Absolutely. Most non-fiction books I’ve read averaged about 9 hours for me to complete. 9 hours listening to an expert is such a trivial investment compared to a lifetime of half-baked speculation on a topic one doesn’t really understand. In 9 hours an expert can provide proper context, break down complex topics, and they have the space to fully explain their perspective and the stories that brought them to it.

The only content as informative and concise as a good book is a good lecture.

I was on Voat when it was a pleasant community like Lemmy, and I tried to nudge for civility as over time every post became hateful and angry. I would still browse Voat occasionally until it shut down because I value diversity of thought, and I was curious to encounter rhetoric which contradicted my own beliefs.

Lemmy is not so different, however, instead of having a far-right bias Lemmy has a far-left bias. For now there are no far-right Lemmy instances to balance far-left instances like Lemmygrad.ml. This creates an atmosphere where right-leaning, and centrist users might take one look around and feel unwelcome.

I think it is important that left-leaning, centrist, and right-leaning users feel welcome while leaving bigotry at the door. We need for someone who is bigoted to feel welcome here by all of their other traits, and to erode their bigoted beliefs over time because bigotry is not tolerated. I think Lemmy and the Fediverse have real potential to foster a space where diverse users can share stories and form communities with users who hold very different beliefs.

Voat showed it is not enough to create an open platform with unmoderated free speech, the platform itself must have structures in place to promote civility, and the users of the platform must work hard to maintain a culture of civility. The fact that QAnon believers are not welcome here means that Lemmy has already siloed itself, and I believe that the current policy of non-federation with disagreeable instances is too strict to be a long-term viable solution.

My vision for fostering civility on Lemmy is for sublemmies to federate with one another across instances. e.g. /c/pixelart@lemmy.ml could federate freely with /c/pixelart@far-right.com and /c/pixelart@far-left.com to promote relationships between users with very different beliefs. However, /c/politics@lemmy.ml might want to federate much more selectively with /c/politics@far-right.com or /c/politics@far-left.com. Perhaps /c/politics@far-right.com and /c/politics@far-left.com could have a weekly debate post which is the only post that federates between them.

It’s worth noting that 1GHz x86-64 is not the same as 1GHz RISC-V or 1GHz ARM. Different CPU architectures have different instruction sets, so it might require more cycles to achieve the same result.

e.g. 1GHz x86-64 and a 2GHz ARM - The x86-64 chip has a desired instruction built in, so it is able to perform the desired calculation in 5 cycles. The ARM chip does not include the desired instruction, so it takes 50 cycles to achieve the same result. Even though the ARM chip is twice as fast, it will take ~5x longer to run the same task.

I’ve never used RISC-V, but I did some testing with a couple ARM CPUs and a couple x86-64 CPUs last year and the results were roughly: ARM took ~5x longer, and x86-64 used ~5x more electricity. For the chips I was using, and for the work I was doing, there wasn’t any efficiency gain by switching fully to ARM.

I am super excited for RISC-V, though! I can’t wait to have a RISC-V coreboot machine.