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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.

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Tourists are to be banned from parts of Japan’s famous geisha district in Kyoto following complaints of “overtourism”.

“Kyoto is not a theme park,” said the local council amid discontent about over-zealous visitors with cameras hoping to snap a glimpse of the famous geishas.

Geishas are professional entertainers who are trained in various traditional arts including dance and music and are an iconic part of Japanese culture.

Visitors crowd the narrow, quaint streets of the area called Gion in Japan’s ancient capital city, often following tour guides who show people around and lecture for long hours, according to local district official Isokazu Ota.

The district’s public streets will remain open to tourists, so the area and the rest of Kyoto will still be teeming with visitors, both from Japan and around the world.

Complaints about “overtourism” began years ago, but cooled somewhat when the COVID-19 pandemic brought numbers of visitors down.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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