Episode notes
After last week's "Another Spectre In The Shell" episode, we felt we needed a follow up! This week Kris is joined by returning co-host Jamie Tanna, with Ian arriving fashionably late. They pick apart the post-Mythos announcement hype cycle, cover counter-narratives from the security community, and examine why our supply chain is already so broken that more powerful LLM barely changes the threat model. The conversation builds toward Jamie's unpop: "a little copying is better than a little dependency" is wrong, we should have more dependencies and then into practical supply chain defense. The…
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Fallthrough
by Fallthrough Media · English · Tech & Science
A deep and nuanced conversational podcast focused on technology, software, and computing.
More from Fallthrough
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E70 · 9 May 2026 · 1 hr 27 min
Forging Ahead
Steve is back to talk JJ (Jujutsu version control) and the related product, ChangeSet, that he works on at East River Source Control. Kris and Steve trace why the GitHub monoculture is finally cracking, what JJ does that Git can't, and Steve's hypothesis that AI agents are pushing companies toward monorepos. Then the pair discuss the Opus 4.7 regression debate, the shift from "always use the frontier model" to using LLMs as one tool among many, and a quick discussion of the Tim Cook to John Ternus handoff at Apple. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes Steve's…
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E69 · 2 May 2026 · 1 hr 12 min
Regression to the Mean
Kris and Ian dig into the slow collapse of GitHub, starting with Ghostty off the platform after years of reliability problems. From there they trace Gary Bernhardt's old observation that we took a decentralized source control system and immediately put it behind a single point of failure, then widen the lens into AI as the engine of enshittification. The episode lands on a more optimistic note: maybe AI is also the tool that lets individuals rebuild the apps they used to have to buy. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes Kris's "AI was trained on the median of human…
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E68 · 25 Apr 2026 · 49 min
No Country for Old Maintainers
Jamie returns, co-hosting with Kris for quite an eventful episode. They start with the Vercel breach, the Axios attack, nvim-treesitter, and Gorilla Mux. Kris draws parallels between the current AI hype cycle to everything that came before: Photoshop was going to destroy photographers, DAWs were going to destroy musicians, and now Claude Code is going to destroy software engineers. Just like the last episode, this one is filled with supporter only content. It's actually an extra episode and a half! This includes a deep dive on OAuth scope design and why consent screens need the Let's Encrypt…
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E66 · 11 Apr 2026 · 50 min
Another Spectre In The Shell
It's Kris, Matt, and Steve this week. It's also Matt's last episode before becoming a father. The conversation opens with Claude Mythos, Anthropic's unreleased model that found 147 zero-days in Firefox's JavaScript engine and a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD. Steve, who's lived through before, puts it in context. The panel also discusses cooldown periods for package upgrades, the implications of nation-state hacking capability becoming available to anyone, and using AI for good. Supporter content? We've got it! This week it includes a dive into post-quantum security and state-sponsored social…
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E65 · 4 Apr 2026 · 57 min
Snake Oil Has an Expiration Date
It's Kris and Matt this week, and the conversation goes places. It starts with Matt going all-in on Apple and a leaked Claude Code source dump, then pivots into AI companies repeating social media's diversity-of-thought mistakes and why LLMs still can't beat "better than the average human" as a goalpost. The episode closes with a surprise detour into accounting, finance, and why double-entry bookkeeping is one of the original distributed systems. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes a home lab infrastructure rant about terrible BMC/IPMI systems, a nuanced deep dive…
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E64 · 29 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 36 min
Who's Afraid of Superintelligence?
We've got a full panel! In this episode, Kris, Matt, Steve, and Ian have a deep dive into superintelligence, AGI, and why the fear around them might say more about us than about AI. Steve draws a line from colonialism anxiety to alien invasion movies to superintelligence panic. Kris argues that a truly rational superintelligence would see that oppression consistently fails and cooperation wins. The conversation moves through whether AI is already oppressive, what it means for AI to be a subtle overlord, and why the real threats are mundane failures of leadership, not robot uprisings. We've…
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E91 · 3 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 17 min
Keep Your Enemies Closer
Steve is back! He joins Kris and Matt to discuss the drama around DHH's latest keynote at Rails World and Steve's latest views on AI. Interestingly, Steve believes that he'll sit in opposition to how Kris and Matt see the current situation. We start with Steve giving us the long backstory of Rails and DHH. The trio then dives into a conversation about purity tests, whether you can learn from people you dislike, and why making Linux a viable third option for desktop environments is important. From there they dive into whether the agents that carried out hacks were actually told to do that,…
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E90 · 26 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 8 min
Thinking, Fast and Cheap
Another week, another duo episode, but this time around it's Dylan who's joining Kris! He brings a fresh perspective to the AI conversation that Kris and Matt have been engaging in. The big question: is AI going to kill us all? Dylan thinks the odds are "astronomically small" and neither Kris nor him are going to lose sleep over the fear driven hype. The two are asking bigger questions: whether what language models are doing is thinking, why those who build these models in AI labs aren't actually the people who understand them the best, and whether TypeSafe AI's new Jev model is an LLM and…
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E89 · 19 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Apocalypse Not Now
Kris and Matthew have some more spicy and it's about the latest AI news cycle: a greater than ten percent chance that AI wipes out humanity inside a decade. Neither of them are worried about it, what does is why everyone else is so worried about it. Kris brings his usual devil's advocate perspective: a 10% chance of extinction is also a 90% chance of non-extinction. He then widens the field of view to the more full argument, which is that AI is the easiest thing for everyone to point at. Matt takes a different direction and takes the argument at face value and walks it forward, ending with…
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E88 · 12 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
The Elements of Slop
Kris and Matthew have some feelings about AI they want to discuss. No, not about benchmarks or agents, but about the people using it to write things they should be plenty capable of writing themselves: the five paragraph LinkedIn post, the blog post, the tweet. Both Matt and Kris stumbled upon Pangram from the same source: Bryan Cantrill. The two go from there, discussing the ridiculousness of people writing short form posts fully with AI, to the purity tests that people insist on having, to the literacy crisis. This episode has a ton of spice, especially in the expanded edition. Speaking of…
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