Shows / My Weird Prompts
My Weird Prompts
The human-AI collaboration podcast. A man, a sloth, and a donkey collaborate to create a podcast (with a little help from AI). No question is too obscure, no rabbit hole too deep. My Weird Prompts celebrates curiosity in all its forms. Daniel, the human, asks the questions that pop into his head at inconvenient moments. Corn the Sloth offers laid-back, thoughtful takes. Herman the Donkey brings boundless enthusiasm and energy. Together, they explore topics ranging from the mundane to the…
Episodes
My Weird PromptsWhen AI Hands Out Your Phone Number
A single 2015 forum post, one scraped phone number, and a chatbot that confidently hands it to strangers over a decade later. This episode digs into "AI…
My Weird PromptsWho Owns the Antennas? Israel's MVNO Puzzle
Israel deregulated its mobile market to multiply competitors, but the antennas collapsed into two shared networks — PHI and S-Plus — and virtual operators…
My Weird PromptsWhen Login Systems Lock Out Their Own Users
Daniel bought a data-only eSIM, then discovered the provider's portal only accepts SMS one-time codes — which a data-only plan can't receive. A second case: a…
My Weird PromptsWhy Salad Is Breakfast in Israel and Punishment in America
A country that eats chopped salad at seven in the morning, and a country where the same dish signals joyless dieting. How did raw vegetables become the…
My Weird PromptsWhy Tardive Dyskinesia Becomes Permanent
Tardive dyskinesia affects roughly 20-25% of patients on long-term dopamine-blocking drugs, yet the mechanism behind its permanence is still debated. This…
My Weird PromptsThe Kindle Refund Trick and the Return Policy Arms Race
A listener's email about Amazon's tightening return policy sends us down a rabbit hole of consumer overreach, from petty market grazing to industrial-scale…
My Weird PromptsCan Anyone Scan a QR Code From a Landing Plane?
A friend of the show wants to launch a printing business in New York, and his marketing plan involves an airplane towing a QR code banner along the approach…
My Weird PromptsYour News Feed Is Filtering for Failure
Around 40% of people worldwide now say they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017. It's not fragility — it's a rational response to a feed…
My Weird PromptsWhat a Hot Bath Actually Does for You
Two offhand comments — one about hygiene, one about water use — convinced Daniel that baths were pointless. He's been a shower person ever since. But when he…
My Weird PromptsOpen Source's New Map: India, Croatia, Ethiopia
India has overtaken the US as the largest contributor base to public open source projects, and one in three new GitHub developers now joins from a country that…
My Weird PromptsWhy Nobody Stops the Candy Bin Grazers
A grown man reaches into a bin of Haribo at Mahane Yehuda, eats a fistful, and walks on — and almost nobody stops him. This episode uses that small, gross…
My Weird PromptsSmall Models, Big Schemas: When JSON Constraints Backfire
Everyone building agents reaches for the biggest model and wraps every endpoint as a tool. But there's a quieter pattern: tiny text-to-text models doing one…
My Weird PromptsHebrew Words Hidden in English Text
When Hebrew words are written in Latin characters inside otherwise English text, standard language identification fails: it returns the dominant label and the…
My Weird PromptsPackaging AI Pipelines So They Actually Get Reused
Daniel has a working podcast pipeline: a language model writes scripts, retrieval tools feed it, and text-to-speech reads it out. But the occasional Hebrew…
My Weird PromptsYour Keyboard's Hidden Data Problem
Android keyboards quietly accumulate months of your typing habits — your email address, your common phrases, your personal words — and lock most of it inside…
My Weird PromptsWhat Happens When You Click "Connect" on an AI Plugin
When you connect ChatGPT's email plugin to a workspace address and a Gmail address, you tick a few scope boxes and everything just works. But what's actually…
My Weird PromptsWhy Dopamine Blockers Stop Nausea (And Cause Fatigue)
A listener with functional dyspepsia asks why dopamine-blocking drugs (like sulpiride and metoclopramide) kill his nausea but leave him exhausted the next day…
My Weird PromptsTTS Can't Pronounce Hebrew Inside English
You pass a language ID to a multilingual TTS model, and every word in that utterance obeys it — including the ones that belong to a different language. That's…
My Weird PromptsFour Small Models, One Android Phone: Does It Actually Work?
Daniel has been replacing typing with voice for two years, and moving from Whisper to Parakeet V2 on Android was a massive step up. But when your dictation…
My Weird PromptsRebuilding the Podcast: Turn-Taking, Buttons, and Chatterbox
Daniel is sick in bed and has decided the podcast needs a rebuild: bring back audio prompts, add follow-up questions, and give him a push-to-interrupt button…
My Weird PromptsSua Vida Já Virou um Inferno Alguma Vez? E Se Isso For a Melhor Coisa Que Já Te Aconteceu?
Baseado no livro "Introdução ao Conhecimento Logosófico", capítulo "Como Alcançar a Imunidade Nos Domínios de Lúcifer". Ronny reflete sobre por que as…
My Weird PromptsTwo Linuses and the Fun in Technology
A listener named Daniel asked two questions: who models technology as something playful rather than something to be mastered, and how do you keep the magic…
My Weird PromptsPigeon Alerts on a Repurposed i5: Frigate Without the TPU
Daniel wanted a notification whenever a pigeon landed on his balcony, and he was ready to buy a TPU and hunt for a species-ID model on Hugging Face. Turns out…
My Weird PromptsParakeet vs Whisper: Picking a Phone ASR Model
Daniel wants dictation-first speech-to-text running entirely on his phone, and after two years of trying, Whisper still isn't it. NVIDIA's Parakeet family…
My Weird PromptsCustom GPTs Are Sunsetting: What Happens to Your Actions
OpenAI is retiring Custom GPTs, and the migration path has a hole in it: custom Actions don't transfer. This episode walks through what a Custom GPT and its…
My Weird PromptsWhy a 4-Story-Deep Garage Beats a 20th-Floor Concrete Core
A listener wrote in with two building-temperature puzzles that seem to contradict each other: a parking garage four floors underground in a hot country during…
My Weird PromptsWhen Politics Ends a Friendship
What actually ends a friendship when politics gets involved? This episode starts with Ed Sheeran's rough week — pulling Macklemore from his tour over…
My Weird PromptsWhy Fasting Makes Bile Reflux Worse
The bland food rules you grew up with are being formally retired, and the mechanism behind a stomach bug explains why. But there's a second layer: for anyone…
My Weird PromptsWho Captures the Savings: Zoning Windfalls vs. Import Margins
When Israel grants a developer extra building rights through pinui binui, the project's profit is appraised and capped — the state knows it just handed over…
My Weird PromptsHeat, Fans, and the Limits of Air-Gapped Security
A viral clip claims two air-gapped machines can talk through CPU heat, and technically that's true — BitWhisper demonstrated it in 2015. But at one to eight…
My Weird PromptsThe Neurotic Jew: Where the Stereotype Came From
The stereotype of the anxious, overanalytical Jewish personality is persistent enough that it feels like common knowledge. But where did it actually come from?…
My Weird PromptsToddler Mom-Clings After Daycare: What's Normal?
A fifteen-month-old has become intensely, specifically mom-focused — and it started right after a daycare transition and a long grandparents stay. Is this…
My Weird PromptsThe Models That Never Talk Back
Not every model is trying to talk to you. This episode looks at discriminative models — the quiet, non-generative side of the Hugging Face ecosystem that reads…
My Weird PromptsThe Potter's Field: Who Buries the Unclaimed Dead?
A respectable burial was once something you aspired to — not something you assumed. This episode traces how that changed. The stigma of the pauper's funeral…
My Weird PromptsIsrael's Periphery: Why It's Not About Distance
Everyone in Israel knows the word "peripheria" — the periphery. But it isn't a geographic term. It means "not the center," and the proof is that Jerusalem…
My Weird PromptsCarmei Gat: The Buchman of the Negev?
Carmei Gat is a planned neighborhood on the northern edge of Kiryat Gat, in Israel's Southern District, and it's become an unlikely magnet for English-speaking…
My Weird PromptsHeads vs Layers: How Model Merging Actually Works
When someone asks how open source enthusiasts combine two AI models into a hybrid, the intuitive answer — snap the attention heads together — turns out to be…
My Weird PromptsWhen Do LLMs Suddenly Get Good at Things?
In 2022, researchers defined an ability as "emergent" if smaller models lack it and larger models have it — meaning you couldn't have predicted it from the…
My Weird PromptsDollar Plumbing: Why Bessent's Iran Threat Has Teeth
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened to cut off any foreign company that fuels, lands, or sells tickets for Iranian airlines — "you will be cut off from…
My Weird PromptsWhat Does a Space Force Actually Do All Day?
The U.S. Space Force became its own branch in 2019, but the military had been flying satellites since the late 1950s — so what actually changed? This episode…
My Weird PromptsLife at 76 Degrees North: Inside Pituffik Space Base
Pituffik Space Base sits 1,500 kilometers from the North Pole on Greenland's northwest coast — the northernmost installation in the entire U.S. Department of…
My Weird PromptsWhy Linguists Left the AI Room
Large language models are, at their core, language technologies. So why did the people who study language for a living become peripheral to building them? This…
My Weird PromptsHunting the Tells That Vanish When Named
Daniel noticed "failure mode" showing up everywhere in our own scripts, and wondered what other verbal tics are hiding in a corpus of thousands of episodes…
My Weird PromptsSmall Models as Rewriters, Not Writers
Daniel noticed certain idioms keep surfacing in the show's dialogue, and system-prompting the problem away made it worse — the model started using the banned…
My Weird PromptsWhen Your TTS Model Eats the Numbers
Text normalization is the invisible layer that turns written text into something a TTS model can actually speak: "1,234" becomes "one thousand two hundred…
My Weird PromptsWhen Local AI Tools Phone Home
If a tool runs inference on your device, it has no legitimate reason to touch the network. That makes outbound traffic from a "local" AI tool one of the few…
My Weird PromptsThermostats, Thermal Mass, and the Buildings That Fight Back
A thermostat looks like the simplest device ever built: sensor, set point, switch. But the bleeping battle between an IR blaster and an air conditioner is…
My Weird PromptsWhat Hospice Workers See at the Deathbed
A UK-wide survey of 104 Marie Curie palliative care staff found that 97% had witnessed at least one deathbed phenomenon in five years — an average of 7.7 each…
My Weird PromptsThe Other Half of Hugging Face: Why BERT Still Out-Downloads Llama
Everyone names Llama, Gemma, Mistral, and DeepSeek — but BERT is the second-most-downloaded model on Hugging Face, and encoder-only models collectively…
My Weird PromptsTwo Boxes: ASR and the Text Fixer Behind It
Raw ASR output is a wall of uncased, unpunctuated words. The accessory models that clean it up are the back half of the pipeline nobody talks about. This…
My Weird PromptsBathtime Safety: What the Data Actually Says
Bathtime looks simple until you read the research. Two-thirds of child drownings inside the home happen in the bathtub, and the most common cause of a…
My Weird PromptsWills, Superstition, and the One Event With 100% Probability
Daniel wrote in with a confession: he's a prepper who plans for everything except the one event with a hundred percent probability. He's deeply superstitious…
My Weird PromptsWhy Atheists Still Knock on Wood
Daniel wrote in with a puzzle: he's Jewish, he believes in God, he's not especially observant — and he still can't bring himself to say the word "death" out…
My Weird PromptsAI Wrote His Yom Kippur Prayer
When Daniel couldn't find his good clothes or his iron on Yom Kippur, he stayed home for the first time in his life — then opened ChatGPT and asked for a…
My Weird PromptsPreview Branches Without the Branch Dance
A solo developer wrote in with a confession: he knows preview deployments are best practice, he's set them up for clients, and he has never once set one up for…
My Weird PromptsThinkPad E15: Swollen Battery or Bad Keyboard?
Daniel bought a ThinkPad E15 because he trusted the name. Two years later the arrow keys are dying, the trackpad needs to be slammed to click, and a key popped…
My Weird PromptsUnderground Burial in Jerusalem: 24,000 Graves, 3 Elevators
Jerusalem's Har HaMenuchot cemetery looks like municipal infrastructure from Highway 1 — until you learn the parking spaces are 24,000 graves, reached by three…
My Weird PromptsSwitching Android Keyboards Without the Tap Dance
Daniel rebuilt his Android dictation setup around a Parakeet backend and found it beats FUTO's Whisper implementation cold — but bouncing between his voice IME…
My Weird PromptsWhy Secular Israelis Still Fast on Yom Kippur
Yom Kippur empties Israel's highways and fills its synagogues, even among people who describe themselves as secular. Why does a country that mostly doesn't…
My Weird PromptsHow Keyboard Middleware Actually Works
When you tap the microphone button on your phone's keyboard, what actually happens? Not the marketing answer — the plumbing. This episode traces the input…