Mïkê 💚 👑🐉🗡️🏳️‍⚧️ / is on Nostr

Mïkê (pronounced mee-keh)
she/her
Vegan | Canadian/American dual citizen | Not a hater | Anti-Terror |
People are generally reasonable; this is the only reason we can be trusted with elections and democratic rights

Last Notes

2025-05-22 16:34:12

Wanna see how bad ChatGPT is at being factual?
Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung was born in Dukla, Galicia (now Poland) on July 13, 1912. When World War 2 started, he escaped to Lithuania, then Japan, where he stayed for nine months until the fall of 1941. He then went to Shanghai, then Montreal. He became the Chief Rabbi of that city in 1969, a position he maintained until his death in 1998. This is all from his Wikipedia page. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinchas_Hirschprung
Let's see what ChatGPT "knows" (obligatory "it's not sentient, it doesn't Know anything) about him.
Question: When and where was Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung born?
Answer: Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung was born on **September 17, 1911**, in **Kuzmin**, which was then part of Poland (now in Ukraine). He became a prominent rabbi and scholar, known for his work in Jewish education and leadership, particularly in Canada after his immigration there in the late 1940s.
Question: Can you describe his immigration journey?
Answer: Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung's immigration journey was shaped by the tumultuous events of his time, especially the upheaval caused by World War II.
1. **Pre-War and Early Years**: Rabbi Hirschprung was born in **Kuzmin**, Poland, and grew up in a traditional Jewish environment. He studied in yeshivas and became a well-respected Torah scholar from a young age.
2. **World War II**: As the war escalated and the Nazi occupation began, Rabbi Hirschprung's life, like that of many others in Europe, was shattered. He narrowly escaped the horrors of the Holocaust, though much of his family perished. His experience during the war deeply affected his life and his worldview.
3. **Escape and Survival**: Rabbi Hirschprung's exact route of escape isn't widely documented, but many survivors from this period had to flee across borders, often enduring great hardships. In the case of Rabbi Hirschprung, after the war and the devastation in Europe, he managed to survive and eventually made his way to France.
4. **Immigration to Canada**: After the war, in **1948**, Rabbi Hirschprung, along with his family, immigrated to **Montreal, Canada**. At that time, Montreal had a growing Jewish community, many of whom were displaced by the war. Rabbi Hirschprung's scholarly reputation had preceded him, and he quickly became a leading figure in the Montreal Jewish community.
5. **Settling in Montreal**: Upon arriving in Montreal, Rabbi Hirschprung became an important educator and community leader. He served as the **rabbi of the Congregation Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem** and was heavily involved in Jewish education. His contributions to the Jewish community of Montreal were significant, and he helped shape the local Jewish landscape, especially through his leadership and emphasis on Torah study.
6. **Legacy**: Rabbi Hirschprung remained in Montreal for the rest of his life, contributing to Jewish education and scholarship. He was known for his deep commitment to traditional Jewish values and Torah learning, as well as his compassion and leadership.
Rabbi Hirschprung's journey reflects the struggles of countless Jews who had to rebuild their lives after the war, finding new homes and communities in the wake of immense loss. His resilience and dedication to Jewish life played a significant role in Montreal’s Jewish educational and spiritual communities.
Note that it said his exact route of escape wasn't known ("not well documented", same thing) and said that he stayed in Europe throughout the war and traveled through France after it was over. In fact, the way GPT worded this seems to imply that he stayed not just in Europe, but in Nazi-occupied Europe.
It also got his congregation wrong; He was the rabbi of the Adath Yeshurun Synagogue, and the rosh yeshiva of the Yeshivas Merkaz HaTorah, then became the Chief Rabbi of the city, something GPT also didn't mention.
The only two things it seems to "know" about him are that he was influential in the Montreal Jewish community (not even why) and that he was born in Eastern Europe (not even where or when). Everything else was a statistical guess based on those two things, delivered with all the confidence of a respected scholar.
Large Language Models are just that - language models. They can talk, that's it. You can't trust them to be factually accurate. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #LLMs #ChatGPT

2025-04-25 01:56:52

Maybe the saddest thing about Mastodon is that it seems like a place where internet arguments could be reasoned discussions that don't devolve into insults, but it's not. The higher character limit, lack of algorithms, etc have done nothing to make people less toxic.
I was just talking to a Jacobin who was arguing in favour of treating all Republican voters like they're just as evil as the politicians they elected, because, well, they elected them, right? She wanted to adopt a stance of extreme intolerance towards anyone even remotely responsible for the evil we're seeing.
I asked what that thought process implies for her, a person remotely responsible for an enormous amount of animal suffering and environmental destruction, through her purchasing of animal products at the grocery store (an assumption, to be sure, but one that she didn't correct). If it's okay for her to tell Republican voters to go die in a ditch, is it okay for me to do the same to non-vegans? I had asked this earlier in the thread, and didn't repeat the question quite as explicitly this time, but I said "You "vote" (with your wallet) for..." And specifically mentioned how "buying beef always kills cows". Nothing in my reply could possibly be construed as having anything to do with any literal election.
This was her response: "Jesus FUCKING CHRIST...WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? You're whining about how I'm choosing to gas animals and grind them up BECAUSE I VOTED TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE? YOU HAVE THE NERVE to say Harris lost and it's my fault BECAUSE I VOTED FOR HER? You are off the rails, sweetheart." [capitalization in original]
This same thread had someone tell me I'm basically Hitler because I abbreviated a paragraph describing predictable behaviour to "like NPCs" (a paragraph I then typed out in full, to make sure there could be no more unintentional misunderstandings). They then made several replies to other people talking about how the left is doomed because people like me want to condemn people in the strongest terms over nothing.
So yeah. Some people are just as impossible to reason with here as they are on Twitter. Do not engage. #Mastodon #Internet #SocialMedia #Trolls #Trolling #Extremism

2025-04-17 00:17:51

Gender-affirming care is now inaccessible for trans people of all ages, in huge swaths of America. In many cases, people are (on paper) unaffected by the existing legislation and orders, but are having their HRT abruptly cut off anyway. https://slate.com/life/2025/04/trump-trans-health-care-ban-adult-hormones.html
Can't wait to watch these cowardly "providers" like Memorial Health learn the hard way that appeasement gets you nowhere. #uspoli #uspolitics #transrights #transrightsarehumanrights

2025-02-27 14:40:58

- reply

@nprofile…3yv6 Source for those curious: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/marco-rubio-state-transgender-visa-b2704734.html

2024-11-05 21:43:51

Just stop using Twitter. There's nothing there worth seeing that you can't get elsewhere, and the extra effort to get it elsewhere is worth it in more ways than one.
Twitter is spyware, addictive, and, for no other reason than the size and consistent activity of its userbase, a powerful tool for Elon Musk to advance far-right agendas. If you for some reason *need* to see something on Twitter, use Nitter (nitter.poast.org is my go-to).
We can make Mastodon an equal alternative to Twitter just by treating it that way ourselves. Talk to people irl about something you saw on Mastodon like you do now with Twitter. When you give examples of social media platforms, include Mastodon. When you take a screenshot of a Mastodon post, view it on the poster's instance so people will see their whole username and know that it's a Mastodon screenshot. Put your Mastodon username in your LinkedIn bio or wherever else you're already putting your other socials. The more people feel like they're missing out, the more they'll join, and the more active the platform will be. It's a self-reinforcing cycle, we just need to start it. #Mastodon #Twitter #Twittermigration

2024-05-06 00:15:01

The McGill encampment has grown into a tiny city. It has a little library, wooden sidewalks, and a huge stockpile of supplies. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mcgill-pro-palestinian-encampment-now-a-tiny-city-1.7194871 #studentprotests #studentspring #Palestine