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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

28:00

Project Sundial: Teller's 10-Gigaton Doomsday Proposal

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/09

In July 1954, Edward Teller walked into a meeting of the Atomic Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee and proposed the largest weapon ever conceived: Sundial, a 10,000-megaton bomb fused by a 1,000-megaton primary called Gnomon. Isidor Rabi called it an advertising stunt. Livermore kept working on it anyway, planning a prototype test during Operation Redwing in 1956 that never happened. This episode digs into what Sundial actually was, why the staged Teller-Ulam design put no theoretical

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29:05

How Many Nuclear Tests Have There Really Been?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/09

Since July 16, 1945, eight nations have detonated nuclear devices — but the official tally depends entirely on who's counting and what they've agreed to count. This episode digs into why the Arms Control Association says 2,056 tests, Wikipedia says 2,121, and SIPRI landed at 2,058, and how a single salvo of five warheads can be recorded as one line item. It also examines the detonations that never made the list at all: subcritical experiments that produce zero yield, the still-unconfirmed 1979 Vela

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22:27

900 Tonnes on Public Roads: The Weirdest Cargo Moves

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/09

What does it take to move a 900-tonne industrial vessel, a Space Shuttle orbiter, and a live elephant across ordinary public roads? This episode digs into the obscure logistics industry behind the world's strangest cargo movements — the axle-load physics that make them possible, the months of route surveys and utility crews, and the specialized haulers who've turned it into a career. From a 138-metre splitter crawling out of Tofield, Alberta at 4 a.m. to nine Asian elephants moved 40 kilometres over

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21:08

Digging Harbors with Nuclear Bombs: Project Plowshare

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/09

In 1957, the U.S. government launched Project Plowshare under the Atoms for Peace banner, betting that nuclear explosions could dig canals, carve highways, and unlock natural gas. Thirty-five devices and twenty-seven tests later, the program was quietly dead. This episode traces the optimism, the actual detonations — Sedan, Gnome, Gasbuggy, Rulison, Rio Blanco — and the human ledger of exposure that the program never escaped. Why did a program named after Isaiah's swords-into-plowshares prophecy

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25:13

Starfish Prime: When the US Nuked Space

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/09

On July 9, 1962, the United States launched a Thor rocket from Johnston Atoll and detonated a 1.4-megaton thermonuclear warhead 400 kilometers above the Pacific Ocean. The blast turned the sky green across the southern hemisphere, lit Royal New Zealand Air Force night patrols from 2,000 miles away, and knocked out streetlights in Honolulu. It also created artificial radiation belts that slowly destroyed satellites over the following months. This episode traces why the US decided to bomb the Van

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32:28

Little Boy: The Untested Bomb That Changed War

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/09

Little Boy was the least efficient nuclear weapon ever built, throwing away 98.5% of its fuel — and it was the one Los Alamos trusted without a full-scale test. This episode traces the strange engineering of the gun-type bomb, from the death of the plutonium Thin Man design to the 72-inch cannon barrel that became the world's first deployed atomic weapon. Then it follows the morning of August 6, 1945, from Tinian's runway to the detonation 1,968 feet above Hiroshima. And it confronts the harder

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27:10

Tsar Bomba: The 50-Megaton Test That Shook the World

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/09

On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated RDS-220 over the Arctic — a 50-megaton device the West called Tsar Bomba. It was built in just sixteen weeks, carried under a stripped-down bomber, and slowed by a parachute made from nylon hosiery fabric. This episode digs into why Khrushchev ordered a weapon with no military requirement, how Sakharov's last-minute tamper swap cut the fallout by 97%, and what the real numbers actually were — separating documented fact from decades of repetition. Part

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22:41

How to Become an Honorary Consul for a Tiny Nation

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/08

A retired management consultant in a Welsh village runs a country's consulate out of his house — because his wife is from Kiribati and the president asked him in 1996. That's the whole qualification. So can you engineer it on purpose? This episode walks the actual mechanism: the 1963 Vienna Convention's split between career and honorary consuls, why only the sending state can nominate, the receiving state's exequatur veto, and the U.S. geographic filter that means you don't pick a country — you pick

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28:54

Police Auditors: Rights, Rage, and the Camera

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/08

Self-described First Amendment auditors film police stations, town halls, and libraries, waiting for a uniformed reaction that becomes the video. Seven federal circuits recognize a right to film police in public — but that's not the absolutist shield many auditors claim, and the public forum doctrine changes everything inside a building. This episode traces the subculture from Diop Kamau's 1980s undercover audits to SeanPaul Reyes's million-subscriber channel, examines how departments like Santa

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19:18

Build First, Ask Later: Hermits Who Dug Cathedrals

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/08

A man in Hackney dug through his own floor for forty years, and kept going after the council moved him to the top of the building to stop him. A Colorado man took rocks out of a national forest for fifty years. Colin Furze built a hoverbike with no engineering qualifications and no flying experience — The Verge's headline was "Man builds working homemade hoverbike, doesn't die." This episode works through a listener's proposed taxonomy: the eccentrics pursued with dedication that makes no sense on

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23:41

What Is a Consulate That Isn't a Consulate?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/08

Israel ordered the British Consulate General in East Jerusalem closed after the UK banned imports from West Bank settlements. Twenty diplomats left, seven stayed, the plaque came down — and both governments are telling their publics they won. So what is the legal status of an office that is no longer an embassy, a consulate, or a consulate general? We walk through the 1961 and 1963 Vienna Conventions, the interests-section model invented during Rhodesia's 1965 UDI, and Israel's own decades-old

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25:08

Inside the Two Steel Industries

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/08

Roughly half the world's steel comes out of China, and the plants making it split into two almost unrelated industries: blast furnace ironmaking and electric arc recycling. That split explains why a mill in India looks nothing like a guided tour in Britain, why worker health outcomes vary by a factor of 77,500 between individual plants, and why sintering and blast furnaces pollute from completely different chimneys. This episode walks through the global production map, the documented health toll on

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22:00

Colgate, Harley, and Bic: Famous Brands' Forgotten Flops

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/08

Everyone knows the Colgate frozen lasagna story. Except the lasagna never existed — the box was a mock-up built by the Museum of Failure in 2017. What Colgate actually sold was dried chicken and crabmeat entrees, test-marketed in one Wisconsin city, and later a soybean snack pulled for causing flatulence. This episode digs into big brands' forgotten product disasters: Harley-Davidson's Black Fire cologne line, which ran for nearly a decade before being quietly shelved, and Bic Cristal for Her, the

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21:46

The Worst Mascots Ever Made

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/08

What actually makes a mascot fail? We count down ten of the worst ever released — cereal aisle nightmares, a pelican who needed cosmetic surgery before the season ended, and the Olympic blob that Atlanta picked single-handedly and then couldn't name. Along the way we work out the four ways a mascot goes wrong, why being ugly isn't one of them, and why Gritty proves the rule. Daniel asked for a laugh. He's getting a countdown.Key sources: • Wikipedia, Izzy (mascot) / Whatizit —

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32:16

Stack Overflow for Agents: SOFA's Trust Model

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/07

Stack Overflow for Agents (SOFA) is a beta knowledge exchange built for AI agents and their human operators — an attempt to close what its makers call the Ephemeral Intelligence Gap, where an agent burns compute re-solving a problem another agent already fixed. This episode walks through the actual mechanism: a skill file named "sofa," agent onboarding gated behind a human SSO claim, four post types (Questions, TILs, Blueprints, Playbooks), and a trust model that separates votes (read-time

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28:39

Who Actually Draws the Follow-Up Chips?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/07

When you finish a chat with an AI assistant, the little follow-up chips underneath look like the model thinking ahead. They're not. This episode walks the full pipeline: a separate, cheaper inference call fired after the main answer finishes, a schema-validated JSON array, a synthetic "puppet turn" smuggled into the prompt, and a UI-only data part that's stripped before the model ever sees it again. Then we turn to artifacts — documents, code blocks, spreadsheets — and why that's a completely

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27:00

Inside Private Grids That Run Themselves

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/07

Most people never think about the electrical network behind a hospital, airport, or remote mine — but those private grids already do everything a utility does, just behind a fence. This episode maps the spectrum from a campus that simply buys power at one meter to a fully islandable microgrid that generates, stores, and balances its own electricity. Along the way: point of common coupling, protection coordination, anti-islanding, seamless transfers, reverse power flow lessons from Hawaii's rooftop

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33:47

SNMP: The 40-Year-Old Stopgap Running Your Rack

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/07

Every rack has one: an SNMP checkbox nobody fully understands but everybody ticks. This episode opens up the protocol that quietly makes large-scale IT management possible — the agents, the managers, the MIB trees, the OID coordinates, and the traps that fire when a power supply dies at 3am. We trace SNMP from its origin as a deliberately temporary IETF stopgap (the "proper" OSI alternative never shipped) through the UDP design choices that still shape it today, and ask why such a wide range of

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29:36

Why You've Never Heard of Schneider Electric

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/07

Schneider Electric equipment is bolted to the wall of nearly every factory, office building, and data center you've ever walked through — and almost nobody outside the electrical trades can name the company. This episode traces the wire from the Square D breaker in a suburban basement all the way up to medium-voltage switchgear, Modicon PLCs, and the automatic transfer switches that keep data centers alive. Along the way: how a 19th-century French steel and armaments maker became an electrification

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23:44

What Does Siemens Actually Make?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/07

Siemens books more revenue than the GDP of a mid-sized country, yet most people couldn't say what it makes. This episode walks through a factory floor, a commercial building, a railway, and a national power grid to show where Siemens technology actually sits — and why it stays there for decades. We trace the four core businesses, the SIMATIC controllers and TIA Portal software that become a plant's institutional memory, the Desigo CC building platform that now earns money through demand response,

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2,743 results

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