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Comment by LinXitoW | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, e-bikes, at least in the EU, are having the exact opposite effect. More people that don't normally ride bikes are using e-bikes to get about. The motor functions not as a replacement, but as a force multiplier. It also makes "experimenting" easier, because the motor can make up for any mistakes or wrong turns.

Caveat: In the EU, an e-bike REQUIRES some physical effort any time for the motor to run. Throttles are illegal.

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> Ironically, e-bikes, at least in the EU, are having the exact opposite effect. More people that don't normally ride bikes are using e-bikes to get about.

At least in Germany people rather joke that the moment e-bikes became popular, people began to realize that they suddenly became too unathletic to be capable of pedaling a bicycle. I know of no person who uses an e-bike who did not ride an ordinary bicycle before.

> In the EU, an e-bike REQUIRES some physical effort any time for the motor to run.

The motor must shut off when 25 km/h is reached - which is basically the speed that a trained cyclist can easily attain. So because of this red tape stuff, e-bikes are considered to be useless and expensive by cyclists who are not couch potatoes.

But they still cannot assist 100%, there needs to be effort from the user.

Otherwise they would be considered e-scooters and would have different rules and regulations applied.

Yes, you pedal with almost zero effort when flat and with a little more effort when uphill. Obviously if you are going to go up the Tourmalet you will run out of battery pretty soon, but that's not the context most e-bikers use them.

In that it fits the LLM situation quite well. LLMs remove the anxieties around coding for newbies at scale better than they make indisputable productivity gains for senior developers, similar to how e-bikes help with newbies more than cyclists.

I know that's what many people, especially elder one, say but this is still a hill I will die on :) They are mostly used to go in mostly flat roads, like some slow-speed motorcycle that needs some low effort. The ones using them outside paved road, using them as multipliers, are the ones that already did mountain biking when they were younger and they want to continue doing it at a higher level their age would permit without (which it's perfectly fine!).

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