Comment by matthewkayin
7 hours ago
I like this analogy. I'll add that, while electric bicycles are great for your daily commute, they're not suited for the extremes of biking (at least not yet).
- You're not going to take an electric bike mountain biking
- You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX
- You're not going to use an electric bike to go bikepacking across the country
Whistlerite here. My Strava stats for last year suggest half and half eMTB and road riding. Tiny bit of fully self-powered MTB work.
As a 56-year old, eBikes are what make mountain biking possible and fun for me.
>- You're not going to take an electric bike mountain biking
this sounds like a direct quote from Femke Van Den Driessche, who actually took an electric bike mountain biking: big mistake. Did it not perform well? no, actually it performed really well, the problem was, it got her banned from bike racing. Some of the evidence was her passing everybody else on the uphills; the other evidence was a motorized bike in her pit area.
Actually, electric mountain bikes are popular (where they're allowed), mostly because they make ascents so easy.
They’re great when the trails aren’t too technical. No so much when they are (as I’ve learned from personal experience )
I'm curious what your personal experience is.
My eMTBs are just as capable as my manual bikes (similar geometry, suspension, etc). In fact, they make smashing tech trails easier because there's more weight near the bottom bracket which adds a lot of stability.
The ride feel is totally different though. I tend to gap more sections on my manual bike whereas I end up plowing through stuff on the hefty eeb.
People have definitely used ebikes for bikepacking as well. Not sure about BMX.
I think you're kind of missing the point discussing which vehicle compares better to LLMs. The point is not the vehicle: it's the birth of the engine. Before engines, humans didn't have the means to produce those amounts of power- at all. No matter how many people, horses or oxen they had at their disposal.
I don't think they're missing the point. I think there's still fundamental disagreements about the functional utility of LLMs.
> You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX
while there are companies that have made electric BMX bikes, i'd argue that if you're doing actual "BMX" on a motorized bike, it's just "MX" at that point :)