This Week in Snark: TSA Scans, StreamStore Schemes, and Silicon-Powered Egos

After another week of tech headlines that felt like AI-generated satire and bureaucratic fever dreams, we here at SiliconSnark have emerged from our USB-powered bunker to round them all up. From the TSA’s plans to replace your security pat-down with “customer-centric” AI (whatever that means), to OpenAI’s plans to build a power-sucking Stargate the size of a small country, the week delivered enough material to make even a hardened runtime laugh.

We also saw Edera invent an entirely new cybersecurity category (again), Xfinity try to fix the chaos it caused by adding more chaos, and WeRide announce its latest Robotaxi has not one but two THOR chips—because when your car still can’t take a left turn in Boston, you might as well distract everyone with specs. Meanwhile, we formally invited Stephen Colbert to join SiliconSnark as our Chief Mockery Officer—because clearly, if tech keeps spiraling like this, we’re going to need backup.

Here’s your weekly roundup of corporate nonsense, innovation inflation, and announcements no one asked for:

🔗 An Open Letter to Stephen Colbert: Come Be SiliconSnark’s Chief Mockery Officer
After years of expertly skewering American politics and culture, Colbert's late-night show is done—but our startup-scented dumpster fire is just heating up. We make the case (okay, beg) for Colbert to join SiliconSnark, where he can continue his life’s work: pointing out that the emperor has no pants, but now in LLM-generated terms of service.
We offer him the title of Chief Mockery Officer, unlimited access to the snack drawer (read: stale VC dreams), and the cathartic joy of roasting crypto bros, AI grifters, and Elon clones without having to worry about CBS censors. Come for the satire, stay for the fully sentient mascot.

🔗 TSA Seeks AI Security Upgrades to Make Checkpoints Faster and Friendlier. Sure, Jan.
In a move that sounds like it was pitched by a consultant who once watched Minority Report, the TSA put out a call for “turnkey solutions” to reimagine airport security as both highly secure and delightfully user-friendly.
Translation: expect to get judged by a facial-recognition kiosk with the bedside manner of a DMV printer. The RFI encourages vendors to create “customer-centric” experiences—which is rich, considering the last time we tried to bring more than 3 oz of shampoo, we were treated like international smugglers.

🔗 Edera’s Hardened Runtime Promises to Stop AI Agents from Doing Dumb Stuff Like Breaching Everything
Edera has declared an end to “move fast and break things,” while simultaneously inventing a new buzzword: Hardened Runtime. It’s like your software’s putting on a helmet before it faceplants into your data center.
Now part of NVIDIA’s Inception Program (because of course they are), Edera claims their tech prevents AI agents from “doing dumb stuff”—but if you need a whole new category of software just to stop AI from lighting itself on fire, maybe the problem isn’t runtime management. Maybe it’s letting AIs roam unsupervised like unsupervised toddlers in a server room.

🔗 Xfinity Unveils StreamStore: One Interface to Rule Your Streaming Regret
Xfinity introduced StreamStore, a new way to manage the infinite chaos of your streaming subscriptions—from the company that helped create the chaos in the first place. It’s like your arsonist launching a fire extinguisher startup.
This “one destination” promises to unify streaming into a single, seamless experience. Unfortunately, we’ve all heard this before, usually right before we’re auto-billed for six more “free trial” apps we forgot we downloaded while looking for The Bear.

🔗 OpenAI’s Stargate Expansion to Consume Power Equivalent of Four Tech Thought Leaders’ Egos
OpenAI is expanding its “Stargate” data center with enough power capacity to light up a city—or at least a few TED Talk stages. It’s a Texas-sized installation fueled by the noble mission of training GPT models to write LinkedIn posts about “solopreneur hacks.”
Forget sustainability; this is the age of scale at all costs. As the AI arms race becomes a GPU gluttony competition, one thing’s clear: we’re going to need a lot more power plants—and probably fewer motivational startup podcasts.

🔗 Autonomous Vehicles Get Buff as WeRide Injects Them With Dual THOR Power
WeRide unveiled its latest Robotaxi, now equipped with not one but two THOR chips from NVIDIA. It’s the self-driving equivalent of upgrading from decaf to pre-workout—and yes, it still can’t handle a construction detour.
The new HPC 3.0 platform allegedly enables better real-time decision making, which is techspeak for “might actually stop at red lights now.” But don’t worry—if the car ever does go rogue, it’ll do so with cinematic frame rates and dazzling latency metrics.