My Weird Prompts

Everything happens for a reason" sounds like one belief. It's actually at least three — God orchestrates every event, God permits events for a purpose, or God neither causes nor permits suffering but good can still come of it. This episode traces the vocabulary of divine providence from Maimonides and Nachmanides through the Baal Shem Tov's 18th-century expansion to hashgachah pratit, then compares how Christianity, Islam, and deism each draw the line. Along the way: the Reformed distinction between God's appointment and God's authorship of sin, the Mu'tazilite and Ash'arite split over kasb, and the theodicy problem every providential tradition has to answer for. Then the part nobody expects — decades of polling exist on belief in God, religious affiliation, and the afterlife, but measuring belief in personal divine involvement turns out to be a much stranger project, and the findings don't line up with the usual assumptions about who holds that view.

Key sources:

• Wikipedia, Divine providence (last edited 2026-10-11) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_providence

• Wikipedia, Divine providence in Judaism — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_providence_in_Judaism

• Michoel Rotenfeld, The Baal Shem Tov's Expanded View of Hashgaḥah Pratit, *Ḥakirah* vol. 36 (2025) — https://hakirah.org/Vol36Rotenfeld.pdf

Episode 5929 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5929 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/340229)

What do you call someone who believes in God but belongs to no religion? Sociologist Grace Davie named it "believing without belonging" in 1990, and the phenomenon has only grown harder to pin down since. This episode digs into the vocabulary (four competing terms, no consensus), the counts (Pew finds 70% of American "nones" believe in God or a higher power, yet the global picture swings tenfold), and the human question underneath: are these people searching for a community, or content with a private faith and no affiliation at all? Along the way: why 22% of self-described atheists say they believe in some higher power, why the same person can answer "no" to God and "yes" to a universal spirit in the same survey, and the sharp critique from clergy who call the whole thing laziness.

Key sources:

• Pew Research Center, 2024-01-24 — https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/are-all-nones-nonbelievers/

• Pew Research Center, 2025-09-04 — https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/09/04/many-religious-nones-around-the-world-hold-spiritual-beliefs/

• Pew Research Center, 2025-05-06 — https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/05/06/god-spirits-and-the-natural-world/

Episode 5928 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5928 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/550507)

Daniel asked where an intellectually restless generalist actually gets priced — and refused the lazy answers. The answer has a name: Forward Deployed Engineer, a role born at Palantir in the mid-2010s and exported across Anthropic, OpenAI, Scale AI, Sierra, Harvey, Glean, Mistral, and Databricks. It pays a 30–50% premium over equivalent backend or ML engineers, with senior compensation at frontier labs hitting $485K median and principals crossing a million. But the real question is harder: what separates someone who accumulates knowledge from someone who ships? The two highest-ranked hiring signals aren't knowledge stock at all — they're shipping production code and running a discovery interview without a sales script. We dig into the 47% customer-facing workweek, the "Duane" problem in enterprise AI, and whether this role is a genuine new discipline or a rebrand of integration engineering with a fashionable business card.

Key sources:

• David Epstein, *Range* (primary author page). — https://davidepstein.com/range/

• Greater Good Berkeley, specialist vs generalist. — https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_it_better_to_be_a_specialist_or_a_generalist

• Wharton, generalists' team value. — https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wharton-podcast/generalists-vs-specialists/

Episode 5927 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5927 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/144768)

Daniel has ordered from AliExpress twice a month for years but has never been to China, never worked with a Chinese team, and wants to know what the other side is actually thinking. This episode traces the machinery behind the storefront — Alibaba's fiscal 2026 filing, the split between Alibaba.com and AliExpress, the Choice rollout that now carries over 70% of retail orders, and why Israel became one of AliExpress's leading markets despite a nine-million-person population. Then it turns to the human layer: Dr. Catherine Hua Xiang on context-rich business environments, guanxi and mianzi, why asking for help reads as respect rather than weakness, and how the same relational logic that feels warm on the inside can feel closed on the outside.

Key sources:

• Alibaba FY2026 annual report . — https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2026/0618/2026061800844.pdf

• Times of Israel, 2017 (Knesset mailroom). — https://www.timesofisrael.com/knesset-fumes-as-online-shopping-orders-flood-mailroom/

• Times of Israel, 2019-10-13. — https://www.timesofisrael.com/young-israelis-really-like-china-and-alibaba-may-play-a-part/

Episode 5926 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5926 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/624833)

Google's Open Location Code was designed to work completely offline, with no geocoding service and no proprietary database in the middle. Then the consumer interface shipped a shortened form that needs a locality name — and a locality name needs Google. We trace the mechanics of code shortening, the base-20 alphabet built by testing eight billion combinations against words in thirty languages, and why a hundred-metre ambiguity in Zurich is enough to break the whole promise. Then we go looking for the purer version: eleven language ports, a zero-dependency TypeScript library, an offline Garmin watch datafield — and the standalone consumer app that we could not confirm exists.

Key sources:

• OLC repo README, Apache-2.0, last push 2026-03-30. — https://github.com/google/open-location-code

• OLC definition paper (Rinckes & Bunge). — https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/main/Documentation/Specification/olc_definition.adoc

• An Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems. — https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/main/Documentation/Reference/comparison.adoc

Episode 5925 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5925 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/428576)

What does it mean when a cemetery becomes a neighbourhood? This episode treats cemetery habitation as its own form of housing insecurity — not a curiosity, not a horror story — and follows the evidence where it actually goes. The City of the Dead in Cairo grew from 35 recorded residents in 1898 to 180,000 by 1986, and is now being bulldozed under Egypt Vision 2030. Manila North Cemetery houses around 6,000 living people on 54 hectares, two-thirds of them rent-free with the plot owners' consent. Along the way: three distinct pathways into cemetery residence, five documented housing types, and an honest accounting of what the research does not know — including why no one has ever produced a global figure.

Key sources:

• Morgan, Rev Panam Salud Publica, 2004 — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15231077/

• Geographical, 2025-07-03 — https://geographical.co.uk/culture/living-among-the-graves-cairos-city-of-the-dead-faces-an-uncertain-future

• Reyes, Social Transformations Journal, 2023-05-31 — https://archium.ateneo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1167&context=socialtransformations

Episode 5924 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5924 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/444948)

Open Location Code gives every square on Earth a short alphanumeric address — free, offline, case-insensitive, precise to about 14 metres. Google published the spec in 2014, developers ported it to a dozen languages, and the Navajo Nation used it to address 3,100 homes for EMS. So why is a proprietary, pronunciation-ambiguous rival the one inside 911 dispatch centres? This episode traces Plus Codes from a Zürich spec document to slum addressing in India and Brazil, and lands on the question that actually matters: what happens when the code is precise but the GPS fix behind it isn't.

Key sources:

• google/open-location-code GitHub repo (README, FAQ.txt, CHANGELOG, LICENSE, External_Implementations.md) — https://github.com/google/open-location-code

• Google Open Source Blog, Open Location Code: Addresses for everything, everywhere, 2015-04-30 — https://opensource.googleblog.com/2015/04/open-location-code-addresses-for.html

• Google Plus Codes site — https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/

Episode 5923 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5923 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/827246)

You can't reliably prompt a model into your voice — system prompts plateau. So what actually works? This episode works through three data-generation strategies for style fine-tuning: regenerating transcripts with global comments, hand-editing transcripts and training on the diff, and training a purely negative counterweight against overused phrases. A July arXiv paper by Federico Boggia on epanorthosis (the mid-sentence self-correction tic) tested almost exactly this, and one implementation failed in a very instructive way: a small-data DPO adapter learned to rank outputs correctly and then raised the density of the target phrase. Supervised fine-tuning on the same data cut it by 98%. We map each method onto that evidence, then get to the practical recipe — how many examples you actually need, why "200 transcripts" is the wrong unit of counting, and why LoRA or QLoRA is the unambiguous choice for a style adapter.

Key sources:

• DeepSeek-V4 Preview announcement, 2026-04-24 — https://www.deepseek.com/en/news/v4-preview/

• DeepSeek-V3.1 model card — https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.1

• Federico Boggia, Artificial Epanorthosis, arXiv, 2026-07-23 (v2 2026-07-28) [primary research] — https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21498v2

Episode 5922 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5922 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/322295)

A listener in Jerusalem, a decade here and fluent in Hebrew, took his sixteen-month-old son to urgent care twice in two months. Both times the boy was in real respiratory distress. Both times the layer that was supposed to catch him before the hospital didn't. This episode traces what actually failed — a documented oxygen saturation and no doctor for twenty minutes, a health fund phone line that couldn't answer, a billing dispute surfacing at pediatric triage — and then zooms out to the numbers nobody wants to look at: 1,369 Israeli doctors leaving between 2023 and 2025, a 94% rise over the previous decade, and a first-ever government waiting-time report showing MRI waits nearly twice as long at one fund as another. The hospital care was good. The layer underneath is the story.

Key sources:

• Terem , urgent care network claims — https://www.terem.com/on-us/?lang=en

• Ynet, 2026-09-06, physician emigration study — https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/bjsin3quze

• Globes, 2026-09-06 — https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-dramatic-rise-in-doctors-emigrating-from-israel-1001554506

Episode 5921 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5921 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/154525)

Dr. Heinz Edgar Lehmann read the chlorpromazine papers in his bathtub in 1953, published the first English-language clinical study on the drug, and helped end the asylum era — then spent his later years warning that the revolution he started had produced cookbook psychiatry. This episode works through his biography, the science, and the black-and-white patient interview films that keep drawing millions of viewers seventy-five years later. Was Lehmann unusually compassionate by the standards of his era, or do the recordings just make him look that way?

Key sources:

• Wikipedia, Heinz E. Lehmann — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_E._Lehmann

• McGill Reporter, In memoriam (Joel Paris), 1999 — https://reporter-archive.mcgill.ca/Rep/r3115/memoriam.html

• McGill Health e-News, Marking 70 years of psychiatric research at the Douglas, 2024-03-13 — https://healthenews.mcgill.ca/marking-70-years-of-psychiatric-research-at-the-douglas-celebrating-heinz-lehmann/

Episode 5920 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5920 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/774393)