So Rihanna’s choice to highlight her bare breasts with 216,000 crystals on an extremely Instagrammable night — a night she was being honored with the CFDA’s Fashion Icon Award, no less — was not only on purpose, but a brilliant strategy. She ensured that thousands of users would commit the same atrocity (posting her nipples) that got her banned in the first place, and she also took another step in what is bound to be an incredibly long journey towards removing the stigma attached to the female breast.
—Isabella Biedenharn, Flavorwire
I won’t lie, Rihanna has some perky crystals.

Kickstarter’s human approval process was never billed as an endorsement — it consisted of a simple check for rule violations that could take as little as five minutes. That check will now be done by an algorithm that looks at keywords in the campaign, the creator’s track record on Kickstarter, and other metrics to create a profile of the project and compare it to similar projects that have been approved, rejected, flagged, and removed. If the campaign passes the algorithmic check, the creator can choose to either launch without a human review or request feedback from the Kickstarter team.
—Adrianne Jeffries, The Verge
At what point will the algorithms be able to create new Kickstarter projects for us to then submit them for approval to the algorithms of Kickstarter?
Is there an algorithm to ship all the hardcover books from my Kickstarter project? Because that would save my ass a hell of a lot of time.

I love this Mini electric concept vehicle, although the fact that it’s a concept vehicle means it’s not likely to look this beautiful if it gets mass-produced.

Headline of the year, via The Washington Post

via Reddit

On Episode 3 of Weekly Exhaust Michael and Bryan discuss the changes in journalism, what it means when you expect people to innovate, more on Schwarzenegger’s ego, Jack White’s ego, Miles Davis being as asshole, good people doing bad things, random pages on Reddit, soccer sucking, Apple buying Beats and how much the tech press sucks.

Video: Blocks for iOS

To Satya Nadella’s credit, he provided not just the answer, but the question as well. And, looked at narrowly, there were good things seen – and not seen – at Microsoft’s Surface event. Having clearly failed as a mass market device, it makes sense to focus Surface and more clearly define its use case. And, if that use case is productivity, then it also makes sense to kill Surface mini. That Nadella allegedly did just that is a great sign. Now he just needs to kill the whole line.
—Ben Thompson, It’s Time To Kill Surface

That’s right. Your favorite contributors from Daily Exhaust—Michael Mulvey and Bryan Larrick—have taken to the digital air waves with a new podcast, Weekly Exhaust.
What is Weekly Exhaust? It’s a talk show version of what you see here. Bryan and I talk about whatever the hell we feel like talking about and we do it for about an hour, once a week. This usually includes technology news, hardware, software, shitty movies, great movies, cars, art, artists and writing to name a few topics.
We (try to) record on Friday mornings, and I usually have episodes edited and posted by Sunday night. It’s raw and we’re still figuring things out, but stick will us and I guarantee it will keep getting better with each new episode.
You can find Weekly Exhaust on iTunes and on the official Weekly Exhaust blog.
I don’t know him, but I want to give a big thank you to Dan Benjamin for generously posting his podcasting expertise on The Podcasting Handbook. I’m a big fan of Dan’s 5by5 Network.
Also, a thank you to Squarespace for making it super easy to syndicate a podcast from my Squarespace blog to iTunes (Squarespace really needs to sponsor this podcast, just a suggestion).

Regarding my last post about Jimmy Iovine watching Apocalypse Now with earbuds, David Lynch has some advice:

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Verge: Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine thinks Apple’s earbuds are bad:

Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine isn’t a fan of Apple’s iconic white earbuds. On stage at Code Conference minutes ago, Iovine had harsh words for the pack-ins, saying that Apple — the company he will soon work for — makes them simply “to make sure the machine [iPhone] works.” But he wasn’t done there. “You listen to Apocalypse Now, and the helicopter sounds like a mosquito,” he added.
Of course Iovine thinks Apple’s earbuds suck—because they do.
Secondly, did you listen to Jimmy talk? That’s a Brooklyn accent you’re hearing, and guys from Brooklyn don’t mince fucking works. Ya undastand?
Actually, hold on, Jimmy baby. Why the fuck are you watching Apocalypse Now on your iOS device with earbuds?!
[UPDATE: Jimmy contacted me and said he only resorts to watching great films with earbuds when he’s flying back and forth between NY & LA. I guess I’ll let it slide.]

via Explore