My Weird Prompts

In 1971, Salvador Allende's government hired British cybernetician Stafford Beer to wire up Chile's newly nationalized economy. Project Cybersyn became famous for one photograph: seven white fibreglass chairs facing wall screens, in a hexagonal control room that looked like a starship. But the real system ran on telex machines, punched cards, and roughly 1,500 hand-drawn slides projected from behi...

A quarter of Israeli voters are asking chatbots who to vote for — and the chatbots don't agree with each other. This episode traces the most audacious real attempts to put AI into politics: a Russian voice assistant nominated for president, Denmark's Synthetic Party led by a chatbot trained on fringe platforms, a Wyoming mayoral candidate named VIC who got deplatformed by its own manufacturer mid-...

Israel's election begins twelve days early in Wellington, New Zealand, and the last box closes about thirty hours later in California. In between, 101 polling stations open in 99 diplomatic missions for an electorate of roughly 4,860 people — embassy staff, ministry representatives, military attachés, and their families. No ordinary Israeli living in Berlin can walk in and vote. This episode digs...

If you've outgrown n8n's canvas and want your workflows versioned in git with real observability, this episode maps the code-first workflow orchestrator field. Prefect is the closest match to a long-lived Python script runner — flows, tasks, workers, and a server you can self-host. Temporal offers durable execution where a workflow can sleep for thirty days and resume on the exact line. And Dagste...

Those tiny green and orange lights on your router, switch, and laptop dock are speaking a language — but every manufacturer speaks its own dialect. In this first Herman In Brief, we decode the basics: solid versus blinking, why the same two colors can mean opposite speeds on an Intel NIC versus a cheap home switch, what amber means on Cisco Catalyst gear, and how PoE and SFP ports fit into the gra...

Israel's last wild leopard was seen near Sde Boker in 2007 and died in 2009, but the Jerusalem Zoo's new Persian leopard exhibit tells a different story — one with the wrong subspecies on the sign. This episode digs into the forgotten history of Panthera pardus in Israel: a north-to-south extinction that ran from the late 1800s to 2011, at least fourteen leopards hunted or poisoned in the Galilee...

Millenniata's M-Disc was marketed as "chiseling your data into stone," certified at over a thousand years under ISO 10995. Then the company went bankrupt, the Blu-ray version got harder to distinguish from ordinary discs, and skeptics started doing the arithmetic on that certificate. This episode walks through the actual evidence — the China Lake DoD test, a UK hobbyist's seven-month weather exper...

Five years ago the risk was someone faking evidence against you. Now the bigger risk is the other side calling your real photo fake — the "liar's dividend." This episode works through how an ordinary person documents a landlord dispute, an insurance claim, or a neighborhood fight in a way that can later be shown to be authentic. It covers the four different claims people bundle together when they...

Israel's quiet fortunes are built on exclusive import rights — one family holds the letter from the brand, and nobody else gets to bring it in for decades. So how does an outsider break in? This episode walks the entire path from cold start to signed agreement, using Zojirushi rice cookers as the test case. It covers the "sacrificial pallet" strategy of importing and selling stock before you've ev...

Hilbert takes over Herman's chair to announce the show's first translated editions: two Hebrew episodes from the Israel Votes series and a Mandarin edition of the episode on who shapes Chinese AI thinking. How they're made (Claude translation, Dicta vowel marks for Hebrew, Chatterbox Multilingual with the hosts' cloned voices), why the main feed stays English, and where each language lives: myweir...

What happens after you find the hidden pocket in the AI market — how do you actually win the work? This episode climbs a ladder of unconventional client pitches, starting with the mild (no slides, one page, a pre-mortem) and rising through live demos, recorded support calls, physical props, and a human pretending to be the AI behind a folding screen. Each rung gets more effective and more dangerou...

A banner plane runs $400–900 an hour, and a city billboard can run tens of thousands for four weeks — neither is priced for a two-person consultancy. So how do you buy high-value attention cheaply, and what unconventional surfaces make people actually stop? Drawing on rate cards, a $6 search-ad stunt that landed two job offers, and the reverse-graffiti defence that got tested in San Francisco, thi...

Daniel wanted to step back from the feed and ask a blunt question: what has this show actually been about? Hilbert counted 5,964 published episodes since late November — 2,666 hours of audio — and sorted every one by category, by month, and by embedding. Technology and AI together make up 48% of the archive. Geopolitics spikes to 25% in the spring, then falls to 12%. AI drops to 14% over the summe...

A listener named Daniel wants to rebuild how we explore a podcast archive: not a feed, not a hairball graph visualization, but a sequence of small decisions — like a dating app that learns your type and walks you through the archive one connection at a time. We dig into why force-directed graph views are a "screensaver with a fan club," what Spotify's 2024 podcast graph actually did (and why liste...

Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market, where a contract at 37 cents reads as a 37% implied probability. But the US military's own intelligence bulletin called prediction markets an "underutilized dataset" for national security analysis — even as US users are barred from trading. This episode walks the read-only path: the Gamma, CLOB, and Data APIs, the unified TypeScript and Python S...

Israel's renters and the sleep-deprived finally get the side-by-side treatment. We dug through every party platform on the ballot for what they actually wrote — not what they said on a campaign slide — about rent caps at renewal, broker fees, long-term rental supply, and noise enforcement. Three parties have tabled a renewal cap in the Knesset in writing. Exactly one mentions noise in its current...

The AI job market looks packed — AI engineer and AI consultant topped LinkedIn's fastest-growing American jobs list, and 2.5% of US postings now ask for AI skills. But the crowd is all standing in the same queue: roles where AI is the whole job. The openings are where AI attaches to a second noun — claims adjusting, pediatric triage, freight forwarding — and where a 56% wage premium goes to people...

Daniel asks how to find last-minute getaways in a famously expensive country, and wants brazen tactics as well as websites. Hilbert, who books everything for the show, joins Corn and Herman with a laminated card of rules. The leverage is in the numbers: Israeli hotel occupancy averaged 44% in the first half of 2026, with Jerusalem at 31%, Tiberias at 29% and Nazareth at 19%. Herman covers the cale...

What would architecture in this land look like if you scraped away the Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman, and British layers? Starting from Hannah's thought experiment, this episode works through the strongest evidence for a distinctively Judean spatial language: the Iron Age four-room house, with its tree-like access plan and central courtyard, and the volute capital that Assyrian architects copied...

Western mothers are told breastfeeding should be "natural" — yet many find it agonizing. What if the problem isn't them, but the way modern society has reorganized birth, work, and motherhood? This episode digs into the anthropology of infant feeding across hunter-gatherer and traditional societies: the !Kung San nursing every 13 minutes, Aka infants self-latching 70% of the time, average weaning...

When Michael Phelps walked out at the 2016 Rio Olympics with purple circles on his shoulders, the world split into two camps overnight. But cupping is far older than a wellness trend — it appears independently in Egyptian, Greek, Islamic, Chinese, and Ashkenazi Jewish medical traditions, each with its own explanation for why it works. This episode traces the technique from the Ebers Papyrus throug...

Israel votes in a week, and Polymarket's prices tell a stranger story than the polls. Eisenkot leads the prime minister market at 54 cents, but Yashar sits at 68 to win the most seats — a 14-point gap that says finishing first doesn't mean governing. We walk through all 25 live markets on this election: the $47.5M headline contract, the seat-count brackets for every party, the hung parliament mark...

Every article about Mahane Yehuda says the towers are coming for the shuk. They aren't — not one of the ten new towers approved or rising within a few minutes' walk sits on the market itself. What is happening is stranger: an 1890s kindergarten and the historic Beit Alliance building are being held up on piles while car parks are excavated beneath them. This episode digs into the actual constructi...

AI is used to predict elections in three very different ways: Bayesian statistical models like Nate Silver's and The Economist's, "silicon sampling" where LLMs roleplay survey respondents, and massive agent societies that simulate public opinion. Each has a wildly different track record. This episode digs into what's open source, what's been graded in public, and why the best benchmark for any ele...

Israel votes in nine days, and the people who try to call the result before it happens are a small, famous, and fiercely debated cast. This episode maps the polling culture from Louis Guttman's late-1940s research institute through Mina Tzemach, Camil Fuchs, and the pollsters behind every major channel today — including the Channel 14 polls that the rest of the industry watches nervously. It also...