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.

AI, Art, and Actuality

Derek Thompson responds to the momentary popularity of an AI generated song featuring "Drake" and "The Weeknd":

Some observers look things in a dystopian direction. It didn't take much to imagine a near future where fake songs and real songs intermingled, where, for every authentic Taylor Swift track, the internet was replete with hundreds, thousands, even millions of plausible Taylor Swift knockoffs. Inundated by AI, pop culture would descend into a disinformation hellscape.

And comes to the conclusion I did with one of my recent posts. He continues:

[L]ately I've become a little bored by the utopia-dystopia dichotomy of the AI debate. What if writing a song and dubbing in celebrity voices doesn't clearly point us toward a disinformation hellscape or a heaven of music-writing creativity? What if the ability to send media that make you sound like a celebrity to your friends is, fundamentally, just kind of neat?

AI-generated art is going to distract people for awhile. The novelty of it will leave less time for audiences to appreciate living artist's work. More great art allowed to fall out of sight. We'll encounter dozens of things like AI versions of Beach Boys songs sung by Paul McCartney, for example. Neat. But forgettable. These things will eventually descend to their natural place at the bottom of cultural importance. Never entirely gone, but also never more than brief curiosities.

This isn't an argument against AI's effect on other forms of labor. In those fields, there will be massive waves of new efficiencies. Art, however, is human first. Any technology, new or old, is only a tool to connect human minds to other human minds. AI, as it relates to art, is only another one of those tools.

And you can't go to an AI-generated concert performance. When Albarn first launched Gorillaz, he tried to perform while hiding behind a screen on which the cartoon band was projected. Fun, for a moment. He quickly dropped the whole cute conceit and played on stage like any other group. In the end, being human is what counts.

New Admin, New WhiteHouse.gov

The White House has a new website. It's lovely. Perhaps the most wonderful feature is its Briefing Room, a blog publishing all the press releases and important documents coming from the Biden Administration. So far, there is the full text of his Inaugural Address. The entire text of the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation. The official request for rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement.

And there is an RSS feed.

This is what transparency should look like. I'm excited to follow what will get done these next four years. During the Obama era, I was young and didn't pay attention. With Trump, the horrors were inescapable. Let's hope good things will now be accomplished day to day, week to week.

On Trump's Attack on Capitol Hill

Ezra Klein has moved from Vox to the NYT as an editorialist, and his first column is worth reading:

They stormed the Capitol, attacked police officers, shattered doors and barriers, looted congressional offices. One woman was shot in the mayhem and died

If their actions looked like lunacy to you, imagine it from their perspective, from within the epistemic structure in which they live. The president of the United States told them the election had been stolen by the Democratic Party, that they were being denied power and representation they had rightfully won. “I know your pain,” he said, in his video from the White house lawn later on Wednesday. “I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it.” More than a dozen Republican senators, more than 100 Republican House members, and countless conservative media figures had backed Trump’s claims.

If the self-styled revolutionaries were lawless, that was because their leaders told them that the law had already been broken, and in the most profound, irreversible way.

What happened yesterday was the wildest political disgrace I've lived through. Donald Trump incited his mob to terrorize everyone inside the Capitol building, including Senators and Congressman. Our highest levels of government was violently vandalized. The domestic terrorists carried Confederate flags among the Trump banners. Some of those inside were known neo-Nazis. This is the American carnage Trump declared on his own inauguration day four years ago. Terror, smoke, broken glass, and death.

On top of it all, there is a suspicion that the poor security defending the congressional leaders inside was a planned failure. A month ago, Trump removed a number of top officials in the Department of Defense and replaced them with lackeys. Trump's Attorney General, Bill Bar, made a surprise announcement he was stepping down early, making his slithery exit before Christmas. It all gives the impression that what happened yesterday was premeditated. It is exactly what Trump wanted. It's a final fuck you to the people of America who rejected him, who never accepted him into polite society.

The insurrectionists had been inside the Capitol for more than two hours. The National Guard and other security forces should have been called in immediately, yet Trump declined. It was Pence, who had been scurried out of the Senate chamber to safety along with everyone else, that finally made the call to retake control over the building. Trump was ensconced inside the White House, watching it unfold on television, doing nothing.

Trump should not be allowed to remain President another second longer. He has less than two weeks left in his term, but that shouldn't be allowed to play out. Impeach or invoke the 25th Amendment. It should have happened after his first week in office, but it might as well happen in his last.

Links for 12/17/2020

• Photo essay by Alec Soth on the inequality in Chicago.
• I was mesmerized watching this video of paper marbling craftsmen working in the 1960s.
• CHAI is the best newish band I've heard this year. Start by listening to absolutely everything they've released. Read this Pitchfork interview if you need further convincing.
• I'm excited to see what happens with Glass, "A community of photographers, amateur and professional alike." Currently awaiting my invite.
  
• A new code editor from Panic, looks promising.
• The WSJ has a great explainer for antifa. This is useful if someone you know has been misled by Fox or other disinfo networks.
• Neural Networks Create a Disturbing Record of Natural History in AI-Generated Illustrations by Sofia Crespo
  
• These images of natural history illustrations have been created by neural network AIs and they're beautiful.
• Why Chrome Is Bad. I wish I could delete this browser for good, but I need it for work. :/
  
• I love Wayne White's word paintings. Would absolutely love to do this Fanfuckingtastic puzzle someday.
  

CSS-Only Masonry Layout

Once this is added to enough browsers, I'll be one of the first to implement it! I have a masonry layout for my portfolio using jquery, but there's a bug with it. Often, the images all load scrunched up at the top. I've made adjustments which fix it, but only for a while, and then it starts happening again. Can't wait for this alignment to be possible with a single line in my CSS.