Image generation from OpenAI took another step forward on Wednesday, and people discovered it could create Studio Ghibli-style images. CC-licensed photo by Choo Yut Shing on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Cartoonish. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
OpenAI upgrades image generation and rolls it out in ChatGPT and Sora • The Verge
Kylie Robison:
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Users can now use GPT-4o to generate images within ChatGPT itself.
This initial release focuses solely on image creation and will be available across ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team, and Free subscription tiers. The free tier’s usage limit is the same as DALL-E, spokesperson Taya Christianson told The Verge, but added that they “didn’t have a specific number to share” and ”these may change over time based on demand.“ Per the ChatGPT FAQ, free users were previously able to generate “three images per day with DALL·E 3.” As for the fate of DALL-E, Christianson said “fans” will “still have access via a custom GPT.”
“This model is a step change above previous models,” research lead is Gabriel Goh told The Verge, adding that the team used the GPT-4o “omnimodal” — or a model that can generate any kind of data like text, image, audio, and video — foundation for this feature.
Some of the improvements Goh noted include “binding,” which refers to how well AI image generators maintain correct relationships between attributes and objects; a model with poor binding, for instance, might get a prompt for a blue star plus a red triangle and create a red star and no triangle. Most image models struggle with this, Goh said, often mixing up colors and shapes when asked to render multiple items — typically around 5 to 8. He says this new image generation tool can correctly bind attributes for 15 to 20 objects without confusion, representing a significant improvement in accuracy and reliability.
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And with all that said, what did people discover? That you can give it an image and it will create a version that looks like it was drawn by Studio Ghibli. Consequently social media has been flooded with versions of memes redrawn in that manner. (This is a wonderful thread. Pick your favourite, and note too which faces it makes angry and which sad.)
The question of quite how OpenAI absorbed a ton of Studio Ghibli content remains unanswered.
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A breakthrough moment: researchers discover new class of antibiotics • Phys.org
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The last time a new class of antibiotics reached the market was nearly three decades ago—but that could soon change, thanks to a discovery by researchers at McMaster University.
A team led by researcher Gerry Wright has identified a strong candidate to challenge even some of the most drug-resistant bacteria on the planet: a new molecule called lariocidin. The findings were published in the journal Nature on March 26, 2025.
The discovery of the all-new class of antibiotics responds to a critical need for new antimicrobial medicines, as bacteria and other microorganisms evolve new ways to withstand existing drugs. This phenomenon is called antimicrobial resistance—or AMR—and it’s one of the top global public health threats, according to the World Health Organization.
“Our old drugs are becoming less and less effective as bacteria become more and more resistant to them,” explains Wright, a professor in McMaster’s Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences and a researcher at the university’s Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research. “About 4.5 million people die every year due to antibiotic-resistant infections, and it’s only getting worse.”
Wright and his team found that the new molecule, a lasso peptide, holds great promise as an early drug lead because it attacks bacteria in a way that’s different from other antibiotics. Lariocidin binds directly to a bacterium’s protein synthesis machinery in a completely new way, inhibiting its ability to grow and survive.
“This is a new molecule with a new mode of action,” Wright says. “It’s a big leap forward for us.”
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If this works, it’s a huge discovery. And where did it come from? A soil sample in a backyard.
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Solar panel windows that could turn whole buildings into power plants smash electricity record • Euronews
Pascale Davies:
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Researchers in Denmark have set a new world record in efficiency for converting sunlight into electricity by using new windows that allow light to pass through while simultaneously generating power.
The transparent solar cell technology could provide a breakthrough for renewable energy by transforming skyscrapers and offices into power plants, using their windows to become solar panels.
The innovation from the CitySolar project could also help Europe meet its ambitions to make all new buildings nearly zero energy and fully decarbonise the European building sector by 2050.
The researchers from the University of Southern Denmark combined organic solar cells with the material perovskite, which saw an efficiency of 12.3%, which is on par with commercial solar cells.
The international team say the panels also have a transparency of 30%.
Until now, transparent solar windows have not been able to absorb enough energy to be able to generate the amount of electricity needed for a building and the panels have previously not been transparent enough for use. The CitySolar project says it has now overcome these issues.“Transparent solar cells could be the next big step in building integrated energy solutions,” said Morten Madsen, a professor from the University of Southern Denmark who was one of the key researchers behind the breakthrough. “The large glass facades found in modern office buildings can now be used for energy production without requiring additional space or special structural changes… This represents a massive market opportunity”.
Furthermore, Madsen said that the two materials used in the cells are highly affordable and could be scaled for commercial deployment.
When added to the organic solar cell, the perovskite layer absorbs near-ultraviolet light and the cell absorbs near-infrared light.
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No word on price or how much energy is generated, but those are decent conversion figures. They’d only be truly useful on south-facing (north, in the southern hemisphere) areas though?
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Google makes Android development private, but will continue open source releases • Ars Technica
Ryan Whitwam:
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Google is planning a major change to the way it develops new versions of the Android operating system. Since the beginning, large swaths of the software have been developed in public-facing channels, but that will no longer be the case. This does not mean Android is shedding its open source roots, but the process won’t be as transparent.
Google has confirmed to Android Authority that all Android development work going forward will take place in Google’s internal branch. This is a shift from the way Google has worked on Android in the past, which featured frequent updates to the public AOSP branch. Anyone can access AOSP, but the internal branches are only available to Google and companies with a Google Mobile Services (GMS) license, like Samsung, Motorola, and others.
According to the company, it is making this change to simplify things, building on a recent change to trunk-based development. As Google works on both public and private branches of Android, the two fall out of sync with respect to features and API support. This forces Google to tediously merge the branches for every release. By focusing on the internal branch, Google claims it can streamline releases and make life easier for everyone.
When new versions of Android are done, Google says it will continue to publish the source code in AOSP as always. Supposedly, this will allow developers to focus on supporting their apps without keeping track of pending changes to the platform in AOSP. Licensed OEMs, meanwhile, can just focus on the lively internal branch as they work on devices that can take a year or more to launch.
…This change to private development doesn’t come out of the blue—Android feels less open today than it did in the early days. For example, Google has been moving Android features from AOSP into closed source packages for years. This gives Google greater control over the platform while also making it easier to update core components without a full OS update.
Currently, most Android development takes place in the internal branch, but a handful of components, like Bluetooth and the kernel, are developed in the open. They’ll be moving to internal under the new system.
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The most important part anyway has always been Google Play, which gets updated much more regularly, and closed source.
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The new Substack universe • NY Mag
Charlotte Klein:
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Substack today has all of the functionalities of a social platform, allowing proprietors to engage with both subscribers (via the Chat feature) or the broader Substack universe in the Twitter-esque Notes feed. Writers I spoke to mentioned that for all of their reluctance to engage with the Notes feature, they see growth when they do. More than 50% of all subscriptions and 30% of paid subscriptions on the platform come directly from the Substack network. There’s been a broader shift toward multimedia content: Over half of the 250 highest-revenue creators were using audio and video in April 2024, a number that had surged to 82% by February 2025.
Substack initially rolled out livestreaming in September as a feature available only to publishers with a lot of subscribers; in January, it made live video available to everyone. There’s a collaboration feature that allows you to co-host streams with up to three people, “essentially what is one step up from a public FaceTime call,” says Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie. “It lowers the barrier to entry to saying something important in public; it’s also kind of fun.” Acosta has kept his videos free for now, but others are offering the feature only to paid subscribers, as Tina Brown has for recent conversations with Maureen Dowd and Janice Min.
“Email is something that we will absolutely never abandon,” said McKenzie, noting it’s “important as a guarantor of that direct owned relationship that the writers and creators can have with their audience.” But by limiting yourself to just email, “you’re tying one of your hands behind your back.” When someone like Acosta goes live on Substack, they announce that they’re doing so to their entire email list, who can then jump on and watch. At the end of the stream, they are presented with the full video, which they can then blast out to their Substack followers as well as post on other social platforms.
But even those who’ve resisted new features and kept their newsletters largely text based continue to see an uptick, like journalist Max Read, who writes the twice-weekly Read Max newsletter. “To the extent there’s been a Trump bump in the media, it’s all going to Substackers. I cover tech, not really politics. But I saw incredibly fast growth — it seems to finally be plateauing — between late October/the election last year and two or three weeks ago,” he said. “I was growing twice as fast as I’d been in the months before that.”
Sports journalism has basically migrated to the platform, and food media seems not far behind — if not already there.
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The inevitable next step is going to be someone or something which aggregates various Substacks into a sort of “daily Substack”. They could charge for it. You could even print it out and bind it and read it over breakfast.
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Exclusive: DOGE staffer ‘Big Balls’ provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show • Reuters
Raphael Satter:
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The best-known member of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.
Edward Coristine is among the most visible members of the DOGE effort that has been given sweeping access to official networks as it attempts to radically downsize the U.S. government.
Past reporting, opens new tab had focused on his youth – he is 19 – and his chosen nickname of “bigballs,” which became a pop culture punchline, opens new tab. Musk has championed the teen on his social media site X, telling his followers, opens new tab last month that “Big Balls is awesome.”
Beginning around 2022, while still in high school, Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN, opens new tab that provided network services, according to corporate and digital records reviewed by Reuters and interviews with half a dozen former associates. Among its users was a website run by a ring of cybercriminals operating under the name “EGodly,” according to digital records preserved by the internet intelligence firm DomainTools and the online cybersecurity tool Any.Run.
The details of Coristine’s connection to EGodly have not been previously reported.
On Feb. 15, 2023, EGodly thanked Coristine’s company for its assistance in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
“We extend our gratitude to our valued partners DiamondCDN for generously providing us with their amazing DDoS protection and caching systems, which allow us to securely host and safeguard our website,” the message said.The digital records reviewed by Reuters showed the EGodly website, dataleak.fun, was tied to internet protocol addresses registered to DiamondCDN and other Coristine-owned entities between October 2022 and June 2023, and that some users attempting to access the site around that time would hit a DiamondCDN “Security check.”
Coristine did not return messages seeking comment.
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I think the administration is a bit backed up with firing people, can this one wait a day or two? But also: what an incredible lack of background checking. Plus anyone who was hit by a DDOS caused by this ring who lost money could sue him as an accessory to crime.
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Oops, DOGE did it again • The Bulwark
William Kristol:
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Late last month, Elon Musk set off a firestorm when he announced that government employees would be required to email five bullet points describing their accomplishments from the prior week—and that, if they didn’t, it would be considered an act of resignation. Musk insisted this was management 101 and that people were being entitled or, worse, lazy if they couldn’t handle it. Perhaps they were dead.
Four weeks later, the “five bullets” program appears to be a bust, in part because Musk’s DOGE team didn’t set up an email system that could handle the incoming. Four government employees from different agencies tell The Bulwark that they or their colleagues recently attempted to send in five-bullet emails only to receive a bounce-back response that the OPM mailbox was full.
“If you sent your message to OPM and received this response, then please save your email to OPM for your records, but otherwise there is nothing more you need to do today,” Securities and Exchange Commission COO Ken Johnson told employees in an email this week.
“We are aware that emails to HR@opm.gov are being returned as undeliverable. Please send your weekly accomplishments to HR10@opm.gov and cc your supervisor,” read an email from a leadership official at Health and Human Services.
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It’s just Pelion upon Ossa. Incompetence that can’t think two steps ahead.
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Exclusive: DOD has deployed Signal on government devices, overriding their own policy • On Democracy
FPWellman:
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A high level information security source inside the Department of Defense has informed me that a month ago they were ordered by political appointees to ignore information security regulations and install Signal on government phones for senior leaders.
This story likely confirms that Signal is a primary means of communications for Trump Administration senior leaders in direct violation of the Presidential Records Act, the Espionage Act, and numerous national security regulations. It appears that much of our national security communications are vulnerable to foreign intelligence agencies to access at the highest levels of our government.
With the explosive news that senior Trump Administration officials had used a Signal chat group that included Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to plan attacks on Yemen questions have been raised about how prevalent the use of the off the shelf civilian app is being used. I can confirm that it has become a primary means of communication.
An anonymous senior level source in the Pentagon’s information technology field reached out to tell me that upon the arrival of newly installed senior military officials in February they were asked to install Signal on their government phones. There had already been instances where newly appointed Trump officials attempted to bring their personal phones in secure areas.
They relented on leaving their phones outside the classified spaces but demanded that CIO install Signal on their government devices.
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Tulsi Gabbard, the alleged Director of National Intelligence – has someone so stupid ever held that role – told the US House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that Signal comes “preinstalled” on government devices. Sure, if you tell them to, it does. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal • The Atlantic
Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris:
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So, about that Signal chat.
On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”
At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”
President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”
These statements presented us with a dilemma.
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Although Mike Waltz (who, the screenshots clearly show, added Goldberg to the group) might have set messages to disappear after one week, he forgot that screenshots, like diamonds, are forever. And there are some real pearls in here. I wonder how long it will take from this publication to the adviser saying “well, if we put secret information into an unclassified app, then it’s not classified any more, so no foul.”
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Hegseth, Waltz, Gabbard: private data and passwords of senior U.S. security officials found online • DER SPIEGEL
Fidelius Schmid, Friederike Röhreke, Roman Lehberger, Roman Höfner, Jörg Diehl and Patrick Beuth:
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Private contact details of the most important security advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump can be found on the internet. DER SPIEGEL reporters were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to the top officials.
To do so, the reporters used commercial people search engines along with hacked customer data that has been published on the web. Those affected by the leaks include National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use, with some of them linked to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. They were used to create Dropbox accounts and profiles in apps that track running data. There are also WhatsApp profiles for the respective phone numbers and even Signal accounts in some cases.
As such, the reporting has revealed an additional grave, previously unknown security breach at the highest levels in Washington. Hostile intelligence services could use this publicly available data to hack the communications of those affected by installing spyware on their devices. It is thus conceivable that foreign agents were privy to the Signal chat group in which Gabbard, Waltz and Hegseth discussed a military strike.
It remains unclear, however, whether this extremely problematic chat was conducted using Signal accounts linked to the private telephone numbers of the officials involved. Tulsi Gabbard has declined to comment. DER SPIEGEL reporting has demonstrated, though, that privately used and publicly accessible telephone numbers belonging to her and Waltz are, in fact, linked to Signal accounts.
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Words fail.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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