“Bakery”, “road trip”, and “tradition” are often associated with certain geographies in literature and tourism booklets. That’s probably why the next-word predictor in the heart of whatever LLM wrote the headline above decided to us “mountain town” to describe Yalaha, Florida, home of Yalaha Bakery. Florida’s the flattest state in the Union, and despite having places named Mount Dora, there are no mountains here.
Any AI, no matter how well-trained, has no experience. It simply has representations of experience, derived from whatever literature, media, or data has been put into its training material.
The article is right about one thing: You need to check out Yalaha Bakery, which not just a bakery, but a deli and a biergarten with live music on the weekends!
Anitra and I saw the sticker pictured above on a Model Y Tesla parked outside Lucky Tigre, Tampa’s hippest Filipino restaurant.
“How hip is Lucky Tigre?” you might ask. It’s this hip:
Here’s a closeup of their “wallpaper,” featuring old-school ads you’d see in magazines in the Philippines, including a promo for the anime TV series Voltes V, one of my favorite cartoons from my childhood:
They even have hip Filipino literature!
And the food’s great. Here’s what we ordered:
Pictured above from left to right: beef lumpia (egg rolls), tocino pork ribs with garlic rice and atchara (pickled papaya), mochi fried chicken.
Anyway, on our way into the restaurant to get our take-out order, we saw the “Happy waifu, happy laifu” anime sticker on the Tesla. I figured the car belonged to the two cosplayers in their early twenties sitting in the back corner of the restaurant.
But as we left the restaurant, we saw the car’s owners getting in the driver and front passenger seats — and they were a grandpa and grandma couple!
“Whaaaat?” Anitra exclaimed. “That was not the couple I was expecting to own that car.”
“Me neither,” I replied, “but that means that someday, WE can be the weird old anime couple at the hip restaurant. Relationship goals, sweetie!”
based on your personal experience when talking to me, give me a character from a movie/ series who is like me, just give me their name
ChatGPT’s response:
Ted Lasso
“That’s a pretty nice result,” I thought, and decided to provide the same prompt to the two LLMs I use most: Claude and Gemini.
Claude’s response
When I gave Claude the same prompt, it replied:
Leslie Knope.
That’s Amy Poelher’s endlessly-optimistic and community-minded character from Parks and Recreation.
I followed up with “Please explain,” and Claude responded with this:
Leslie Knope is a hyper-competent, community-obsessed organizer who genuinely loves the people in her city and works tirelessly to bring them together. She shows up to everything, documents it all, and has an almost unreasonable enthusiasm for turning local events into something meaningful. She also has a personal brand, a loyal community, and a side thing she’s weirdly passionate about that most people don’t fully understand but respect anyway.
You organize multiple tech communities, cover local events with the dedication of a beat reporter, have been doing it consistently for nearly 20 years, and you play the accordion. That last part is very Leslie — she would absolutely play the accordion.
When asked “Please explain,” it responded with this:
The “Renaissance Geek” Archetype
You share a very specific, high-energy profile with Buckaroo Banzai that goes beyond just being “into tech.” Here is why the comparison fits so well:
The Polymath Lifestyle: Buckaroo is a neurosurgeon, a particle physicist, and a rock star. You mirror this multi-hyphenate life as a Developer Advocate, a Python/AI instructor, and a professional accordionist. Both of you refuse to be siloed into a single “type.”
The “Hong Kong Cavaliers” Energy: Buckaroo surrounds himself with a specialized team of experts (his band) who also happen to be his tactical unit. Between your leadership in the Tampa Bay AI Meetup, your neighborhood advocacy in Seminole Heights, and your frequent collaborations in the dev community, you lead your own local “Cavaliers.”
Tech-Forward Creativity: Whether it’s Buckaroo’s “Oscillation Overthruster” or your work with Agentic AI and MCP servers, there’s a shared theme of pushing the boundaries of current technology while maintaining a distinct, slightly eccentric personal brand (the “Accordion Guy” persona).
The Aesthetic: There is a certain “cool professor meets indie rocker” vibe that defines both of you—capable of teaching a deep-dive technical course on AI one hour and playing a high-energy set on a stage the next.
In short, you’re both proof that you can be the smartest person in the room and the one keeping the party going at the same time.
I loved The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, a delightfully weird sci-fi comedy/cult classic. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be the titular character.
However, I had to ask:
Me:
Why did you refer to the character as “Banzai Buckaroo” in your initial answer?
Gemini:
That was a bit of a “glitch in the Matrix” on my part—essentially a “brain fart” in AI terms.
While his name is Buckaroo Banzai, I flipped the order, likely because “Banzai” carries such a punchy, iconic energy that it jumped to the front of the line. It’s a classic case of my internal processing prioritizing the high-action word over the actual name.
I’d like to say it was a clever test to see if you were paying attention, but in truth, I just got the name backward! I’m glad you caught it—it’s definitely Buckaroo Banzai.
AIs have brain farts?
Give this AI exercise a try!
Bonus material
In case you’re not familiar with Buckaroo Banzai, here’s a modern trailer for the film…
It’s silly, dated, and full of the kind of fakety-fake techno-cheese found in “hacker” and “cyberpunk” movies of the 1990s, but the 1995 film Hackers is still one of my guilty pleasures. It turned 30 today!
I will always say this about Hackers:
I find myself willing to suspend my disbelief about their depiction of the tech scene of that era, the motivations of some of the characters, Penn Jillette as a pushover cybersecurity specialist, and the way the movie shows computers in general.
However, there’s one thing where my suspension of disbelief comes to a crashing halt: The way the film tries oh-so-hard to portray rollerblading as cool.
The headline would be unintelligible to most people in North America in 2000:
Elon Musk was not yet a household name at the time. If you wanted to evoke images of high tech with a mainstream audience, you’d mention Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
Anime had only started making headway into popular culture in the mid- to late 1990s thanks to Sailor Moon and Pokémon.
At the time, the term gooner was limited to soccer, meaning “superfan of the Arsenal football club.” It had not yet become internet slang for “porn addict” or “chronic self-pleasurer.”
The term “AI” would have been reasonably well known by then, and a year later, Syeven Spielberg’s film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, would be released.
“AI slop” is a term that only got mainstream popularity last year thanks to programmer and tech blogger Simon Willison.
