Rusty Frangipani

29/05/2026

inheriting the unseen

Apple gets mocked quite a bit these days.

14/05/2026

blood and genes are overrated as binding agents...

2003 was a weird year for me.

10/05/2026

Who is inheriting the family?

I am a branch in the family tree but it doesn’t feel that way.

24/04/2026

something I never thought of... but should...

Newton published his laws of motion in 1687.

16/04/2026

how did your parents educate you and how are you educating your children?

What lessons are we consciously leaving our children?

09/03/2026

The world’s WD40 sense and sensibility want all friction removed. I, on the other hand, tend to panic when friction abandons me.

Like the time I was on the skating ring in Kazan. And the time I was washing the dishes, detergent on my hands and on the plate. Also, the time I was on the ramp going into the basement carpark on a very wet day.

Slippery slopes have no friction. When there is no friction, things move fast but without control. Before I know it, my butt was on the floor. Ice, too, very slippery.

AI-generated text is fast. Is it out of control?
What controls AI-generated text?
The large language model? The prompt? The people or the machine?

The other day, I reintroduced friction into my writing. Literally. Pencil on paper. One scratch at a time. I was getting defeated by AI.

I fed AI-generated text into an AI detector and the machine was 99% confident it was chewing another machine’s spew. I edited half the recipe and the AI detector was now 47% confident the text was generated by a fellow algorithm. Pleased, I edited the remaining half and got the whole text assessed again. The confidence level jumped back up to 97%?! I rewrote sentences but could not get the machine to recognise my humanity. It was only willing to compromise that the latest salad was 10% AI, 66% mixed, 24% human.

That’s when the pencil was called into action. After typing out what I wrote, I reinstated two of the original paragraphs which I liked a lot. Those two along with one of my new paragraphs got flagged as AI. 2% AI, 11% mixed, 87% human.

I won’t lie. My heart skipped a beat when I clicked “Scan”. I think I would quit writing altogether if my pencil was AI and not human. But now my faith in humanity is somewhat restored… 87% restored and I can move forward with my writing project.

You see, without friction, it is impossible to move forward. For now, I need to go sharpen my pencils.

12/12/2025

The wife is next to the window. I am next to her. For the first time in 13 years...

The wife is next to the window.

17/10/2025

gravitas...

I see myself in my son.

22/08/2025

The world isn’t kind... but should we tell them?

but should we tell them?

15/08/2025

If you are bemused about what I have done wrong, then it proves what I was doing was obviously a widespread and therefore totally acceptable practice.

Powerful people get to tell the less powerful and powerless what to do.