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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

18:55

The Night the Temple Courtyard Glowed

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

Every Sukkot, the Temple courtyard filled with towering lamps, torch dances, and all-night music. But what does the earliest source actually claim — and where do the juggling rabbis and impossible light come from? This episode reads Mishnah Sukkah chapter five line by line, tracking how the description of Simchat Beit HaShoeva grows louder with each layer of tradition. We separate the terse, concrete Mishnah from the Tosefta's expansions and the Bavli's acrobatics, flag the round numbers historians

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16:25

Why Screen Protectors Bubble Every Time

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

Almost everyone has tried to install a tempered glass screen protector, and almost everyone has ended up with bubbles. The frustrating part is that it looks trivial — a flat sheet of glass on a flat sheet of glass — yet it defeats a huge fraction of the population. This episode digs into why. The answer turns out to be a dust-management problem wearing a glass costume: pressure-sensitive adhesive only microns thick, an oleophobic coating actively resisting the bond, and humidity trapping water that

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21:17

When Your Toddler Swallows a Screw

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

A fifteen-month-old, a flat-pack wardrobe, and a screw that went missing — that's the scenario a listener wrote in about, and it turns out the answer splits in a way most parents never expect. A screw is a sharp object and gets you to the ER. A small smooth washer gets you a chair and a three-day wait. This episode walks through the actual pediatric foreign-body protocol: the swallow test, the size thresholds, the stool-check guidance, and why emetics, laxatives, and the old meat-tenderizer remedy

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24:02

How Emoji Went From 176 Characters to 3,600

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

Emoji didn't start as decoration. In 1999, NTT DoCoMo's Shigetaka Kurita built 176 tiny pictures to carry tone that plain text on a tiny screen couldn't — and named them "picture characters," not after the English word emotion. This episode traces the whole arc: carrier incompatibility, the Unicode Consortium's standardization starting in 2010, the two-to-three-year proposal pipeline, and why the same code point renders as a prayer on one platform and a high five on another. Then it gets practical:

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25:48

Why Your Spreadsheet Mangles José's Name

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

Ever opened a UTF-8 CSV in Excel and watched José turn into "JosÃ©"? That garbled text is called mojibake, and it's the visible symptom of a character set mismatch hiding beneath every keyboard layout, font, and file format you touch. This episode unpacks the three layers people constantly collapse into one — code points, encodings, and graphemes — and shows why the encoding layer being wrong poisons everything above it. From ASCII's 1963 origins and UTF-8's genius backward compatibility, to the

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23:13

Why Hebrew URLs Turn Into Percent-Sign Gibberish

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

A listener noticed something odd: Hebrew in a URL's domain renders beautifully in the address bar, but Hebrew in the path collapses into six lines of percent-sign hex. It turns out the domain and the path are governed by two completely separate internationalization regimes — IDN and Punycode on one side, IRI and percent-encoding on the other — and only one of them comes with a display mandate. This episode traces why the path stayed ugly, from the 2002 homograph attack paper out of the Technion to

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22:52

Fine-Tuning Parakeet for Hebrew and Your Own Jargon

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

Daniel runs NVIDIA's Parakeet V2 on Android for dictation and wants two things: a Hebrew fine-tune, and a personal-vocabulary tune to catch tech jargon and Hebrew loanwords like "makolet." We dig into what Parakeet actually is under the hood — FastConformer encoders with CTC, RNN-T, and TDT decoders, shipped through NVIDIA NeMo — and why its transducer architecture sidesteps the hallucination loops Whisper is famous for. Then we separate the two questions: personal vocabulary turns out to have a

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25:02

When Governments Own the Pipes: Telecom's Open-Access...

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

What if the government owned every fiber line and cell tower, and every carrier simply rented space on the state's pipes? This week we dig into a listener's provocative proposal to centralize physical telecom infrastructure while keeping the retail market fully competitive. We trace the idea back to its real name — open-access networks — and examine the three-layer model that forbids the infrastructure owner from selling services at all. From Israel's regulated unbundling to New Zealand's structural

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22:49

One Network: Israel's Deregulation and the Case for...

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

Israel's 2009 telecom reforms forced incumbents to host virtual operators and cut mobile prices by 60–80%. So why not go further — one physical network owned by the state, with every retail provider renting equal access? This episode unpacks that proposal, then tests it against real examples: Liechtenstein's LKW, Singapore's NetLink Trust, Ireland's SIRO, Italy's FiberCop and Open Fiber. The key distinction turns out to be wholesale-only versus state-as-retailer — and almost no country runs the

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26:16

When AI Edits Your Words: The Off Switch Problem

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

Daniel built an AI agent to lightly edit his podcast prompts, and it works. So why does he keep turning it off? This episode digs into the measurable mechanics of AI over-editing — from a 2026 coding-model study showing reasoning models rewrite more by default, to brevity bias and context collapse that erode a prompt across iterations. We walk through the draft system prompt in full, find the broken worked example hiding inside it, and map three production patterns that fix the problem: surgical

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25:54

Small Models, Big Guardrails: PII Detection in ChatGPT

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

When ChatGPT asks you to approve a tool call, something has already scanned the outgoing data for usernames, addresses, and other PII — and that something is probably a small language model. This episode digs into the "guardian" class of compact models doing narrow, high-volume security work: PII-Tracer, OpenAI Privacy Filter, GLiNER2-PII, and the consistency problem that makes partial detection worse than it looks. We also untangle a name that doesn't exist, and explain why character-level

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25:31

Writing a Personal Instruction for ChatGPT

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

Most advice about custom instructions says make them longer. The evidence says the opposite: a leaner prompt can be functionally equivalent, four and a half times cheaper, and faster to first token — because every added rule dilutes the attention paid to the others. This episode takes apart a real listener's general-purpose ChatGPT instruction line by line, separating what earns its tokens from what the memory layer already handles, and explains why the rules you write should pass one test: can the

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21:05

Why Number Porting Takes 30 Minutes

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

Mobile number porting is a legally mandated right, standardized by 3GPP and enforced in Israel since the mid-2000s. The consumer version is one sentence: disconnect the old SIM and wait thirty minutes. The technical version is a signalling relay, a portability database, and a synchronization problem that has nothing to do with routing speed. We trace what actually happens when a number moves between networks — and what happens when the move never completes. Along the way: the 2012 arrival of Golan

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21:03

When AI Hands Out Your Phone Number

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

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 doxxing" — the documented cases where Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok surfaced real people's phone numbers — and the uncomfortable mechanics underneath. We trace how a number gets into training data, why one mention is enough, and what labs can actually do about it. The answer, it turns out, is filtering: a bouncer at the door, not a deletion. If

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19:49

Who Owns the Antennas? Israel's MVNO Puzzle

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

Israel deregulated its mobile market to multiply competitors, but the antennas collapsed into two shared networks — PHI and S-Plus — and virtual operators aren't required to disclose which one they ride. A listener's phone migration saga raises two questions: can you detect the host network from the outside, and do MVNO subscribers get the same service as direct ones? This episode walks through the MCC/MNC registry, the PLMN broadcast trick, crowd-sourced cell maps, and why identical radio links can

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21:25

When Login Systems Lock Out Their Own Users

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/23

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 switched phone number left him permanently locked out of his Israel Post account, because changing the number required authenticating with the old one. This episode unpacks why these lockouts aren't bugs but failures of imagination, tracing the problem through happy-path testing, dissolved QA teams, and decades of accumulated identity code. It

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20:59

Why Tardive Dyskinesia Becomes Permanent

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/22

Tardive dyskinesia affects roughly 20-25% of patients on long-term dopamine-blocking drugs, yet the mechanism behind its permanence is still debated. This episode digs into D2 receptor supersensitivity, the maladaptive synaptic plasticity theory, and why removing the drug often doesn't remove the movement. Then we get into the numbers: how much have second-generation antipsychotics actually reduced incidence, and why the total case count may be rising even as the rate falls. A grounded look at a

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24:23

The Kindle Refund Trick and the Return Policy Arms Race

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/22

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 refund fraud. We trace the spectrum from a single grape at a date stall — governed by nothing but eye contact and shame — to the woman who returned over a hundred Kindle books while reading every one of them, and the wardrobers, home-stagers, and gift-card fraud crews that pushed retailers to fight back. It's a story about what happens when you

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18:26

Can Anyone Scan a QR Code From a Landing Plane?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/22

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 path into the airport. We take the idea seriously enough to ask the obvious questions: can a passenger actually scan a code while landing, what are the legal limits around airports and highways, and where does physical advertising in extraordinary places actually pay off? Along the way we get into QR code sizing math, motion blur at a hundred

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26:08

Your News Feed Is Filtering for Failure

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/09/22

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 that filters for failure. This episode unpacks why every individual story can be true while the composite is a lie, what constructive journalism actually means (it isn't positive news), and how the ad model itself shapes what you're allowed to see. Then we map real tools to three distinct needs: a fire hose of weird global stories, hopeful

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2,651 results

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