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PODCAST

My Weird Prompts

Daniel Rosehill

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

technology

All Episodes

23:48

Never Being Pressed for Time: The Buffer Mindset

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/26

We all know we should build buffer into our schedules. So why can't we actually do it? This episode tackles the planning fallacy head-on — the cognitive bias that makes us systematically underestimate how long tasks take, even when we have the data. We explore Kahneman and Tversky's famous research, the inside view versus the outside view, and why Parkinson's Law doesn't apply the way you think. Then we get practical: how to measure your personal bias factor, operationalize the fifteen-minute rule,

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25:28

Rental Networking Without Wrecking Your Walls

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/26

Running Ethernet in a rental is a constant tension between performance and aesthetics. This episode breaks down exactly how to route cables without destroying door frames, which adhesives remove cleanly, and why the angle you pull a Command strip matters more than the brand you buy. From the credit card test for door gaps to stretch-release removal techniques, we cover the full toolkit for non-permanent networking that doesn't look like a data center exploded in your living room.

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26:26

The Doctor Visit You Can't Make: Health Anxiety's...

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/26

Daniel writes in about a painful paradox: the very people who need medical care most are often too terrified to seek it. We break down illness anxiety disorder (IAD), the avoidance subtype that flies under the radar, and the cognitive-behavioral loop that keeps patients trapped. Plus, what actually works — from CBT with ERP to practical fear ladders — and why the medical system itself can be the phobic trigger.

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24:19

What Actually Happens at a Trade Fair?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/26

Why would a small framing shop in Ireland fly to Italy just to say hello to their wood supplier? This episode unpacks the real economic mechanics behind trade fairs. We explore how these gatherings function as compressed market intelligence operations, enabling quality benchmarking, supply chain discovery, and trend detection that digital tools can't replicate. Discover the "long tail of smarter trade" and why in-person meetings are cheap insurance against bad supplier decisions.

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25:43

Digikey, Mouser, and the Hidden Supply Chain of...

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/26

What exactly are Digikey, Mouser, and Farnell? They look like websites from 1998, but they're the backbone of the global electronics supply chain. This episode unpacks the difference between MRO suppliers (Grainger, Talmir) and electronic component distributors, why their "ugly" websites are actually perfectly designed for engineers, and how these distributors became quiet saviors during the chip shortage. Plus: how a single facility in Thief River Falls, Minnesota (population 8,500) stocks 2.7

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22:43

Structuring Raw Voice Prompts at Scale

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/26

Daniel has built a prompt enhancement node that takes raw voice-to-text input and decomposes it into questions, context data, and host notes. It works well — but how do you make it reliable when it runs thousands of times? We explore four design principles for building meta-prompts that structure other prompts: classification before extraction, real voice-capture few-shot examples, explicit schemas with fallback fields, and chain-of-thought reasoning for ambiguous cases. If you're building a

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22:01

Python Visualization vs. Subscription Tools

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/26

Python’s visualization ecosystem has over thirty libraries, from matplotlib to GeoPandas, yet companies still pay thousands annually for Tableau and ArcGIS. This episode maps the landscape, explains why the subscription reflex persists, and shows how a few core functions can replace expensive tools. We explore the two APIs of matplotlib, the rise of interactive libraries like Plotly and HoloViews, and the geospatial stack that makes ArcGIS licenses hard to justify for repetitive workflows.

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25:10

Where GeoJSON Breaks and KMZ Still Wins

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/26

GeoJSON looks clean and modern, but try rendering ten million points on a map and your browser will crash. In this episode, we stress-test geographic data formats — where GeoJSON's text-based design collapses at scale, why KMZ still dominates for styled field surveys and time-animated data, and what you lose every time you convert between them. We cover the real-world performance ceiling of each format, the workaround that breaks the spec but keeps workflows alive, and why the conversion pipeline

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24:53

Inside the SIGINT Pipeline: How Mossad Tips Actually...

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

When you read a headline about Mossad tipping off German police to foil a terror plot, what’s actually happening behind the scenes? This episode traces the complete signals intelligence pipeline — from bulk collection at fiber optic taps through automated filtering and human analysis to the final shared report that lands on a foreign police desk. We examine the Five Eyes model as the gold standard of institutionalized intelligence sharing, then use the Israel-specific case as a stress test of

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22:22

The Hidden Worlds We Build From Stuffed Animals and...

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

From Pinocchio's yearning to become real to Toy Story's panic when Andy comes home, we've been building hidden worlds for over a century. This episode traces the evolution of a genre where toys freeze when humans enter the room, babies speak sophisticated languages behind their babble, and pets have elaborate social lives the moment the door closes. We explore what The Velveteen Rabbit, Thomas the Tank Engine, The Brave Little Toaster, and Baby Geniuses all share — and why these stories satisfy

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21:06

How to Become Uncle Colm McCool

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

What happens when you take a fictional Northern Irish character and treat him as a serious textbook for social technique? This episode answers a listener's brilliant question: how do you become Uncle Colm McCool from Derry Girls? We break down five specific, learnable storytelling techniques — the False Start, Gratuitous Specificity, Leveling, the Correction Loop, and Audience Obliviousness — that transform ordinary conversation into an endless, monotonous monologue. We analyze the dead priest story

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25:01

What's Actually Behind the API Endpoint?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

Most developers treat the API endpoint as a magic curtain — send a request, get a response, and everything in between is someone else's problem. But at the scale of OpenAI or Anthropic, that "in between" is a distributed system in its own right. This episode explores the tiered routing architecture behind public-facing APIs: global load balancers at the edge, Envoy proxy in the gateway layer, and internal service meshes routing to inference servers. We break down how Envoy's xDS APIs enable dynamic

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28:03

The F-35 Export Dilemma: Trust, Tech, and Tethering

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

When Turkey bought Russian S-400 missiles, the U.S. expelled it from the F-35 program — not as a political punishment, but because the radar could map the jet's stealth signature over time. This episode unpacks the impossible math of selling weapons so advanced they could be used against you. From Israel's unprecedented access to the F-35's source code to the UAE deal frozen by shifting administrations, we explore how the U.S. balances billions in export revenue against the nightmare scenario of a

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23:09

The Missing Protocol for AI Software Development

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

After an exhaustive survey in July 2026, the answer is clear: nobody has built a software development protocol designed from the ground up for AI agents. Not for spec definition, task decomposition, execution tracking, or agent-to-agent handoff. Markdown is still the state of practice, and agents routinely misparse task state from checkbox characters. This episode walks through the five candidate primitives for such a protocol, debates which one is actually load-bearing, and wrestles with the

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22:25

What a Log Scale Actually Does to Your Sensor Data

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

Ever flipped a sensor graph to logarithmic scale and wondered what's really happening under the hood? This episode unpacks the surprisingly straightforward mechanics of log scales — from variance stabilization to the four hard failure modes that will wreck your analysis. Learn why a log scale isn't a smoothing tool (it's a ruler swap), how it reveals proportional noise, and when it's actively working against you. We cover concrete Home Assistant examples like greenhouse temperature sensors, light

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27:49

How Zoxide's Decay Algorithm Works

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

What makes zoxide's directory jumping feel so intuitive? It's not magic — it's an exponential decay function baked into a single line of Rust code. This episode breaks down the actual formula from zoxide's source, explains how recency and frequency combine to produce adaptive rankings, and explores where the same mathematical pattern shows up in radioactive decay, drug metabolism, and time series forecasting. If you've ever wondered how tools learn your habits without hard rules, this is the episode

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32:28

Free Your Shopping Cart: Dot Cart Explained

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

Shopping carts are trapped in browser sessions — clear your cookies and your carefully assembled BOM vanishes. A new open file format called dot cart aims to fix that. It's a JSON-based, vendor-neutral standard for ecommerce carts that supports export, import, comparison, and document generation. We dig into how it works, what it unlocks for procurement, and whether lightweight formats can succeed where heavyweight standards couldn't.

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32:20

True Crime Docuseries That Don't Earn Their Runtime

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

We break down the worst offenders in documentary padding — series that take compelling stories and stretch them across episodes they don't deserve. From Netflix to HBO, we name names and call out the specific techniques: recycled re-enactments, three-minute recaps, aerial drone shots doing narrative work the script couldn't manage, and talking heads repeating the same information across multiple episodes. This isn't about quality — some of these are well-made. It's about the ratio of runtime to

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33:09

Building a $120 Porch Monitor for Construction Noise

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

When Daniel realized he'd be leaving town just as a construction site next door began drilling into rock, he didn't settle for secondhand reports. Instead, he designed a complete weatherproofed porch sensor system that reports decibel levels, particulate counts, and vibration data directly into Home Assistant. This episode walks through the entire build: the ESP32-based brain, the digital MEMS microphone that delivers lab-adjacent accuracy for under $4, the dust sensor that duty-cycles its laser to

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28:23

3D File Formats: What Survives Conversion

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/07/25

Every 3D project hits the wall of format fragmentation eventually. This episode breaks down the landscape by use case: glTF for web delivery, FBX for game engine interchange, USD for film pipelines, STL for 3D printing, and the dozen other formats you'll encounter. More importantly, we trace what silently gets dropped in every conversion — rigs, animation, PBR maps, scene hierarchy — and build a practical decision guide for choosing the right export format based on what you're building.

en-us

2,233 results

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