¶“In game theory, it’s called strategic uncertainty, so you’re not going to tell the person on the other side of the negotiation where you’re going to end up,” Bessent told ABC’s “This Week” news program.

¶“‘Nobody is better at creating this leverage than President Trump,’ the treasury secretary added.”

¶Well, Bessent has a defensible point there.

¶OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that “GPT-4o updates have made the personality too sycophant-y and annoying.” And today, Altman announced on X that the company was fully rolling back the 4o update for paid and free users alike.

¶“too sycophant-y and annoying” — sounds like much of the Republican Party these days. Can we get a full rollback on that?

¶Amazon says it’s not planning to display added tariff costs next to product prices on its site — despite a report that sparked speculation the e-commerce giant would soon show the new import charges, and the White House’s fiery comments denouncing the purported change.

¶I knew I smelled something fishy when I posted about this earlier today (see my note in that post). Turns out, a report from a site called Punchbowl News citing an anonymous source is…not great.

¶Thank you AP!

¶SCOTUSblog is delighted to announce that it has been acquired by Dispatch Media, Inc., and will round out The Dispatch’s coverage of the Supreme Court and the rule of law.

¶Back when I first starting blogging in 2001-ish, with my ill-fated Promote the Progress patent law blog, SCOTUSblog quickly became a model for legal blogging. The site has a long track record of consistently delivering current, high quality content. It’s weird to see this announcement that SCOTUSblog has been acquired by Dispatch Media, which has the following description in the title its main site, The Dispatch: Unbiased News & Informed Conservative Analysis. SCOTUSblog certainly has every right to choose its own future, but I hate to think of SCOTUSblog content as either conservative or liberal. The Founding Manifesto for The Dispatch does a nice job explaining that its focus is more on conservatism and not on the Republican Party, which helps but I’ll still be reading new SCOTUSblog content through a new lens.

¶There is one major difference between shopping through ChatGPT versus Google, for now: The results you see in OpenAI searches are not paid placements, but organic results. “They are not ads,” says Fry. “They are not sponsored.”

¶ChatGPT is slowly eating Google Search, the way a bird slowly, then suddenly, eats an alligator.

¶Adults of America, you need to wake up. Allowing your political biases to create a future where children are treated with hostility while pursuing higher education is dangerous, no matter what political party you belong to. This is not just about Harvard. Or about me. It’s about the country we are building — one where young people are punished for thinking, dreaming and believing differently than the generation before them.

¶We are not your culture war – we are your kids. We are the future.

¶I really feel the emotion of this article, to an extent. My son is a Harvard alum, and his grandparents, on both sides, are Trump Republicans. My wife and our two sons are definitely the liberal wing of the family. So, we understand the feeling that arises when Republican family members ask about Harvard, although we’ve never been asked something as direct as “Harvard? Isn’t that a liberal school?”.

¶I’m proud of my family, though, because, unlike the author’s family, they have never abandoned what they understand about Harvard – it’s reputation for academic excellence. Every member of our family, including the Trumpers, has been outwardly proud of my son for his Harvard education. Many of them even travelled to Cambridge to attend his graduation last year (battling a torrential downpour in the process!).

¶I hope that pride continues to hold as the university battles Trump’s attacks on higher education. My dream is that their pride in my son actually grows into an understanding of academia and the importance of its continued independence. He’s in graduate school at M.I.T. now and has committed to a career in academia, so it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable ask. We’ll see.

¶There are not many physical things I actively covet in this world, but for a while now I’ve wanted a classic Eames chair.

¶I’ve wanted a Eames lounge chair ever since I first sat in one as a kid. We stayed in a condo owned by a friend of my dad. There was an Eames in the family room, and I think I ended up sleeping in it more than one night. I can still feel that chair decades (4+) later. Yeah, I want one but won’t be getting one anytime soon.

¶“Not until this Court asked Mr. Kachouroff directly whether the Opposition was the product of generative artificial intelligence did Mr. Kachouroff admit that he did, in fact, use generative artificial intelligence,” the filing states. “After further questioning, Mr. Kachouroff admitted that he failed to cite check the authority in the Opposition after such use before filing it with the Court.”

¶We’ll there’s a surprise – the clown hired a clown lawyer.

¶“I woke up with a little bit of a headache, because it was a long night last night. That first beer went down cold after the portal finally closed at midnight, I can tell you that,” Day said. “Holy smokes, what a world we’re living in right now.”

¶I can’t imagine being a college football head coach these days. They’re navigating uncharted territory on a daily basis. I admit to calling for Day’s firing after his loss to TTUN last year, but “[h]oly smokes” is he crushing it.

¶The state of Ohio State football is strong.

¶And we’ll get *ichigan this year.

¶Q: Please talk about the status of the price increase. If additional tariffs are passed on to product prices, how much of a price increase will we see in the end market?

¶A: We have notified major dealers that we will raise prices and are in the process of estimating the timing and amount of the increase.

¶This is a quote from the Q&A following Canon’s announcement of its 2025 Q1 financial results. I thought this particular question, and Canon’s answer, provides a succinct reminder of how tariffs actually work — producers raise prices to cover the tariff, and consumers pay more. Period.

¶But, hey, they protect the domestic camera manufacturers, right?

¶As for the interchangeable-lens camera market, in addition to sales promotion that started last year, among the younger generation, for whom smartphones are the norm, there is a growing need for cameras that allow them to enjoy taking photos and videos that are different from others.

¶As a result, the market is expected to grow to around 6.6 million units in 2025.

¶In the first quarter, in addition to increasing sales of full-frame cameras, especially the EOS R5 Mark II that was launched in the second half of last year, strong demand for entry-class cameras, which are popular among young people as a step up from smartphones, resulted in a significant increase in sales of 15.5%

¶This is interesting from a “future of photography” point of view, maybe even a “survival of photography as a craft” point of view.

¶Canon sees an ironic twist in the saga of smartphones killing interchangeable-lens cameras (DSLRs, Mirrorless) – a desire to have photos that are different from those of everyone else (i.e., smartphone photos) is actually increasing demand for interchangeable-lens cameras. And the company’s 2025 Q1 financial results back this up with actual data. Smartphones aren’t killing higher-end cameras. To the contrary, the omnipresent nature of smartphones is actually fueling growth in entry level full frame models. It’s not far-fetched to think that this will, eventually, lead to growth in higher end models as some of the new folks buying entry level models move on to bigger and better models, adding lenses that fit all models along the way.

¶Photography is not dying; it’s actually thriving and seeing a new generation of hobbyists and professionals enter the craft. They may have new reasons for showing up, with new and different goals, but that’s an evolution of the art and craft that everyone in the field should welcome. I do.

¶I wonder if the fear about AI killing photography will be turned on its head, too, in time.

¶Our results indicate that the relative splashed volume has an almost invariant inflection point independent of We and Re under conditions of human urination (see Methods section). The model predicts that at ⁠, the splash is reduced by about 95% from maximum splash. This implies the possibility of designing a urinal geometry so that the impinging angle is always at or below this critical angle; consequently eliminating splash regardless of factors dependent on the user.

¶I’m surprised the bathroom fixture companies haven’t solved the splash-back problem before now. I also wonder if these researches applied for patents on their invention and the Cornucopia and Nautilus designs. If they really reduce splash-back to essentially zero, I can’t imagine they won’t be an immediate hit.