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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

25:43

What Customs Officers Actually Read at the Booth

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

A foreign national and a US citizen walk up to the same customs booth, married to each other, and experience two entirely different events. This episode digs into the asymmetry underneath: what a refusal to answer actually costs each of them, and what the evidence says about how officers read demeanor. The best study on the subject is from 1980, and it has never been improved on — inspectors who were worse than a coin flip at spotting smugglers, yet agreed with each other almost perfectly. Six

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26:53

Atlas Obscura: 33,000 Hidden Places and a Boardroom Coup

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

Atlas Obscura started as an anonymous blog about a 17th-century Jesuit polymath and grew into a catalogue of 33,000 of the world's strangest places — from a rotating circle of plants in Argentina to a boiling river 400 miles from the nearest volcano. In 2025, it posted its first annual profit after sixteen years of losses, and the same year, its two co-founders were voted off the board. This episode traces the whole arc: the Airbnb-led Series B, the Gastro Obscura food vertical, the Obscura Day

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29:49

Counting Every Letter: Ancient Text Integrity Systems

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

The Masoretes counted every letter in the Torah — then counted again, recording totals in the margins so a scribe a thousand years later could verify his work against a number he had no authority to change. This episode explores how ancient traditions solved the same problem modern storage engineers face: catching copying errors, dropped lines, and slow corruption across generations of copies. From positional checksums (the middle letter of each book) to the Kethiv-Qere system that flagged

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25:48

What Do You Call the Urge to Know Obscure Things?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

Daniel watches Tom Scott and Yes Theory, but it's not the famous places that hook him — it's the obscure island, the strange border, the overlooked piece of infrastructure. Is that one disposition or four unrelated hobbies? And if it's one thing, does it have a name, a lineage, and living practitioners? The short answer is that there's no settled name, and the reason there isn't one turns out to be more interesting than the name would be. The vocabulary exists — epistemic curiosity, epistemophilia,

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24:42

Dead Man's Switches: Alerts vs. Final Notices

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

What do a train pedal, a WiFi sensor that reads your breathing through a wall, and a service that emails your loved ones sixty days after your last check-in have in common? They're all dead man's switches — systems that trigger not on death, but on the absence of a signal. This episode traces the mechanism from its mechanical origins (including the 2003 Waterfall train disaster that forced a redesign) through the two families it split into: emergency alert devices like Halo Home and Silvie, which

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20:08

When GLP-1s Silence Hunger Cues

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

One in eight American adults is on a GLP-1, and the drugs do physiologically much of what anorexia does — muting hunger signals at the level of the brainstem. New survey data in JAMA Psychiatry finds GLP-1 use and misuse running far higher among people with eating disorders than in the general population, while FDA labels list no eating disorder warning and a secret-shopper study found telehealth vendors shipping the medication with no clinician interaction at all. This episode works through the

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26:07

When Your GPS Is Lying: Aviation's Spoofing Problem

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

Aircraft are being fed counterfeit satellite signals that produce a confident, wrong position — with no red lights, no master caution, and no checklist. This episode unpacks the difference between jamming and spoofing, the hybrid IRS trap on the 787 and G650, and the manual alignment trick crews use at Larnaca, Tel Aviv, and Beirut. From the Vilnius aborts at 850 feet to FlySafe's finding that the Middle East accounts for over 68% of global GNSS interference events, we trace how a timing system

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23:17

Managed vs Layer 3: Two Switch Axes, One Empty Box

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

When you go shopping for a switch, the shelves hand you two vocabularies at once: managed versus unmanaged, and Layer 2 versus Layer 3. They sound related. They aren't. Managed describes whether you can configure the box; Layer 2 versus Layer 3 describes what the box is allowed to decide. Build the four-quadrant matrix and something surprising falls out — one of the four combinations is essentially a ghost. This episode walks the axes, populates all four boxes, explains why a Layer 3 unmanaged

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24:20

Serving Your Own Fine-Tuned Model in the Cloud

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

You've fine-tuned an open-weight model like DeepSeek and now you need to serve it behind an API. This episode walks through the two main patterns — dedicated GPU hosting with weights loaded on an always-on instance, and serverless GPU inference where you pay for compute consumed — and untangles the three very different things "serverless GPU" actually means. We cover which platforms let you bring your own weights (RunPod, SageMaker, Modal, Baseten, Replicate, Fireworks, Cerebrium), what the LoRA

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29:06

Printing Files on Paper That Outlasts the Software

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

What if you could archive a file by printing it on paper? Optar and PaperBack encode arbitrary binary data as dense dot patterns on A4 sheets — no drive, no power, no cloud account required. This episode digs into how the encoding actually works, from Golay error correction borrowed from the Voyager probes to Reed-Solomon blocks, and what happens when you fold the page twice, carry it in a pocket, and scan it back. Then the hard numbers: kilobytes per page, the gap between a printer's claimed 600

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20:09

Punched Cards: The 200-Year Reign of Cardboard Computing

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

Long before magnetic disks and SSDs, the world ran on holes punched in cardboard. This episode traces the full arc: Joseph Marie Jacquard's 1801 loom cards, Herman Hollerith's census machines, the rise of IBM as a punched card company, and the 1928 business decision that created computing's first proprietary format. We dig into the actual encoding — the 80-column card, zone punches, the six-bit BCD codes that became EBCDIC — and the keypunch tradeoffs that made the fastest data entry machine also

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25:58

LTFS Explained: Tape That Acts Like a Disk

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

LTFS turns LTO tape into something that browses like a disk, using a clever two-partition trick and a plain-XML index. But the physics of tape never went away: append-only writes, unreclaimable deletes, and a random seek measured at around 37 seconds. This episode walks through what LTFS actually is under the hood, then asks the practical question — if you had hundreds of terabytes of PDFs to make searchable, how would you build it? Disk caching, tape libraries, and hierarchical storage management

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24:36

The Thread That Outlived Its Authors

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

In April 1997, Martin Schulze filed a wishlist bug against dpkg. In October 2021, Glenn Washburn quoted the entire original message and seconded it. That 24-year gap is the doorway into a bigger question: what happens when an email thread outlives the people who started it? This episode digs into the Debian bug tracker, the 39-year Traveller Mailing List archive, and the Cypherpunks archives, then pulls apart the machinery that holds threads together — Message-ID, In-Reply-To, and References —

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25:41

Why Voices Sound Good in Some Rooms and Not Others

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

Some voices make you settle in for an hour; others make your thumb twitch toward skip before the first sentence ends. Voices aren't just being found anymore — they're being designed to spec, and that changes the question from "which voices are pleasant" to "pleasant for what." This episode digs into the acoustics research behind voice appeal: spectral tilt and what engineers call presence, the vocal fold mechanics that separate trained radio voices from the rest of us, and a large-scale audiobook

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24:16

Herod's Four Walls: Why Only One Became the Kotel

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

Herod's retaining walls went up as one project, fifteen feet thick, and they're still standing. So why did only the Western Wall become the Kotel? We walk all four sides of the Temple Mount platform — the Iron Age stones in the Eastern Wall, the monumental pilgrim steps along the Southern Wall, the Northern Wall that's now buried inside Mamluk buildings — and then dig into the surprising religious history: a possible case of mistaken identity in the Midrash, a sixteenth-century earthquake, and a

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21:30

Why Soap Operas Never End

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

Coronation Street debuted in 1960 to reviews predicting it would last three weeks. It has since aired nearly 12,000 episodes. Guiding Light ran for 72 years across radio and television. Unser Sandmännchen has produced over 22,000 episodes — more than anything else in television history. This episode counts the episodes, traces how a single Australian format traveled through the Netherlands into Germany, and asks the question underneath the numbers: what does a show that never owes you a conclusion

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27:09

Building Herod's Wall, One Course at a Time

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/10

The Western Wall is usually encountered as a place of prayer. This episode treats it as a construction site. Working from a listener's spec-sheet request, we walk through the material, the quarrying, the transport and the lifting of Herod the Great's 488-metre retaining wall — 19 metres of exposed height, 45 courses, blocks weighing hundreds of tonnes. The stone dictated the module: local meleke limestone with horizontal bedding planes eighteen inches to five feet thick meant the course heights were

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21:46

Who Remembers Where You Left Off?

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/09

Daniel asked whether playback progress, completion status, and listening history are reusable components or something every media app rebuilds from scratch. The answer sits somewhere uncomfortable: mpv bundles a real resume feature (quit-watch-later, save-position-on-quit, flat watch-later config files), but it's locked inside the player. Media3 and ExoPlayer hand you an event stream, a position, and a maintainer telling you to persist it yourself — in Room, Android's SQLite layer, which knows

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24:06

How Python Became AI's Default Language

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/09

Python has no scientific data structures at its core — no arrays, no matrices — yet it leads AI development at 58% adoption. This episode traces the unlikely path: a 1995 mailing list post that seeded NumPy, a 2005 MATLAB licensing change that pushed research institutes toward Python, and a NIPS workshop where the scientific community converged on one toolchain. Then the AI boom arrived and changed who was showing up. We dig into the packaging chaos newcomers inherit — distutils, pip, conda, Poetry,

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20:17

One Number, Every Hard Question: Agent Session State

My Weird Prompts ·

2026/10/09

Daniel wants a Telegram bot that tracks AliExpress cart totals and pings him when the cart crosses the free-shipping line to Israel. The number is trivial. The state architecture around it is not. This episode works through where an agent session begins and ends, why a stateless model needs a runtime notebook, what happens when you leave a session open across order cycles, and whether a database is overkill for a memory that holds a single number. Along the way: the Chroma study on context length

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2,716 results

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