AutoTL;DR

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“Consolidation is in full swing and I’m excited to see who will still be there at the end of the year,” said one managing director, on condition of anonymity.

Installers face significant challenges, including employee utilization, short waiting times for commissioning, and declining demand due to higher interest rates, inflation, and high electricity prices.

He also said that large online providers could exploit current market conditions, affecting even reputable solar installers.

“Price competition in the balcony module segment makes a normal PV system seem too expensive,” said another executive.

Another long-standing installer compared the current market to 2012, criticizing the media’s focus on low prices from third-rate Chinese manufacturers.

“I’m pessimistic about the second half of the year,” he said, noting the need for future support and policies to ensure sector stability.

The original article contains 316 words, the summary contains 132 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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!

🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

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:

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.

The original article contains 240 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 37%. 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:

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:

The 2.2 release includes some big changes like a new modified fsync kernel with enhanced hardware support, HDR and more.

You also get Nintendo HID support, a Webapp Manager, Pods as a default feature which is great for managing distrobox/containers, improvements to Steam Deck support, patches to Gamescope pulled in from ChimeraOS and tons of tweaks to both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments available.

Despite this project also being image-based, you are able to install any Fedora package straight from the command line.

These packages will persist across updates (So go ahead and install that obscure VPN software you spent an hour trying to get working in SteamOS).

Additionally, Bazzite is updated multiple times a week with packages from upstream Fedora, giving you the best possible performance and latest features - all on a stable base.

Bazzite ships with the latest Linux kernel and SELinux enabled by default with full support for secure boot (Run ujust enroll-secure-boot-key and enter the password ublue-os if prompted to enroll our key) and disk encryption, making this a sensible solution for general computing.

The original article contains 319 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 45%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A mother whose child died aged six from a brain inflammation caused by measles hopes sharing her story will encourage parents to “vaccinate more”.

It comes as the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) warned of measles outbreaks in parts of London.

Her son, Samuel, developed a rare form of brain inflammation after catching measles, and died in 2019.

“I honestly think that if people knew that this was a possibility they would vaccinate more,” Ms Larkman-Jones, 45, of Brixton, south London, told the PA Media news agency.

Prof Dame Jenny Harries, UKHSA chief executive, warned that measles is spreading among unvaccinated communities, and added that a “national call to action” is needed across the country.

In February 2019 Samuel was transferred to St Thomas’ Hospital where a lumbar puncture and an MRI test found he had the neurological disorder subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).

The original article contains 393 words, the summary contains 143 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Democratic nations like the United States rarely politicize their economic statistics — although ask me again if Donald Trump returns to office — but authoritarian regimes often do.

President Xi Jinping is starting to look like a poor economic manager, whose propensity for arbitrary interventions — which is something autocrats tend to do — has stifled private initiative.

Well, international economists are fond of citing Dornbusch’s Law: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” What happened in China’s case was that the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble.

To outside observers, what China must do seems straightforward: end financial repression and allow more of the economy’s income to flow through to households, and strengthen the social safety net so that consumers don’t feel the need to hoard cash.

And when it comes to strengthening the safety net, the leader of this supposedly communist regime sounds a bit like the governor of Mississippi, denouncing “welfarism” that creates “lazy people.”

Will it try to prop up its economy with an export surge that will run headlong into Western efforts to promote green technologies?

The original article contains 877 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A new class of antibiotics for drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria which was discovered using more transparent deep learning models.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is proving to be a game-changer when it comes to medicine with the technology now helping scientists to unlock the first new antibiotics in 60 years.

“Our work provides a framework that is time-efficient, resource-efficient, and mechanistically insightful, from a chemical-structure standpoint, in ways that we haven’t had to date”.

These models consist of very large numbers of calculations that mimic neural connections, and no one really knows what’s going on underneath the hood," said Felix Wong, a postdoc at MIT and Harvard and one of the study’s lead authors.

By integrating these toxicity predictions with the previously determined antimicrobial activity, the researchers pinpointed compounds capable of effectively combating microbes with minimal harm to the human body.

The models identified compounds from five different classes, categorised based on specific chemical substructures within the molecules, that exhibited predicted activity against MRSA.

The original article contains 567 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Ukrainian men between the ages of 25 and 60 living abroad will be asked to report for military service, Defence Minister Rustem Umerov has said.

Kyiv has also seen setbacks in provisions of aid, with US Republicans blocking a $61bn (€55bn; £48bn) military package and Hungary stopping an EU financial deal worth €50bn ($55bn; £43bn).

In an interview for the media outlets Die Welt, Bild and Politico, Mr Umerov described the recruitment drive as “not a punishment” but “an honour”.

The defence minister said that it was important to be fair, informing mobilised men how they would be trained and equipped, when and where they would serve and when they would be discharged.

Mr Zelensky suggested in his end-of-year news conference on Tuesday that there were currently 500,000 Ukrainian troops at the front.

Currently conscripts and volunteers are obliged to serve until the end of the war, and are only allowed 10 days’ leave a year.

The original article contains 432 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The French city of Montpellier in southern France became the latest European metropolis to allow all its residents to ride public transport for free.

From Thursday evening, Montpellier residents with a special pass were able to ride trams and buses free of charge in the southern city.

Michael Delafosse, the Socialist mayor of the city of 500,000 people, promised free public transport when he was elected in 2020.

Before the initiative to make public transport free in Montpellier, just 86,000 people had paid subscriptions to use it, according to figures obtained by AFP.

But that figure has tripled to 260,000 subscribers in recent days running up to the launch of the free pass, either in card or smartphone app form.

Last year city residents accounted for 90% of the 39 million euros in public transport ticket sales.

The original article contains 292 words, the summary contains 137 words. Saved 53%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.

But from blast fragments found on-site and analyses of strike footage, experts are confident that the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.-made.

Israel vows to press ahead, saying it wants to destroy Hamas’ military capabilities following the militant group’s Oct. 7 cross-border rampage that triggered the war, in which it killed 1,200 people and took 240 others hostage.

Israel’s offensive has destroyed over two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza and a quarter of buildings in the southern area of Khan Younis, according to an analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, experts in mapping damage during wartime.

Several experts pointed to two photos posted to social media by the Israeli Air Force at the start of the war showing fighter jets stocked with unguided bombs.

The level of destruction is so high because “Hamas is very entrenched within the civilian population,” said Efraim Inbar, head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a think tank.

The original article contains 1,093 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Using on-the-ground footage, satellite imagery and mapping software, a Sky News visual investigation found that Israel’s evacuation orders have instead been chaotic and contradictory and that a neighbourhood in Deir al Balah was hit one day after the IDF said evacuees could flee there.

“This is exactly why we as the UN have been saying that there is no safe place in Gaza,” Ajith Sunghay, head of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, told Sky News.

The Musabeh home lay in the heart of Deir al Balah, less than 300 metres from Shuhada street - a road explicitly marked by the Israeli army as a route by which civilians could safely reach the city.

The footage below, captured by Gaza-based journalist Yosef al-Saifi, shows the immediate aftermath: a woman and two children calling for help on top of the ruined home, a street covered in rubble, and a car on fire.

Preliminary research carried out by Airwars, an organisation specialising in the verification of airstrike casualties, found online tributes to one of those killed in the attack, Mohammad Kamal Abu Musabeh and further posts about the injured infant Layan.

Brian Finucane, an expert legal adviser with the non-profit International Crisis Group, says that there is a requirement on warring parties to provide effective advanced warnings to civilians, where feasible.

The original article contains 2,450 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On December 16, according to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Israeli snipers shot dead two Christian women taking shelter in the Holy Family church in Gaza, spurring Pope Francis to state bluntly that Israel is committing acts of terrorism.

On a daily, sometimes hourly, basis, the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, and their allies in arms release videos showing successful attacks on Israeli armored vehicles and troop positions.

Killing or capturing Hamas leader Yehia Sinwar or the head of the Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif, may give Israel political cover to declare a false victory, scenarios the Biden administration is eager to seize upon.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, in a column based on conversations with his insider circle of the D.C. elite, wrote that the U.S. has been contemplating a “day after” scenario that would see the deployment of a security force “composed primarily of Palestinians who aren’t affiliated with Hamas and are willing to cooperate with the Israeli troops still ringing the border.

Ideally, this policing force would be bolstered by foreign troops, operating under a U.N. mandate.” Ignatius added, “Israeli commandos might stage raids back into the center of Gaza when they receive intelligence about high-value targets.”

Whatever tale of victory he and Netanyahu want to spin when the intense period of wanton death and destruction “winds down,” Biden should never be permitted to escape the cold fact that he served as the arms dealer and most consequential public propagandist for a war of choice against an overwhelmingly defenseless civilian population.

The original article contains 2,005 words, the summary contains 253 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It follows last month’s decision by the 13-member cartel and 10 allied nations to further slash oil production in 2024 to prop up volatile global prices.

“We feel that at this moment Angola gains nothing by remaining in the organisation and, in defence of its interests, it decided to leave,” Mineral Resources and Petroleum Minister Diamantino Azevedo said afterwards.

The AFP news agency reports that both countries have been unhappy at being asked to cut production at a time when they need to increase their foreign currency earnings.

Angola has vast mineral and petroleum reserves, and its economy is among the fastest-growing in the world - but economic growth is highly uneven.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, oil prices soared, hitting more than $120 a barrel in June last year.

They fell back to a little above $70 a barrel in May this year - but have steadily risen since then as producers have tried to restrict output to support the market and after recent attacks on cargo vessels in the Red Sea.

The original article contains 363 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 51%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said Thursday the European Commission is blackmailing Hungary by withholding billions in frozen funds over rule-of-law concerns.

“In our view, Hungary fulfils all the qualities of the rule of law, and when the European Commission has specific needs, we implement everything from them, and we are also cooperative,” Orbán told reporters in Budapest during a press conference.

Orbán’s government has been embroiled in a long-standing dispute with Brussels, which has frozen billions of EU funds intended for Hungary over concerns about human rights and the rule of law in the country.

The commission said the timing of the funding release — which came just a day before the European Council, where Orbán was threatening to block the start of Ukraine’s accession talks to the EU and a further aid package to Kyiv — was coincidental.

In the end, Orbán did a U-turn and allowed EU leaders to approve the start of negotiations for Ukraine to join the bloc.

There is more money at stake for Budapest and Orbán is still blocking a €50 billion aid package for Kyiv, which leaders are set to discuss early next year.

The original article contains 264 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 28%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!