If you can suffer through it - the inaugural episode of Techxistential Dread! We talk local AI models, the NPM supply chain attack that hit half the internet, why Allbirds is now an AI company, Matt's theory that compute ownership is the new class divide, whether Claude is conscious, and more.

Recorded April 20, 2026

This week's topics:
Results of Matt's GPU rentals & benchmarking
Jensen Huang's "$250k engineer burning $500k in tokens" quote
Justin Elze (@HackingLZ) on the productivity spike-and-plateau after AI rollouts
Anthropic's Amanda Askell on Claude's character and wellbeing
Claude's anxiety weights and performance degradation
Mystery of the Claude Code degradation, solved
The Bullshit Benchmark for LLM hallucination grading
Larian Studios catches flak for using AI in pre-production
The Axios npm supply chain compromise
Slopsquatting research
Stryker / Iran-attributed Intune takeover and mass device wipe
EvilTokens device code phishing kit
Allbirds pivots to "NewBird AI" via convertible financing
Claude Mythos limited release and federal usage
Taalas HC1 ASIC-baked inference (~17k tokens/sec on Llama 3.1 8B)
Gemma 4 release
Qwen 3.6 27B release
Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B release
Qwopus-GLM-18B model release
Google and Marvell in talks on AI inference chips
Uptick in number station broadcasts (V32 Farsi station, UVB-76)
Framework's Next Gen event teaser
NVIDIA N1X laptop motherboard leak
Dave Kennedy / TrustedSec buying eight H100s