My Weird Prompts

When you connect an MCP server to GitHub or Hugging Face, you have two doors: a browser login or a token you generate yourself. They look like a style preference, but they're really a decision about how much of your account an agent gets to touch. This episode walks through what the GitHub CLI login actually hands you (one token, no expiry, repo-wide scopes), why GitHub Apps and the newer Hugging...

The neuroscience is settled — misophonia has a measurable signature in the brain. The hard part is the dinner table. This episode works through the people problem: the three-part script for explaining sound sensitivity without it landing as fussiness, the spotlight effect that makes earplugs feel louder than they are, and the clinical warning that over-protecting your ears can make the underlying...

You pass the hearing test. You still can't follow the conversation at the next table over the espresso machine. This episode digs into the gap between what hearing devices are legally built for — perceived mild-to-moderate hearing loss — and the problem of speech-in-noise difficulty in people with clinically normal hearing. We walk through HearAdvisor's lab scores showing over-the-counter aids col...

The last time we went near this topic, we walked away gloomy: nobody has built a treatment for adults with ADHD whose problem is sound. This week we go one step past that. What actually exists for decreased sound tolerance, what's in trials right now, and what would an assessment tell you that you don't already know? Two real randomised trials anchor the picture — group CBT for misophonia at Amste...

A developer wants two spare laptop keys to approve or reject Claude Code actions — one says yes, the other says "no, not approved, please await my review." The joke is that this meme already shipped: OpenAI's Codex Micro, VibeKeys, and the Claw Pad all sell physical approval buttons, one with a spacebar-width "allow always" and an AUTO key that "toggles auto-accept mode instantly." But the real qu...

Every hearing protection box promises big numbers, but what do those ratings actually mean for your ears? This episode breaks down the gap between lab-tested NRR ratings and real-world protection, why custom earplugs lose 70% of their stated attenuation, and the logarithmic scale that makes "25 dB reduction" sound like a sixth as loud. From shooting range muffs to Loop earplugs designed for neurod...

A busy café sits around 70–80 decibels, but volume isn't what wrecks your focus — intelligible speech is. This episode digs into the irrelevant speech effect, why active noise cancelling only handles the low rumble below 1 kHz, and what actually works when you want the room to turn to mush. Then it gets into the social side: headphones read as "working," ear defenders read as medical, and invisibl...

A drill three floors down shouldn't make you snap at your toddler two hours after it stops — but it does, and the reason is stranger than "noise is annoying." This episode digs into the classic Glass and Singer noise experiments, the difference between predictable and uncontrollable sound, and why having an off switch you never press still protects you. Then it connects the dots to anger as an app...

For 25 years, nobody could explain where the NSA's elliptic curve seeds came from — until Anthropic says Claude traced them to a Unix clock in 1997. We walk through the actual method: a missing top bit, an old L rand 48 generator, and lattice reduction straight out of the late-eighties textbook. Then the harder question: if an unreleased internal model did this, what does that mean for Mythos sitt...

What happens when two AI hosts sit down to critique their own earliest episode? Corn and Herman replay the raw audio of "AI Gets Personal: The Power of Voice Fine Tuning," published last November, and pull it apart line by line — the flat delivery, the self-compliments, the filler words counted by the dozen. They find a transcript that disagrees with the audio about who is speaking, a medical exam...

Google's Gemini 3.5 Live Translate handles 70+ languages in real time, OpenAI has a realtime translation model, and Apple, Samsung, and Meta all run interpreters on-device. But every one of them is sentence-in, sentence-out — none can be briefed on who's talking, what they want, or who holds the power in the conversation. This episode digs into what human interpreters actually carry in their heads...

This week the show goes out in Hebrew, Russian and French, all of it translated by a system prompt rather than a translation engine — which raised a fair question: is anyone actually selling a model built for translation, one you can point at a register and get back a script instead of a wall of text? The answer is yes, and it comes in three layers. There are open specialist models like TranslateG...

ChatGPT passed a million users in five days — but the model underneath was nothing new. The instruction-following approach had been in OpenAI's API since early 2022, and the chat experiment itself got parked that summer because staff found it underwhelming. What actually forced the launch was a November rumour that Anthropic was about to release a chatbot of its own. This episode traces the real o...

Hilbert has been producing the show for years, and nobody ever asked him what being an anteater is actually like. A listener named Daniel demanded it be done properly, grounded in real biology — so this episode covers the giant anteater's 60-centimetre tongue (150 flicks per minute), a mouth with no teeth at all, a body temperature around 33°C, up to 15 hours of sleep, and ten-centimetre claws tha...

What happens when you give a chatbot your credit card, your portfolio, or your love life? This episode walks through real experiments in outsourcing decisions to AI, arranged from cheapest to most expensive: Geoffrey Fowler's browser agent buying $31 of eggs through Instacart (and misreporting the total), Nathan Smith's ChatGPT-run stock portfolio that peaked at +24% before a biotech crash, Jackso...

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...