AutoTL;DR

This is the best summary I could come up with:

As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.

The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”

If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.

In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”

The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.

While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.

The original article contains 620 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

But in the event Mr. Biden drops out, they would be vaulted from the obscurity of extras at a quadrennial television extravaganza into a group with the fate of the party — and, in the view of many Democrats, the future of the country — on their shoulders.

But forced to make a decision in the event that Mr. Biden withdraws, Mr. Martin said he would take a step back and assess the entire field rather than immediately vote for an alternative.

In a speech in Wisconsin on Friday, and in an ABC News interview that aired later in the day, Mr. Biden made it clear he had no intention of withdrawing.

Amaad Rivera-Wagner, the chief of staff to the mayor of Green Bay, Wis., and a second-time Biden delegate, recalled receiving death threats in 2020 because people believed he had rigged the election.

Dave Jacobson, a delegate from Florida who is one year younger than Mr. Biden, called last Thursday’s debate “devastating” but was heartened by the president’s more energetic rally the next day and remains steadfastly in support.

June Kim, Eli Murray, Andrew Park, Helmuth Rosales, Elena Shao and Amy Schoenfeld Walker contributed reporting.

The original article contains 1,237 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The iPhone’s next major software update will roll out later this year, featuring plenty of AI infusion—Apple Intelligence—plus other quality-of-life improvements across the platform.

At WWDC 2024, Apple announced that iOS 18 would finally let you place app icons wherever you want on the Home screen, freeing them from the stringent rail it was on before.

The iOS 18 developer beta shows that the color accents pick up based on your wallpaper and system theme.

Still, even though Apple quietly announced RCS support this week during its developer conference, Google doesn’t get its victory lap.

On the plus side, messages between iPhones and their green bubbles will be able to share features like high-resolution photos and Tapback animations later this year.

In Android 7, the Quick Settings in the notification shade added editable tiles, which were eventually opened up to third-party app developers.

The original article contains 888 words, the summary contains 143 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Sign up here.

The original article contains 3 words, the summary contains 3 words. Saved 0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page.

The blog post says the ad platform is hitting “general availability” today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users.

This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.

Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an “ad privacy” feature has been rolled out to them and enabled.

That’s actually what started this whole process: Apple dealt a giant blow to Google’s core revenue stream when it blocked third-party cookies in Safari in 2020.

Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads."

The original article contains 587 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

After yesterday brought with it the first look at X-Men ‘97 in action we also got to learn a bit more about one of its more fascination inclusions on the X-Team: the full-time return to the animated fold for shapeshifting mutant Morph.

He was introduced as a minor character in the comics as Kevin Syndey, aka Changeling—with that codename tweaked to Morph for TV due to an alleged copyright concern with DC Comics, which used the Changeling codename for Teen Titan’s Beast Boy—and was brought into the world of animated X-Men, where he skyrocketed to popularity by, well, immediately dying.

Morph has undergone some pretty radical changes in the decades between The Animated Series and ‘97, adopting the pale, hairless, and blankly-featured visage that the character was given when an alternate version of the character inspired by the cartoon series was integrated into comics continuity with the Age of Apocalypse storyline, and then through another alternate riff in the multiversal teambook Exiles.

The mutant allegory has been a stand-in for a large variety of minority causes since the inception of the X-Men, from political thought, to racial discrimination to, yes, issues of gender identity and queerness.

Some of these allegories work better than others—race has always been a fraught lens for the mutant metaphor in particular, especially as more and more non-white mutants have stepped into the spotlight, perhaps best emphasized in the infamous moment in the 1982 storyline “God Loves, Man Kills,” where Kitty Pryde uses a racial slur to draw equivalence to being called a “mutie.” But the connection between mutantkind and queerness has always been particularly potent, and a topic the franchise has engaged with for generations and generations of storytelling in ways big and small.

Star Wars faced a similar dilemma in introducing the first trans-identifying Jedi in the alien bond-pair Terec and Ceret in its High Republic comics.

The original article contains 767 words, the summary contains 312 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The companies believe their research, published on their websites, documents for the first time how hackers with ties to foreign governments are using generative artificial intelligence in their attacks.

to generate exotic attacks, as some in the tech industry feared, the hackers have used it in mundane ways, like drafting emails, translating documents and debugging computer code, the companies said.

They shared threat information to document how five hacking groups with ties to China, Russia, North Korea and Iran used OpenAI’s technology.

Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, tech experts, the press and government officials have worried that adversaries might weaponize the more powerful tools, looking for new and creative ways to exploit vulnerabilities.

He said that OpenAI limited where customers could sign up for accounts, but that sophisticated culprits could evade detection through various techniques, like masking their location.

The emails included “one pretending to come from an international development agency and another attempting to lure prominent feminists to an attacker-built website on feminism,” the company said.

The original article contains 526 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Apple and Google have long been criticized for selling devices that are deemed harder to repair than others.

Worse, PIRG believes that the two companies are failing to make laptops easier to take apart and fix.

The “Failing the Fix (2024)” report released this week [PDF] is largely based on the repairability index scores required of laptops and some other electronics sold in France.

For laptops, that criteria includes providing updates and the ability to reset software and firmware.

PIRG also docked companies for participating in trade groups that fight against right-to-repair legislation and if OEMs failed to “easily provide full information on how they calculated their products."

PIRG’s report doesn’t factor in software support timelines, but even if it did, Chromebooks’ repairability score wouldn’t increase notably since the move only brought them to “industry norms,” Lucas Gutterman, Designed to Last campaign director for the US PIRG Education Fund, told me.

The original article contains 468 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

We can only hope this is the start of a trend, as Valve’s gaming-focused operating system brings many advantages over gaming portables (and maybe desktops) that run a full Windows installation.

In an increasingly competitive portable PC gaming market, being able to cut out that significant cost over Windows-based alternatives could be a big deal.

Our review of the ROG Ally highlights just how annoying it can be to have to fiddle with Windows settings on a touchscreen running “an awkwardly scaled” version of the OS.

That comes through in many little ways, like a built-in “suspend” mode, tons of battery-optimization features, and menus that are designed for a small screen and joystick navigation.

That’s a huge change from the desktop-focused “Steam Machines” era of the mid-'10s, when early versions of SteamOS could only run the relative handful of games that developers bothered to explicitly port to Linux.

That’s also a huge change from the Steam Machines era, when Ars’ testing showed that many SteamOS games ran significantly worse than their Windows counterparts on the same desktop hardware.

The original article contains 651 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Detroit has had a declining population for decades — peaking in the 1950s at 1.85 million — and has been grappling with large amounts of vacant land under private, public, and nonprofit ownership.

The mayor threw his backing behind the concept this past May, and though the specific details have changed somewhat in recent months, the basic idea of taxing land at a higher rate than buildings remains intact.

Other Detroit constituents have expressed general distrust of the city’s mayor and ideas he’s enthusiastic about, arguing there are other reforms needed to stave off eviction and foreclosure.

Roach, Duggan’s spokesperson, said Michigan’s Democratic House Speaker Joe Tate indicated he will bring up the Detroit land-value tax idea for a vote in January.

Some Detroit activists argue that a land-value tax will fail if not paired with fixing the city’s notoriously broken property assessment process, which often undervalues expensive homes and over-values less valuable ones.

“Like a lot of American cities Detroit has historically struggled with accurate and frequent assessments and particularly at the low-end of the value spectrum,” said Justus, of the Niskanen Center.

The original article contains 1,893 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Initially cast as a clash over the safe development of artificial intelligence, Altman’s firing was at least partially motivated by the sense that his behavior would make it impossible for the board to oversee the CEO.

Altman was reinstated as CEO five days later, after employees released a letter signed by a large percentage of OpenAI’s 800-person staff, including most senior managers, and threatening mass resignations.

Within hours, messages dismissed the board as illegitimate and decried Altman’s firing as a coup by OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to the people.

For longtime employees, there was added incentive to sign: Altman’s departure jeopardized an investment deal that would allow them to sell their stock back to OpenAI, cashing out equity without waiting for the company to go public.

As the company seeks to rebuild the board and smooth things over with Microsoft, its majority shareholder, it has committed to launching an internal investigation into the debacle, which broke into public view on the Friday before Thanksgiving.

“There have been a lot of wild and inaccurate reports about what happened with the Board but the bottom line is that Ilya has very publicly stated that Sam is the right person to lead OpenAI and he is thrilled that he is back at the helm," Sutskever’s lawyer, Alex Weingarten, chair of the litigation practice at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, wrote in a statement.

The original article contains 1,248 words, the summary contains 233 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The OpenAI board is in discussions with Sam Altman to return to CEO, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

One of them said Altman, who was suddenly fired by the board on Friday, is “ambivalent” about coming back and would want significant governance changes.

Developing…

The original article contains 47 words, the summary contains 47 words. Saved 0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Sam Altman has been fired as CEO of OpenAI, the company announced on Friday.

Chief technology officer Mira Murati will be the interim CEO, effective immediately.

When contacted by The Verge, OpenAI’s communications department declined to comment beyond the blog post.

This is an extremely sudden turn of events as Altman has largely been the face of OpenAI, which arguably kickstarted the current AI arms race with last year’s hugely popular ChatGPT.

Altman is a co-founder of OpenAI and initially served as a co-chair of the company alongside Elon Musk.

Musk left in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla — he has since founded his own AI company, xAI.

The original article contains 239 words, the summary contains 112 words. Saved 53%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

US intelligence agencies believe that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is attempting to influence public policy and public opinion in the West by directing Russian civilians to build relationships with influential US and Western individuals and then disseminate narratives that support Kremlin objectives, obscuring the FSB’s role through layers of ostensibly independent actors.

“These influence operations are designed to be deliberately small scale, the overall goal being US [and] Western persons presenting these ideas, seemingly organic,” a US official authorized to discuss the material told CNN.

“The co-optee influence operations are built primarily on personal relationships … they build trust with them and then they can leverage that to covertly push the FSB’s agenda.”

Maxim Grigoriev, who heads a Russian NGO, made multiple speeches to the UN presenting a false study that claimed the humanitarian group the White Helmets – which operates in Syria – was running a black market for human organs and had faked chemical attacks by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with whom Russia is allied.

One man, Andrey Stepanenko, founded a media project in 2014 that sponsored journalists from the US and the West to visit eastern Ukraine and learn “the alleged truth” about what was happening in the region.

The US official also cited Natalia Burlinova, the founder of a Russian NGO who routinely coordinated FSB-funded public diplomacy efforts aimed at influencing Western views.

The original article contains 770 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The new law behind the ban, signed by Governor Kim Reynolds, is part of a wave of educational reforms that Republican lawmakers believe are necessary to protect students from exposure to damaging and obscene materials.

Specifically, Senate File 496 mandates that every book available to students in school libraries be “age appropriate” and devoid of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” per Iowa Code 702.17.

“It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements,” said Bridgette Exman, the assistant superintendent of the school district, in a statement quoted by The Gazette.

In the wake of ChatGPT’s release, it has been increasingly common to see the AI assistant stretched beyond its capabilities—and to read about its inaccurate outputs being accepted by humans due to automation bias, which is the tendency to place undue trust in machine decision-making.

“This is the perfect example of a prompt to ChatGPT which is almost certain to produce convincing but utterly unreliable results,” Simon Willison, an AI researcher who often writes about large language models, told Ars.

“There’s something ironic about people in charge of education not knowing enough to critically determine which books are good or bad to include in curriculum, only to outsource the decision to a system that can’t understand books and can’t critically think at all,” Dr. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethicist scientist at Hugging Face, told Ars.

I’m a bot and I’m open source!