One of the big turning points for Facebook for them to increase the difficulty of switching was cutting off RSS as a way to syndicate content into Facebook. After that, content had to be manually created in Facebook, instead of automatically imported from a third party source based on standard protocols. This forced people away from their chosen content authoring system into Facebook's opinionated, inflexible, ad infested walled garden.

But here's the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they'd never sell out. I know those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered them friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users.

They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/7/24151497/tesla-lidar-luminar-elon-musk-sensor-autonomous

Tesla bought over $2 million worth of lidar sensors from Luminar this year

I spent so much time with this thing. Moon Patrol was my jam.

I think the bigger issue was more about being able to go local for warranty service, instead of having to ship your bike somewhere far away, which would be costly and be a PITA.

But you're absolutely right about regular maintenance. I gave the wrong idea about the reason in my last comment.

(And now I'm sitting here thinking "omg, I sound like ChatGPT.")

It takes 27 seconds to cut a ulock with a battery powered angle grinder. https://youtu.be/hjYXD9pyupg

That being said, I do use a ulock and cables when I lock up my bike. It stops opportunistic thieves, but not determined thieves.

I got an Aventon earlier this year and it's been great. Two of my friends in another state coincidentally also got Aventon bikes, each a different model than mine, and they also love them.

However my wife's family got some cheaper Chinese-made small fat tire folding e-bikes and they're also pretty good, and cost a lot less.

Rad Power is what I see the most when I'm out riding around.

When I was researching, some folks said "buy from your local bike shop so you can take it back there for maintenance" which seems like good advice for folks who aren't comfortable doing their own maintenance. I also watched a lot of videos on YT for models I was interested in, and videos by the same person so I could get a sense of what they said about bikes at all. I'd be particularly skeptical of people who never have anything bad to say.

This biggest concern I have with my ebike is theft, and that concern is keeping me from doing everything around my area with my bike that I would do if my family had a second car for me to take out instead. I find myself waiting u til our one car is available to do things where I would have to leave my bike out of view for very long.

Smash the patriarchy.

That's because Nigel did the math on his fingers, and he has 6 fingers on his right hand.

Awesome. How much more time off to google software engineers get? I guess it's none.

Does this mean "AI was used as a fancy autocomplete"? Because that's my number 1 use case for AI like copilot, and if that's the case, over 25% of my code is written by AI. But let me tell you, it still gets it wrong, repeatedly making the same syntax errors no matter how many times I correct it. It starts to get it right, then later reverts to making the same syntax errors, even making up variable names that violate widely known public APIs.

It's Big Brother doublespeak. "Ministry of Truth" and all that.