At this point, just accept electric motorcycles/scooters are a distinct category that you'd like to accept and promote, and get rid of the vestigial pedals.
In my country, our govt is promoting e-cycles, and they are about ~ USD 1,000, after being imported from China. They have similar specs to these 'bikes' (range-wise) and I think they are better vehicles, both in price and in utility.
No need to add fake pedals or create a useless 'bike' frame when people are earning for a scooter/motorcycle. Create easier licensing/registration options and you will see adoption rise for the vehicles people truly want.
I don't get what you mean, electric scooters are already a thing? At least in most countries in Europe they are classified the same type of vehicle as pedal-assisted e-bicycles and are capped at 25km/h and can ride in the bike lanes. If they go faster they are classified as full motorcycle and have to ride on the road with the cars and requires a license and a license plate (regardless if electric or non-electric).
Pedal-assisted is very much not a vestigial category, plenty of people want to get exercise and not just ride a scooter. On top of that they massively increase the range of the bicycle and the bicycle is still usable when the battery runs out.
I've been annoyed by this as well for a while. I have a non-electric cargo bike but I don't care if others have pedals or not. I'm more scared of a bakfeit mum zooming through at 25km/h than a lightweight Chinese-style moped going slower than that. Regulating who can go where by speed and weight would make much more sense than creating all these arbitrary categories in my opinion.
Reminds me of an acronym that defines this sort of behaviour: COIK.
What is COIK? well everyone knows what COIK is, no need to bother explaining.
COIK is 'Clear Only If Known.' Did you really have to ask me about such a simple thing? Now run along.
____
There is so much assumed knowledge that writing guides becomes a matter of how simple you have to go, before you start insulting the reader's intelligence. (A computer is a magic box that goes DING!)
If you writing a guide, do you explain what a terminal is and where to find it? Or do you presume they know what it is and start sharing command lines? Is setting a minimum knowledge bar acceptable or are you showing your bias?
> It's absolutely insane that this @nytimes article would quote Doug Loverro saying "I was not firm enough in pushing what I should have pushed" when in fact the reason he abruptly left NASA in May 2020 (after just 6 months on the job) was that he was caught providing illicit inside advice to Boeing regarding the Human Landing System contract during the blackout period, despite which Boeing's entry was so poor it was withdrawn. How much harder could he have pushed?
> It gets even crazier.
> The article also quotes Douglas Cooke, who oversaw the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA from January 2004 until September 2011, and who is thus directly responsible for Constellation's abject failure, cancellation, the debacle of the Ares I-X rocket, and the origins of the SLS program, and who as recently as late 2021 was still advocating for a retvrn to the Constellation architecture (https://x.com/jeff_foust/status/1448008434478108676).
> Dan Dumbacher rounds out the trio of former NASA executives brave enough to go on the record, as the Deputy Associate Administrator of Exploration Systems Development from October 2010 until July 2014, ensuring this article quotes exclusively from former NASA leaders who have proven beyond doubt they cannot run a rocket development program, and who, having spent 20 years and $100b on their own failed system that somehow forgot to develop the lander, are now throwing stones at SpaceX for spending less than $3b (along with $10b of their own money) and having developed a rocket that's roughly 100x cheaper and 4x more powerful than SLS in less than 1/4 of the time.
> I don't want to hear from Loverro, Cooke, or Dumbacher unless it's a detailed explanation of how, exactly, NASA managed to screw up SLS as badly as they did. Perhaps they can ask for an internship at Starbase to get the elite program management exposure and experience they so evidently lacked when the nation entrusted them with the future of the light cone?
> According to public disclosures, none of these former NASA officials, who now work as independent consultants, receive money from Boeing. And yet whenever their opinion is solicited, they seem to advocate for mission architectures that support Boeing's proposals, Boeing's contracts, and Boeing's interests, despite NASA's own Office of Inspector General finding over and over and over again that Boeing and NASA's program management have collaboratively presided over an extremely expensive comedy of errors.
> Not just expensive - as I have now warned for many years - corrosive to US technological dominance and security, as China moves decisively towards the Moon.
looks like there has been infighting among former NASA employees about who is responsible for the decline.
> To assemble what would become one of the most important parts of Elon Musk’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, the docking system that would attach it to the International Space Station, a couple of SpaceX engineers in 2013 purchased mountain bike shocks from an online cycling shop. They bought the rest of the parts from McMaster-Carr, a sort of Home Depot for industrial tools and materials and dubbed their creation the “McDocker."
> NASA’s engineers were perplexed that SpaceX would even go through the trouble of building a docking system on its own. The space agency had been working to design one for more than a decade, in partnership with Boeing, and NASA had offered it to SpaceX for free. Docking with the space station was a perilous task, and NASA was confident its system would work safely. All SpaceX had to do was install it.
> At other companies, such a thought would likely have been laughed at. A young engineer was going to improve on NASA’s design? Why even bother?
> When their prototype was finished, Matthews and Western showed it to Mark Juncosa, one of Musk’s most trusted engineers. Unlike some at the company, who shied away from dealing with Musk directly, Juncosa was unafraid of the boss. He told Matthews this was something Musk would want to see and that they should go show him the prototype that instant. Without an appointment, they rolled the McDocker over to Musk’s cubicle and asked him to take a look.
> Musk studied it intensely, pulling and pushing on the docking ring, while rubbing his chin. After just a few minutes, he said, “Yep, let’s do this.” There were no deliberations. No consultations with other engineers. No memos or meetings. Musk liked what he saw and simply made the decision to go.
> NASA was incredulous that SpaceX was rejecting its soft capture design and attempting to build something on its own.
> To be assigned to fly on SpaceX, then, was at best a dead end, many in the astronaut corps believed — because those astronauts would never fly. It might even be a death sentence —because if SpaceX did fly, the thinking was, “If they don’t kill you, you’ll be lucky,” Hurley said. “There were probably five people in the entire agency that thought we’d be successful.” SpaceX would treat you like cargo, Hurley was told. You’d be little more than a “biological payload.”
> Pakistan's spy agencies can monitor at least 4 million mobile phones at a time through its Lawful Intercept Management System (LIMS), while a firewall known as WMS 2.0 that inspects internet traffic can block 2 million active sessions at a time, Amnesty said.
> The two monitoring systems function in tandem: one lets intelligence agencies tap calls and texts while the other slows or blocks websites and social media across the country, it said.
> In court, Pakistan's defence ministries and intelligence agencies denied running or even having the capacity for phone tapping. But under questioning, the telecom regulator acknowledged it had already ordered phone companies to install LIMS for use by "designated agencies."
> Amnesty said the firewall uses equipment from U.S.-based Niagara Networks, software from Thales DIS, a unit of France's Thales, and servers from a Chinese state IT firm. An earlier version relied on Canada’s Sandvine.
> Niagara told Reuters it follows U.S. export rules, does not know end users or how its products are used, and only sells tapping and aggregation gear.
> Amnesty said the phone tapping system was made by Germany’s Utimaco and deployed through monitoring centres run by UAE-based Datafusion.
> Datafusion told Amnesty that its centres are only sold to law enforcement and that it does not make LIMS, while AppLogic Networks, the successor to Sandvine, said it has grievance mechanisms to prevent misuse.
> Media reports say that data of all SIM holders, including Interior Minister Naqvi, was sold at Google.
> They further said that information regarding mobile location was being sold for Rs500 (USD 1.78), mobile data record for Rs2,000 (USD 7.10) and details of foreign trips for Rs5,000 (USD 17.76).
> A couple of months ago, the National Cyber Emergency Response Team of Pakistan (PKCERT) issued an advisory warning that the login credentials and passwords of more than 180 million internet users in Pakistan have been stolen in a global data breach, urging people to take immediate protective measures. Media reports said PKCERT had identified the global breach involving a publicly accessible, unencrypted file containing more than 184 million unique account credentials.
> “The breach exposed user names, passwords, emails and associated URLs tied to major social media services, as well as government portals, banking institutions, and healthcare platforms worldwide,” the reports said quoting the PKCERT’s advisory.
> In March 2024, a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) formed to probe a data leak from the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra), told the interior ministry that the credentials of as many as 2.7 million people had been compromised between 2019 and 2023.
> ℹ Note: Multiple online services including Google Search and YouTube are currently experiencing international outages; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering #GoogleDown
Currently working fine for me in Pakistan. Btw, you can run https://api.webprobe.org/scan/ in a spare tab in the background and it will periodically check the status of such websites and update the NetBlocks status.
> The new lawsuit said Li began working as an engineer for xAI last year, where he helped train and develop Grok. The company said Li took its trade secrets in July, shortly after accepting a job from OpenAI and selling $7 million in xAI stock.
> Musk's startup said that the secrets could allow OpenAI to bolster ChatGPT with xAI's "more innovative AI and imaginative features."
> The lawsuit said Li admitted to stealing company files and "covering his tracks" during a meeting on August 14, and that the company later found additional stolen material on his devices that he had not disclosed.
I live in Pakistan and two years back we had this exact same problem, (election interference) and frankly, you just try to scrape through solutions, but without an answerable government, there is little you can do.
We tried things like Proton VPN and Windscribe VPN, as well as enabling MT proxy on Telegram, but soon govts find it easier to just mass ban internet access.
Use Netblocks.org to analyse the level of internet blockage and try to react accordingly.
I have 140k followers and a strong incentive to go back to X. I do check in occasionally for the reasons you state, and it’s unusable and high-noise every time I do it. There was a golden age for science on Twitter and it’s over. On BlueSky I don’t get the huge engagement (and there’s too much politics) but I can blather on about cryptography and people are enthusiastic and I don’t get weird bluecheck crypto scammers in my replies.
I find it much easier to filter out the politics on BlueSky and focus on my professional connections. I gave up on Twitter years ago precisely because I got sucked into politics all the bloody time.
Having control over your timeline/algorithm, and the absence of engagement bait, makes it worthwhile for me to be on such a platform for the first time.
The algorithm on X is intentionally less calibrated for everyone. For example replies are now ordered by subscriber status rather than time stamp or relevance. Subscribers also have preference in “For You” feeds and suggested accounts. There is also an overt thumb on the scale for certain accounts like Elon Musk or the Cat Turd guy.
It’s still an entertaining place to find memes etc, but any use as real signal for public sentiment is long gone.
In my country, our govt is promoting e-cycles, and they are about ~ USD 1,000, after being imported from China. They have similar specs to these 'bikes' (range-wise) and I think they are better vehicles, both in price and in utility.
https://www.pave.gov.pk/vehicles
No need to add fake pedals or create a useless 'bike' frame when people are earning for a scooter/motorcycle. Create easier licensing/registration options and you will see adoption rise for the vehicles people truly want.