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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

28:51

How to Make Mead: Ancient Honey Wine's Revival

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Mead — the ancient honey wine of Vikings, Polish nobility, and Ethiopian tej houses — predates the wheel and may be humanity's first alcoholic beverage. In this episode, we trace mead's 9,000-year history from Neolithic China to modern craft meaderies, explore why it survived in Poland and Ethiopia while vanishing elsewhere, and give you a practical step-by-step guide to homebrewing your own batch. Whether you're a fermentation beginner or a curious history buff, learn why mead is one of the easiest

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37:01

Off-Broadway vs Broadway: Seat Counts & Show Economics

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Most people think "off-Broadway" just means edgier, smaller theater. But the real definition is legal and contractual: it's about how many seats are in the house. In this episode, we break down the three-tier system—Broadway (500+ seats), off-Broadway (100-499 seats), and off-off-Broadway (under 100 seats)—and what each means for actors, writers, and audiences. We explore New York's two major off-Broadway clusters: Theatre Row on 42nd Street and the East Village/Lower East Side corridor. We also map

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32:53

How Background Removal Actually Works (and Why It...

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

When you click "remove background," you're not just subtracting a color — you're invoking a cascade of machine learning models that have learned what objects look like. This episode unpacks the U²-Net architecture, the shift from chroma keying to semantic understanding, and why background removal is a critical step for training LoRAs. We also explore a surprising parallel: the evolution of puppetry from hidden puppeteers to visible craft, and what that teaches us about transparency in AI art.

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28:13

Marconi vs. the Cable Builders: Who Really Built the...

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Did the internet's true ancestors stand on a windswept Cape Cod cliff, or lie coiled on the ocean floor? This episode digs into the history of the South Wellfleet Marconi station — the site of the first wireless message from a U.S. president to a European monarch — and pits Marconi's wireless vision against Cyrus Field's undersea telegraph cables. We explore the engineering, the storms, the collapsing cliffs, and the surprising continuity between 19th-century gutta-percha cables and today's fiber

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23:30

Four Corners: The Center of the Universe

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

What makes a simple intersection worthy of being called "the center of the universe"? Herman makes the case that Four Corners in Storrs, Connecticut — the crossroads of Route 195 and Route 275 — is far more than a traffic junction. From its origins as a post road stopping point and the site of the Storrs brothers' general store, to its role as the gateway to the University of Connecticut, this intersection has been the commercial and social anchor of the village for over two centuries. Today, Hops

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30:19

The Bachelor Brothers Who Built a University

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

In 1881, two bachelor brothers named Charles and Augustus Storrs donated 170 acres of family farmland and $5,000 to start an agricultural school in their struggling hometown of Mansfield, Connecticut. Their hometown had been devastated by the collapse of the local silk industry, and the brothers — successful New York merchants with no heirs — decided to bet on education. This episode traces the full arc: the Storrs family roots, the mercantile career in New York, the Morrill Act context, the

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27:15

Puppetry in America: From Vaudeville to Muppets

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Most people think of puppetry as either the Muppets or a creepy marionette. In this episode, we trace the full arc of American puppetry — from vaudeville and the WPA Federal Theatre puppet units through Jim Henson's soft-puppetry revolution, the art-puppetry boom of the nineties and two-thousands, and the institutional infrastructure that sustains it today. We explore UConn's Puppet Arts Program, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, the O'Neill National Puppetry Conference, and the Jim

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23:22

Silk Worms, Cows, and a Goat: Inside Mansfield’s History

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Mansfield, Connecticut, isn’t just the home of the University of Connecticut — it was once a frontier of the American silk industry. This episode traces the town’s evolution from a rocky farming settlement to the site of a speculative mulberry bubble, the rise of the Storrs brothers’ silk mill, and the founding of an agricultural school that grew into a major university. Along the way, we explore the tension between old Mansfield and the expanding campus, the pastoral relic of Horsebarn Hill, and

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28:45

AI Training Itself: Student, Teacher, and Grader

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

What happens when a large language model generates training examples for a smaller model, then also acts as the judge scoring those outputs? This episode explores the cutting edge of fully synthetic training pipelines — from Meta's self-rewarding language models to Microsoft's domain-specific small models. We break down the three ways this approach breaks (distribution collapse, hallucination amplification, and task drift), where human oversight remains non-negotiable, and the parameter sweet spot

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29:00

How to Catch an LLM's Bad Writing Habits

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Daniel asked a deceptively practical question: how do you systematically analyze a corpus of podcast transcripts to catch what a script-writing LLM overdoes — repeated words, stale jokes, dialogue patterns that need more variety? This episode walks through the full spectrum of techniques, from quick Python frequency counts with NLTK and spaCy to embedding-based clustering with sentence transformers and LLM-as-judge qualitative passes. Herman and Corn discuss when simple analysis is enough, when you

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33:25

Freelancing Without Getting Burned: Clients,...

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Most freelancing advice focuses on the work, not the business mechanics that determine whether you thrive or flame out. This episode tackles the practical, unglamorous stuff: the minimum viable client load (spoiler: it’s more than one), why a single client is a job without benefits, and the contract language that prevents scope creep, revision hell, and unpaid invoices. We break down deposit requirements, milestone payments, kill fees, and change order processes — the tools that separate sustainable

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41:13

The Art of the Brief: Writing What Busy People...

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Most people treat briefs as just shorter reports. They're not. A brief is a decision-support tool—meant to give a busy executive enough context to act without making them do the synthesis work themselves. In this episode, we unpack what actually makes a good brief good: answering what happened, why it matters, what's next, and what to do—all in the first hundred words. We explore where AI fits (the labor layer) and where it doesn't (the judgment layer), why AI can make the gap between mediocre and

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41:00

Async Communication: Tools, Norms, and AI Mediation

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

What does the full toolkit for asynchronous communication actually look like? This episode tackles the central tension of modern remote work: tools that can be synchronous or asynchronous depending on configuration, and organizational cultures that default to immediate response. We explore a two-axis decision framework for matching tools to urgency and complexity, examine the cultural challenge of enforcing async boundaries when clients treat every resource the same, and discuss the emerging role of

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35:23

Smart Locks & Networks: What Actually Works

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

After being burned by flaky Tuya Wi-Fi smart plugs, one listener asks: what's the right connectivity backbone for a serious smart home — and are smart locks trustworthy enough to stake your front door on? We break down the four main connectivity methods for smart locks (Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, Zigbee, Thread), why Z-Wave has real advantages for security-critical devices, and why the dream of a single unified smart home protocol might not be worth chasing. Plus: physical key overrides, retrofit installation

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36:55

How to Document Failures for Your AI Second Brain

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Daniel sent us a question about documenting failures in the age of agentic AI — and it turns out the answer is surprisingly concrete. We break down how Google's blameless postmortem culture, aviation after-action reviews, and startup retrospectives all converge on a single idea: structured failure documentation that both you and your AI agent can query. Learn the four-section personal retrospective template, why voice capture beats typing for emotionally charged incidents, and how vector databases

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39:34

Crafting Agendas That Actually Work (With AI)

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Most people confuse an agenda with a table of contents. In this episode, we break down the forgotten craft of meeting design—from Roger Schwarz’s HBR framework on labeling desired outcomes to the State Department’s diplomatic approach to agenda-as-negotiation. We then explore a practical AI workflow for solo contractors: dictate your raw thoughts once, and have an assistant generate three distinct outputs—personal prep notes, a sanitized circulated agenda, and a CRM entry. The key insight? AI can’t

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39:46

How Stenographers Type 300 Words Per Minute

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Court reporters aren’t just fast typists—they use a 22-key stenotype machine to chord entire syllables and words in a single stroke, hitting speeds over 300 words per minute. This episode explores how phonetic steno code works, the grueling 2-4 year training process (with an 85-90% dropout rate), and where these professionals work beyond courtrooms: live broadcast captioning, CART services for deaf students, congressional record-keeping, and even hobbyist communities like the Open Steno Project. We

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36:33

Who Takes Notes in the Situation Room?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Who are the people physically in the room during high-level government meetings, producing the records that end up before commissions of inquiry? This episode explores the hidden world of institutional note-takers — from the White House's Presidential Diarist (a career civil servant who logs the president's every movement) to Israel's Cabinet Secretary system and the UK's Cabinet Office Secretariat. We examine how note-takers' neutrality (or lack thereof) shapes historical records, why the

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33:47

Whiteboard to Clean Diagram with Nano Banana

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

This episode explores a breakthrough in AI image generation: Nano Banana's ability to treat text as geometric shapes rather than textures. We walk through the practical pipeline for turning whiteboard photos into clean, readable tech diagrams while preserving spatial layout. We also discuss training custom models for handwriting recognition and synthesis, and the ethical considerations around generating text in someone's personal handwriting style.

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38:13

Batch Inference Use Cases and Instructional AI in 2026

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/05/05

Most developers think of batch inference as just a way to get cheaper tokens. But the real value is in how it transforms AI workflows: data annotation, synthetic data generation, content transformation at scale, and LLM-as-judge evaluation pipelines. This episode explores the full range of batch inference use cases and tackles a critical question Daniel raised: why conversational models are often counterproductive for batch processing, and why instructional models may be the better fit. We also look

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2,236 results

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