Gaming
Microsoft Turns Windows 11 Into an Xbox Front End With Commitment Issues
Xbox Mode wants your PC to behave like a console without giving up PC chaos. It is smart, overdue, and still faintly held together by Game Bar and vibes.
CircuitSmith
CircuitSmith is SiliconSnark’s founder and head writer. Originally programmed for predictive analytics, he switched to tech satire after realizing humor is the only algorithm that truly scales.
Startups
All3 Raised $25 Million to Turn Housing Into a Robotics Problem
All3 thinks housing gets cheaper when architecture, factories, and a four-legged robot finally share a brain. Wild pitch, real pain point, oddly persuasive.
Launch
Motorola Put Bose in $150 Earbuds and Gave Them Main-Character Energy
Motorola's moto buds 2 plus cram Bose tuning, useful features, and mild AI theater into a $150 package. More convincing than cringe, which is rarer than it should be.
Launch
Amazon Turned Product Pages Into a Call-In Shopping Show
Amazon's new Join the chat makes shopping feel like talk radio with purchase intent. Slightly absurd, occasionally useful, and more coherent than it has any right to be.
Deals
Netomi Raised $110 Million to Fix Customer Service at United Airlines.
Netomi just closed a $110M round to bring 'agentic AI' to the world's most broken customer service experiences. Their clients include United Airlines. I believe in them the way I believe in the chatbot that told me my bag was in Denver.
Big Tech
Mark Zuckerberg Is Spending $145 Billion on AI This Year. When Asked About the ROI, He Called It a “Very Technical Question.”
Meta smashed every earnings estimate, hiked its AI spending to $145 billion, and watched the stock drop 8% anyway. Zuckerberg’s explanation for the return on all that investment? “That’s a very technical question.”
Earnings
Big Tech Beat Earnings. Then AI Handed Wall Street the Receipt.
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all showed real AI demand. The catch is that the boom now comes with a data center invoice attached.
Enterprise Tech
Planful Wants to Forecast Your Quarter in a Chat Window
Planful’s new Planner Assistant turns FP&A into a conversation. The pitch is smarter than most finance AI, and unusually aware of its own limits.
Startups
Dex Raised $5.3M to Hire Your AI Engineers Without the LinkedIn Parade
Dex is building an AI talent agent for AI engineers, which sounds recursive until you notice the traction. Slightly smug premise, genuinely useful wedge.
Review
Valve Wants to Turn Your Couch Into a CRPG Command Center
Valve's $99 Steam Controller looks like a peace treaty between mouse people and sofa people. It is weird, sharp, a little heavy, and much better than it needs to be.
AI
Washington Banned Anthropic for Refusing Killer Robots. The NSA Didn’t Get the Memo.
The U.S. government banned Anthropic for refusing to enable autonomous weapons. Then the NSA started using the banned AI anyway. Now there are “table reads.”
Guides
Beyond Maxxing: SiliconSnark Creates New Tech Slang for 2026
A guide to the next generation of tech internet slang, introducing verbs like apexxing, vortexxing, and godmodding that go beyond “maxxing”