting of its RSS feed. If I can't follow the music news without also getting posts about what watches movie stars wore on red carpets, then I'm out out.

Time to start looking for more places for independent music news.

BrianFeeney.us v11.2

Welcome to a slightly updated brianfeeney.us. This morning, I transferred my domain from one server to another, moving from my old website to this one. Minor updates on the front-end, but it's a fully updated Craft instance on the back-end. Apologies to anyone following via RSS; you might have just been flooded with a bunch of old posts and new.

Only a few things have changed between v11.1 and v11.2. Here's a short list:

• I've added a Notes post type for short comments not necessitating a title.
• There's a new homepage featuring writing and photos.
• My portfolio & CV is no longer on this site, but on a new domain: http://brianfeeney.design
• An about page! I plan to update this with something better ASAP.

That's about it for now. I'm currently playing with designs for a big v12 update. I don't feel pressured to get that up anytime soon, as I still really like the general design of v11. Maybe summer 2024?

If you're a reader, I welcome you to reach out! I run this site as if there are literally zero real people visiting. I don't believe for a moment that the 4.6k unique visitors registered by Cloudflare is really real. But surely a few those are friends and future friends out there.

AirPlay is Broken

At some point in the last few months, Apple degraded the user experience with AirPlay and the HomePods. I used to be able to play music on my speakers via an "iPhone -> Living Room" option. Now, I can only handoff to the Living Room option, which is a combo HomePods/AppleTV thing. I can control the music playing out of the speakers, but it's not really my Apple Music library. It's a facsimile of it. And that's the real problem. It doesn't retain "favorites", gives me an "Add to Library" option for songs supposedly playing from my library, does not allow for rating tracks, and play counts do not increase inside my iTunes smart playlists. When viewing on the iPhone, it doesn't even let you look back through the history so you can update Favorites or ratings from there. It's all very frustrating because it used to work exactly as I expected it to.

I've troublshooted by turning on/off every single setting I can find on my phone, HomePods, Apple TV, and Apple Music apps. No luck. The problem is such that no amount of specificity in my Google search terms can filter to it. I suspect that once you set a pair of HomePods to be the default audio for an AppleTV, those HomePods are no longer findable on their own to AirPlay to. They disappear as their own thing which can AirPlay.

My hope is that my personal use case has fallen into the cracks between one update and the next within something in the Apple ecosystem, and that an upcoming update will realign it all. That AirPlaying music will once again be possible.

New Findings on Migraines

This Vox article on migraines is a rare quality on on the subject.

Experts used to think migraines were solely caused by the abnormal expansion of blood vessels in the brain, according to Zhang. Over the past couple of decades, that thinking has evolved: Scientists now believe the brains of people with migraines are exquisitely sensitive to the effects of certain neurotransmitters, in particular calcitonin gene-related peptide, or CGRP.
"The CGRP molecule is essentially a pain molecule," says Zhang. Headache researchers have found that people with migraines had higher blood CGRP levels during headaches than people without migraines, and that giving migraine-prone people infusions of the molecule triggered headaches. These discoveries made the molecule a target for a flurry of drug discovery, and since 2018, the FDA has approved eight new migraine drugs.

Nurtec is one of the newer drugs and it has been wonderfully effective for me. I've been taking it every other day since late 2021 and it effectively prevents my migraines. Rizatriptan had helped, too, but it wasn't preventative and I was going through the maximum 10 pills a month. If you're a migraine sufferer and put off seeing a neurologist, let me tell you to change that. The new drugs work.

Anticipatory anxiety, the worry about something bad to come, is one of the types of stress that can trigger migraines. That can make it challenging to disentangle actual migraine triggers from beliefs about triggers. Lipton remembers a patient who blamed his migraines on changes in barometric pressure, which his smartwatch pinged him about in real time. "I took away his watch, and his headaches got a lot better," he says. "Beliefs about triggers cause anticipatory anxiety, which increases the probability of headache."

This is also true for me. It's undiagnosed, but I'm pretty sure I have a low-level general anxiety disorder which I highly suspect it's also one of my migraine triggers. How frustrating is it that fear of a thing could make that thing happen? Very.

He notes that migraine triggers are often cumulative: For example, many women can drink alcohol without getting a migraine at most times of the month, but a glass of wine during their menstrual cycle can lead to a headache.

Absolutely. After keeping a migraine journal for years, I found this to be true for me. I learned that migraines were regularly occurring on overcast or rainy days. That itself, wasn't enough to cause a migraine, but it was if I had had multiple drinks the night before. Or if I was stressed about something, or my diet had been bad for a day or two. Keeping tabs on all of this has been a huge help.

When it comes to prevention, the greatest boon has been the ability to work from home. No commute, no fluorescent office lights, no social anxiety and forcing myself to be pleasant. Also, when at home, comfortable on a couch in soft natural light.

Migraines are the worst. I've been suffering from them since I was in 3rd grade, when my eyesight went south and I needed glasses. And when my social anxiety was coming on board. If you're suffering from regular headaches and haven't looked into treatment, you absolutely should. I put it off for a very long time and regret it.

Where Have All The Websites Gone?

Jason Velazquez wonders "Where have all the websites gone?" It's a nice post decrying the ongoing dominance of major social media platforms. If you're reading this via RSS, you understand.

But he ends on an optimistic tone.

So when we wonder where all the websites have gone, know it’s the curators we’re nostalgic for because the curators showed us the best the web had to offer once upon a time. And the curators— the tenders, aggregators, collectors, and connectors— can bring us back to something better. Because it’s still out there, we just have to find it.

This is partly why I always feel the need to start blogging again. I want to get back to the place where small, weird sites share links to other small, weird sites. The internet is massively bigger than it was in 2003 when I made my first website. I want to be a part of the community finding and sharing the good stuff.

OpenAI Versus The House of Lords

OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it's supposedly "impossible" for the company to train its artificial intelligence models — and continue growing its multi-billion-dollar business — without them.

If your company cannot function without breaking laws, your business model is not a viable one. This isn't hard.

Killing the Buddha

Peter Manseau:

Twenty years ago today this weird book [(Killing the Buddha)] I made with [Jeff Sharlet] was published. First book for us both, set us each on a path for thinking & writing about religion in America. Publisher thought it would get more attention with no words on the cover. We didn’t know anything and said Sure!

This was a seminal book for me. It effectively reoriented the way I thought about religion and how people practice it. After reading it, I could make sense of religion's true place in culture, in people's personal lives. Not in an academic way, nor dryly philosophical. Certainly not cynically. But as a practical thing. Our media tends to focus on either the growing number of nonbelievers or the true obsessives who cause trouble for the rest of us. In truth, most religious folk are somewhere in between. Killing the Buddha showed me how varied — and beautiful — that somewhere in between can be. And it did so with respect and empathy. I'm grateful for what Jeff and Peter taught me.