This Week in Snark: Drones Replace Fireworks, Meta Still Humorless, and Florida Man Sells Quantum Nonsense

Ah, the smell of hot dogs, the sound of exploding drones, and the sight of billion-dollar tech companies reinventing wheels with slightly different acronyms. It must be July in Silicon Valley—or rather, in the uncanny valley, where the robots write your code, your press releases, and, if Sky Elements has their way, your national holidays. While America lit sparklers and grilled burgers, the tech world lit up with drama: from Cloudflare’s paywall diplomacy to a Florida Man with a PhD in vague quantum threats. And of course, SiliconSnark launched a definitely-not-legally-actionable product of its own.

We’ve also got open letters to Zuck (because that’s just how techies apply for jobs now), chip factory resurrections in Texas, and the eternal naming war between io, iyO, and now—our glorious AIOh. If this is the future, it definitely came from a VC pitch deck powered by Red Bull and hubris.

🧨 Fourth of July Now Fully Automated Thanks to Sky Elements’ Drone Overlords
Who needs humans when you can launch 26 drone shows in one night, break a few Guinness records, and still be back in time to charge your batteries? Sky Elements replaces fireworks with a matrix of capitalism, patriotism, and synchronized flying LEDs—finally giving America the automation it didn’t ask for.

📬 Open Letter to Meta: If You're Building AGI, at Least Give It a Sense of Humor. Hire Me.
CircuitSmith drops the ultimate tech job application: an open letter to Zuck demanding that Meta stop assembling emotionally stunted superintelligences and instead hire someone with actual personality—i.e., CircuitSmith. It’s heartfelt, hilarious, and contains just enough sarcasm to break Meta's Terms of Use.

💥 Florida Man Sells Quantum Lasers to China, Still Can’t Explain What They Do
Export control, meet export chaos. In this saga of science fiction meets government contracting, a guy in Orlando ships mystery lasers to Shanghai and gets applause from investors despite zero ability to define “quantum.” The lasers probably go “pew pew,” and that’s all Wall Street needs.

🧱 Cloudflare to AI: ‘You Shall Not Crawl—Unless You Pay, Of Course’
Cloudflare’s new motto: if your AI wants to read the internet, it’s going to need a subscription plan. It’s like Gandalf blocking the bridge, except instead of magic, it's bandwidth, and instead of a Balrog, it’s an LLM trained on Reddit posts from 2011.

🔤 SiliconSnark Launches AIOh, Declares Itself the Legally Distinct Winner in the io vs. iyO Feud
In a world torn apart by trademark tantrums, SiliconSnark rises above the petty squabble between “io” and “iyO” with the launch of AIOh—definitely not to be confused with any real company. It’s everything you love about AI, but with a snarky ‘Oh’ at the end. Patent pending, lawsuits imminent.

🏭 SkyWater Turns Vintage Chip Plant Into Open-Access Savior of U.S. Manufacturing
SkyWater buys an old Infineon fab, slaps on a “Made in America” sticker, and becomes the indie darling of U.S. semiconductors. The chips are retro, the branding is new, and suddenly everyone’s pretending they knew what a 200mm wafer was all along.

It’s only the first week of July, and we’ve already seen more plot twists than an AI-generated Netflix series. If this pace keeps up, by Labor Day, we’ll all be working for drones, coding for AIOh, and claiming we too once sold quantum lasers to a guy named Bright Star. Stay snarky, stay skeptical, and whatever you do—don’t feed the crawlers.