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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

20:37

Amy, Presto, and the Thousand Workers Behind "AI

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

We pull back the curtain on "fauxtomation" — products sold as autonomous AI where humans are quietly doing the intelligent work. Starting with X.AI's Amy, the scheduling assistant that fooled Silicon Valley, and Remotasks, the data labeling platform where workers earn pennies teaching models to see. Then Presto, the drive-thru voice agent whose human operators were reportedly told not to say "um" so they'd sound more like a machine. And the most absurd case of all: Amazon's Just Walk Out, the

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19:31

Who's Actually Behind the AI? Fauxtomation Explained

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

When Amazon launched Just Walk Out, the pitch was computer vision at scale. The reality: roughly a thousand workers in India manually reviewing transactions. This episode digs into "fauxtomation" — technology marketed as automation that secretly runs on human labor — from Google Duplex to Facebook M to a logistics startup whose "AI" was a satellite office typing fields into a database by hand. We explore why companies misrepresent manual work as automation, how the Wizard of Oz prototype differs

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21:47

When "AI" Was Just Someone at a Desk

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

A comedy sketch about a "Waze call center" turns out to be less absurd than it looks. This episode traces fauxtomation — automation that isn't automation — from Amazon Go's thousand human reviewers to Facebook M, Expensify's SmartScan, Uber's safety drivers, and Taco Bell's drive-through AI. We dig into the economics that make the deception profitable, why the labor stays offshore and invisible, and what Amazon's own Mechanical Turk — "artificial artificial intelligence," named after a fake chess

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22:34

Chaining Small Models for Voice Cleanup

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Daniel's phone-based voice pipeline has the transcription part solved — it's the cleanup that falls apart. Dates render as "nineteen eighty-four," paragraphs have no boundaries, and self-corrections like "wait, I meant grapes" sit in the text as content. His instinct is to chain six or seven small models, each doing one narrow job. But every stage multiplies the error rate, and the destructive stages — like instruction scrubbing — can silently delete a user's words. This episode works through the

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22:31

Teaching a Small Model to Stop Spelling Out Numbers

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Dictation pipelines break on numbers, not hard words. This episode digs into inverse text normalization (ITN) — the post-processing step that turns spoken forms into written ones — and why the standard solution isn't a generative LLM at all. We walk through two competing approaches to generating training pairs (LLM teachers vs. rule-based rewrite engines), why NVIDIA's production tagger is a token classifier rather than a seq2seq generator, and what that architectural choice means for hallucination

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25:30

Six Colors, One Hospital Corridor

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

When a child's chest infection sent a family through the winding corridors of Shaarei Zedek Medical Center, the instruction on the chart was simple: follow the purple corridor. That single design choice opens up a much bigger question — how do hospitals, airports, and other high-stakes spaces use color, iconography, and progressive disclosure to guide people who are stressed, multilingual, and overwhelmed? Drawing on wayfinding research, a 30-nation study of color and emotion, and real hospital case

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22:09

Why Waze Sends You Into a Jerusalem Alley

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Daniel drives in Jerusalem and trusts the blue line — until it puts him nose to nose with a delivery truck in an alley built for one car. His question: how does a routing app actually work under the hood? This episode unpacks the three layers behind every route you've ever taken: the static map, the routing engine, and the live conditions layer on top. Along the way: why a map is really a graph, how Contraction Hierarchies compress a country's road network into a skeleton your phone can search in

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21:21

Fine-Tuning a Model on 100 Hand-Edited Answers

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Most coverage of personal fine-tuning leads with the same line: tens of thousands of examples, a rack of GPUs, a research team. That story is mostly wrong. For a stylistic fine-tune — changing tone, personality, and response structure — the numbers are comically small by comparison. This episode walks through the full pipeline: how many hand-edited prompt-response pairs you actually need (somewhere between 100 and 1,000, with the first hundred doing most of the work), where the initial drafts come

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30:08

Building Agents You Can Actually Move

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Everyone says they want agents they can move between clouds, laptops, and providers — until they try. The code moves fine. The memory doesn't. This episode digs into why an agent is only as portable as its least portable part, how vector stores quietly become the system of record, and the difference between vendor lock-in and the subtler technological kind. Then we get practical: what a portability-first architecture looks like, why keeping raw text alongside embeddings isn't wasteful duplication,

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21:08

The Software Behind Urgent Care Triage

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Daniel watched an urgent care tech work a triage screen — massive buttons, color coding, emoji condition indicators, and prompts like "order IV." That's not the EHR. It's a clinical decision support layer, and the biggest name in the space is Schmitt-Thompson, standardized triage protocols used by over a thousand organizations. This episode breaks down what's actually running: rule-based decision trees, Holliday-Segar dosage math, CPOE order routing, and where AI actually shows up — risk scores like

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31:24

Chaining Small Models for Dictation Cleanup

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

A listener running a Futo voice input fork on Android wants to chain a custom small model after his ASR and punctuation stages to fix number normalization, punctuation, and paragraph breaks. But number normalization, punctuation restoration, and paragraph segmentation aren't one task — they're three tasks with different shapes, different data requirements, and different latency costs. This episode works through the whole design space: multi-stage pipelines versus single purpose-built models like

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25:00

Hugging Face vs Kaggle: Where Models Actually Live

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Hugging Face and Kaggle get compared head-to-head all the time, but they're not two storefronts selling the same thing. Hugging Face is Git-backed infrastructure where models, datasets, and Spaces are versioned artifacts that plug into real training and deployment pipelines. Kaggle is a practice field — free browser notebooks, leaderboards, medals, and a competitive social layer built for learning and competition. This episode traces the structural differences, from chunk-level deduplication to why

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26:53

Android's Split Keyboard and Voice Input Problem

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Android's architecture treats your keyboard and your speech recognition engine as two independent system services — you can set each one separately. But most keyboards bundle their own speech-to-text and route the mic button straight to it, bypassing your system default entirely. This episode digs into the gap between what Android was designed to do and what the apps on top of it actually let you do, with concrete examples from HeliBoard and FUTO's voice input project.Episode #326639 — open it

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23:44

Who Decides What Your Keyboard Knows?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

HeliBoard ships with zero dictionaries — you download a .dict file yourself, and that file may date to October 2014. This episode digs into the open-source dictionary stack: ESDB/SCOWL for English, Hunspell across Europe, and the AOSP dictionaries repo aggregating both for Android, each maintained by different people on different schedules. We contrast that with Gboard's federated analytics, which discovers new words on-device through character-level votes without ever seeing what you typed, and

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22:27

Morse Code Between Two Phones: Does It Actually Work?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

You need to get a message across a room with two phones and no network. Morse code over audio is the oldest trick in the book — and the most likely to actually work. This episode digs into what's really available on F-Droid, why the pretty translator app can't hear you back, and which decoder actually does the job. Then we get into the physics: why echoes, not background noise, are the thing that breaks indoor decoding, how Morse timing works at 5 versus 20 words per minute, and where the speaker

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30:05

Android's Hidden Voice Input Split

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Android has always treated keyboards and speech-to-text as two separate services — you can set a default IME and a default voice input provider independently. But Gboard, SwiftKey, and most mainstream keyboards bundle their own speech recognition and wire the microphone button straight to their own cloud backend, silently bypassing whatever speech provider you configured. This episode breaks down the real architecture behind Android voice input: what an IME actually is, how speech providers register

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27:53

Android ASR Runtimes: LiteRT, ExecuTorch, and Why...

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

You download a model from Hugging Face, but you're not downloading something that runs — you're downloading weights. Something has to map every operator onto your phone's silicon, and on Android that layer is fragmented across LiteRT, ONNX Runtime Mobile, ExecuTorch, and llama.cpp. This episode digs into why there's no VRAM equivalent on a phone, what a TPU actually changes, and how to find an ASR model on Hugging Face that won't crash your device. Plus: practical tips on tags, quantization,

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25:20

Android's Open Core, Closed Governance

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Android is open source — except for the parts that matter. This episode digs into the gap between what AOSP promises and what developers actually experience when Google shifts the platform underneath them. From scoped storage to the sideloading verification backlash that rattled F-Droid, we trace how the core gets built, who gets consulted (spoiler: mostly large teams), and why a two-person app studio can lose everything in 48 hours. We also look at the OEM layer — Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi — and the

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24:32

10 Commercial Gear Upgrades for Your Home

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Commercial and industrial equipment is built for a different buyer: one who runs it sixteen hours a day for a decade and repairs rather than replaces. That single difference in duty cycle explains why a $699 commercial washer can outlast a $499 consumer one four times over. But the real filter for home use isn't price — it's your electrical panel. This episode ranks ten consumer categories where the commercial equivalent is worth chasing, from Hobart undercounter dishwashers and Wascomat

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25:29

What Hotels Know About Laundry Machines

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/20

Daniel wants to know if there's an entry-level industrial laundry machine you could plausibly put in an apartment. The answer is yes and no — and the no is more interesting. This episode maps the three tiers of laundry equipment, from domestic machines to commercial washer-extractors to industrial units running 24/7, and explains what actually separates them: G-force extraction, hardmount versus softmount installation, and the physical infrastructure that decides whether commercial equipment can

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2,652 results

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