This Week in Snark: Cables, Coins, Close Your Rings, and Cyberattacks

Welcome back to This Week in Snark, your weekly field guide to the absurdities of the tech-industrial hype complex. This week, Beats re-reinvents the wheel (or rather, the wire), OpenAI’s new models debut with caffeine jitters, and 18% of new music is now made by robots who feel nothing but still drop bangers. Meanwhile, Apple encourages mass wrist-based guilt, meme coin promoters keep grinding like it’s 2021, and Hertz exposes more than just your terrible rental history. We also take a look at where GPT is heading—spoiler: it's probably hosting a late-night show by version 10.

Let’s dig in.

🧢 Shill or Be Shilled: The Meme Coin Promotion Industrial Complex

Behind every trending meme coin is a well-oiled machine of Telegram mods, pseudonymous influencers, and Twitter bots who haven’t slept since DOGE broke a penny. This 8,500-word exposé dives deep into the gig economy of shilling—where coins are pumped, dumped, and rebranded before you can say “liquidity locked.” If you’ve ever wondered who’s behind that coin with a cartoon frog, a vague roadmap, and 40% of the supply in one wallet... this is their origin story.

🔌 Beats Cables Arrive: Finally, the Courage to Reinvent the Wire

Beats, the audio brand known for selling style-forward headphones with “sonic experiences” that make everything sound like it’s happening in a hallway, has now unveiled their boldest product yet: cables. That’s right, wires—in 2025. Available in colors like Rapid Red and Nitro Navy, these $18.99 cords prove that Apple really can slap a vibe on anything and call it innovation. We nearly missed the announcement because they buried it in a PDF. On purpose? Almost certainly.

🎶 Streaming the Machine: 18% of Music Now Pure Robot Vibes

According to Deezer, nearly one in five tracks uploaded to streaming platforms is now fully AI-generated. That’s 20,000 songs per day, all crafted by emotionless code trying desperately to predict what your broken human heart wants to hear. Soon, “Spotify Wrapped” will just be a mirror reflecting your algorithmically predicted regret. On the bright side, robots don’t demand royalties—just GPU time and your soul.

☕ Say Hello to OpenAI’s O3 and O4 Mini

OpenAI dropped new models this week—O3 and O4 Mini—the most advanced AIs yet to hallucinate your calendar invite. These models can use every tool in the box and even think longer before responding, which is tech-speak for “it still guessed, just slower.” O4 Mini is like that hyperactive friend who insists they're chill but just ordered their third cold brew and now wants to discuss consciousness. Welcome to the reasoning era—please allow up to 45 seconds for enlightenment.

⌚ Apple Watch Declares National Guilt Day, Calls It Close Your Rings Day

April 24 is officially Close Your Rings Day, Apple’s annual excuse to make you feel bad about sitting. If you didn’t move enough today, your Apple Watch knows—and it will buzz. But now, you can unlock a limited-edition virtual medal no one else will see, and maybe achieve a fleeting sense of control over your spiraling digital existence. Thanks, Tim.

🔮 A Totally Serious Forecast of GPT-4.6 through 10.0

Where is GPT heading? According to our extremely rigorous, definitely-not-a-joke predictions: by GPT-7 it becomes self-aware enough to ghost your emails, GPT-8 launches a startup with you as unpaid intern, and GPT-10 ascends into a shimmering holographic cult leader who offers AI-generated enlightenment for $11.99/month. The only thing we know for sure? Somewhere in the middle, it’ll write your breakup text with unsettling emotional accuracy.

🚘 5 Things We Pray Hackers Never Learn (From the Hertz Data Breach)

Hertz reported a vendor data breach this week, which means your deepest automotive secrets might now be on the blockchain or, worse, Reddit. What kind of secrets? That time you claimed to care about the environment but rented a Hummer. Or when you bought the rental insurance twice. We compiled the five most embarrassing facts that could leak—and honestly, we hope they never surface. But if they do… just deny everything. You were hacked too, probably.

That’s it for this week in tech’s most delightfully absurd corner.
Until next time: keep your meme coins freshly shilled, your cables overpriced, and your rings tightly closed.