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the absurdity of ChatGPT's ideas
Saturday, October 4 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning I was up before everyone else, drinking tea (to conserve limited supplies of non-decaf coffee) and tinkering with my Meshtastic Python code, which was showing signs of working. When I finally got it to send *-delimited data to my backend, I saw that it was being rejected due to the Python functions' inability to properly encrypt a secret passed in the querystring. I feared I'd have to debug this issue myself, since ChatGPT had done the translation of the code from C++ to Python. But when I pasted the C++ and Python versions of the code into ChatGPT and asked what the discrepancy was, it immediately flagged that the bit rotates in the Python version were going the wrong way. Once that was fixed, the Python code sent the secrets perfectly encrypted.
From there, it was more of a struggle to get the GPS-equipped Meshtastic node to actually send GPS coordinates. And then I had to fix a bug in the Python related to the order of location data in the *-delimited string.
By then, the others were up and I'd made a french press of coffee. At some point Gretchen set off with Fern and Charlotte down to the lake, while I stayed back at the cabin to continue tinkering with my code and Joshua did whatever work he felt like he needed to do (probably related to the little-known martial art he is a master of).
Eventually I headed down to the lake with mug of kratom tea and the GPS-equipped Meshtastic node to see if it could send data from as far as the lake. When I got there, I found Gretchen having a loud conversation with Fern on the dock from within the lake, where she was swimming in place. Evidently she wasn't finding the lake as cold as she'd found it yesterday. While I was at the lake, I went out on the paddleboard and gathered the flattest stones I could find on the lake bottom near the public dock.
We all went back to the cabin at around noon for an unusually light lunch that consisted mainly of bean salad. I don't usually eat much salad, but since salad was all there was, I had thirds. Gretchen was impressed and drew attention to this fact. My response was simply, "If there had been pizza..." and I left it at that.
I continued my Meshtastic tinkering while everyone, including Joshua, headed down to the lake after lunch. By this point I'd logged enough GPS data to want to see what it looked like on the map. At that point I realized that something was very wrong with the data. The coordinates I'd been seeing had superficially looked correct, with a latitude of a little over 43 and a longitude near -74. But on the map, the points had all ended up about a mile and half to the east and also a little north of where they should be. Not only that, but the points weren't changing. So I asked ChatGPT about this, and it came up with a bunch of ideas that were clearly wrong, such as that the longitude and latitude had been swapped (had that been the case, the points would've been near or within Antarctica) or that the device was falling back to a hardcoded preset (why would such a preset be so close to us in such an unpopulated region?). I pointed out the absurdity of ChatGPT's ideas, and it apologized and came up with some other scenario, but then as the conversation went on, it kept returning to those ideas in a way that no human would. It was crazy-making and really showcased the limitations of a large language model (something I don't run into so clearly very often). Eventually I was forced to use a search engine to track down what was going on, eventually stumbling onto a Reddit thread with useful information. But in the meantime I decided to route around the problem by taking advantage of a feature the Meshtastic device had where it actually did report valid GPS data: when it used the "Lost & Found" feature. When that was turned on, it would periodically broadcast a text message containing the actual latitude and longitude information. So I made my bridge software parse that information out of the string, allowing my backend to actually store accurate GPS data for the first time.
I then took the Meshtastic device down to the lake for a second time, this time while also carrying a bag containing beers in case anyone down there wanted one. We sat on the dock chatting about various topics, including how lonely it is for Fern now that she feels she cannot leave the country to visit her family in Australia. She's in the US on a visa, and she fears that if she goes through immigration and some Trump lackey Googles her and finds academic papers she's written about anarchism, her visa will be suspended and she'll end up in a gulag. It's not just paranoia; such things are happening, and it's making America a scarier place to visit than the scary countries of old (such as Turkey or Saudi Arabia).
Eventually Fern set off on the paddleboard. She ended up wiping out when she hit a reef over near Pyotr's dock and all the clothes she was wearing ended up drenched. But she managed to strip down to just her underwear (or was it a bikini?) to continue paddling around. The weather by then was fairly warm and the sun was shining down from cloudless skies. Meanwhile I'd gone out in one of the kayaks, mostly to explore the outflow bay.
For dinner, we all returned to the cabin and ate out in the screened-in porch. Gretchen had prepared a meal of cheezy noodles with chunks of broccoli and Joshua uncorked a nice white wine that didn't have the usual white wine acidity.
This evening after dinner, while the others chatted in the great room, I kept experimenting with my Meshtastic code and one of the devices in the physical world. By then, I had the client node and Raspberry Pi hanging off the side of the upstairs deck so I could have maximum LoRa range, and I kept grabbing a flashlight so I could take the other GPS-equipped node further and further down the Mossy Rock Trail to see if its signals were still being received. I'd yet to get a packet from as far as the dock, but during these experiments I was getting valid data from about a third of the way to the dock (300 feet). Unfortunately, though, this data seemed to jump around a bit more than it should.
At some point Gretchen roped us all into hand-writing postcards to a bunch of Democrats in Virginia to convince them to vote this November. Gretchen had been sent the blank postcards and lists of addresses by some get-out-the-vote organization trying to win a state supreme court seat. It was our job to inject the human touch, something the astrophied muscles of my right hand could only do for a single page full of addresses.
Sunrise over the top of the Mossy Rock Trail this morning. Click to enlarge.
Throckmorton the Loon today. Click to enlarge.
Me on a paddleboard today. Click to enlarge.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?251004 feedback
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