Two of the four core tests for fair use hinge on this.
1. Purpose and character of the use. With emphasis on whether the copy was made for commercial use.
4. Effect on the work's value, and the creator's ability to exploit their work.
---
Both can be dramatically impacted by the intent of the copy, usually with enforcement and punishment also being considerably stronger if the copy is being made for commercial gain and not private use.
This for the actual work, definitely not for transformative works like llm output. So a ghibli style image of me is fine legally, whether I sell it or not.
I agree, the classifications are pretty solid when followed and I'm with you on class 2 being the right pick for most people - But I'd argue they're too complicated.
I think it's also a social issue right now, there's very little general information provided to bikers (ex - most people don't even know these classifications exist, and can't remember them if they do), and not a large enough chunk of the population is biking yet to get a general consensus on "acceptable" behavior.
Couple that with low enforcement, and it makes sense a fair number of people are just clueless.
---
Just simple things like "bike speed limit" signs on trails/paths would probably help a lot.
I have a class 3 ebike, and I'd still 100% prefer to ride it on a trail with a speed limit of 20mph instead of having trying to mingle with cars on even moderatly busy streets.
The laws should let bikers understand the desired behavior, and allow them to self-regulate.
Especially given that this isn't in the same risk category as larger vehicles (e-bikes are half the weight of mopeds, and 28mph is very different than 45)
Then give folks tickets. They're too useful to go away - we'll get it figured out.
I think the MPH limit for ebike classification makes sense. But why do they need a 750W limit? Whats the harm in a motor putting out 3000W to get a loaded cargo bike up a steep hill at 8 MPH.
> a motor putting out 3000W to get a loaded cargo bike up a steep hill at 8 MPH
Probably two reasons to avoid this. Practically, it's more expensive because not only do you have a 3kW motor but everything else must handle the increased demands. It just gets more expensive all around just for a niche case equivalent of "everyone needs a truck to carry 16 sheets of drywall and 12 2x4s".
The second is that regulators were reasonably pragmatic. Top speed, peak power, and weight are good proxies for safety, rather than having to regulate every aspect of a bike's operation like with cars. Bikes are spending most of their time on flat ground on city streets where huge power/torque are not just unnecessary, they're dangerous. Already plenty of e-bikes are going all out (governors are easily bypassed) on sidewalks and bike lanes where the others have 100W "motors". In my otherwise very civilized part of the world, every day I ride I almost get run over by assholes on full blown motorcycles speeding on the bike lane because it's faster. I have never, ever seen one get a fine. Nobody can do enforcement of safety at rider level especially for very lightly regulated and unregistered vehicles.
> Nobody can do enforcement of safety at rider level especially for very lightly regulated and unregistered vehicles.
I don't particularly buy this. I think we've spent very little time and effort actually trying.
I also think that the lax enforcement as it currently stands is a pretty practical take... My read is that ebikes (even the class 3s) aren't actually out there killing people in crashes all that often.
Of the folks who are dying on bikes... the majority of the deaths are still happening due to collisions with motor vehicles. The second largest cause of death is the rider dying due to lack of helmet usage coupled with the higher speeds.
---
Basically - I agree we should improve social patterns for not being a dick on a fast bike in mixed-use spaces.
But if we're talking about actual benefit to safety... the problem is still the cars and not the bikes. At least for now (again - it's shifting because e-bikes are just useful as all get out).
Your first point feels like it should easily be handled by regular market forces, ie no one can produce one in a price range anyone would want to buy.
I would suggest that the only good reason to have a peak power limit in law on the engine is so that if you unlock it/chip it you can't blast off at 60mph. But at that point you're breaking the speed limit either way, so I'm still not convinced a peak power limit is reasonable.
I have a powered bike that limits the speed to the lawful limit, but the engine has 500w instead of 250w, meaning my bike is better at getting up hills than my wife's. I don't think this should be illegal, and if I want to pay for a stronger engine, that is reasonably up to me.
That nobody is enforcing the speed limit on bike lanes is an enforcement issue, and it doesn't get solved by having unnecessarily tangential laws. And I'm certainly not a "deregulate everything" person.
> should easily be handled by regular market forces
I think we've heard this blurb so many times it should be a joke to be ridiculed by now. It usually prefaces a story about some abusive, exploitative action.
> But at that point you're breaking the speed limit either way, so I'm still not convinced a peak power limit is reasonable.
That's why I said that enforcement at rider level is impossible. The burden to check if someone removed some governor is so high that it might as well not be regulated in any way. Or you heavily strengthen and give an even broader mandate to LEO, and I hear that's what everyone wants more of these days.
So the easy way around this is to regulate the manufacturing or sales. You limit the power of the motor, you implicitly limit how fast the bike can realistically go, and how much weight it can carry at speed. This makes things a little bit safer. If you need more, choose a different vehicle. You don't buy a Fiesta and then shout in the wind that it's not allowed to have 18 wheels and carry 35t.
> That nobody is enforcing the speed limit on bike lanes is an enforcement issue, and it doesn't get solved by having unnecessarily tangential laws
I get that you really want something but this isn't an argument. The laws aren't "tangential" they are very much on point, trying to keep a balance between usability and safety faced with practical reality. Not the wishy-washy "the market will handle it" or "I should get it because I want it and anyone stopping me is stupid". The law allows every kind of vehicle for every need, under the appropriate conditions. You just think your conditions for your needs come first. Some people ride like that so the "tangential laws" exist to protect others from them.
The “market handling it” would mean liability lawsuits followed by mandatory liability insurance, with insurers installing telemetry devices on an ebike to decide how much to charge you or even just drop you as an uninsurable risk altogether.
In other words enough people would have to get hit and killed that there would be a huge series of lawsuits. In that scenario those people are still dead.
“The market handling it” is why there are hordes of cars with purposefully loud mufflers blasting past my house at many hours of the day. My state chose to make it illegal to build something like that but it’s perfectly legal to sell the parts. So the market did what the market does.
> The “market handling it” would mean liability lawsuits
Amazon and Temu sell so much illegal and dangerous junk and no lawsuit changed this. People still get hurt or killed by battery fires, malfunctioning products, intoxication with all kinds of chemicals.
> followed by mandatory liability insurance
People complain that they have to wear a helmet. They won't be fine with mandatory liability insurance. The level of bike theft shows that bikes are notoriously untraceable, it's very hard or prohibitively expensive to enforce this.
> with insurers installing telemetry devices on an ebike
Raises costs, requires cloud services and connectivity, and the owner can still hack the antenna off or shield it and the bike is now permanently offline but with no way to detect that on the street.
Amazon and Temu aren't allowed to sell cars, because we still regulate our cars somewhat, so the cars that are sold in America and Australia and other places have to meet certain safety requirements. The manufacturer is also 100% liable for things like recalls or safety defects, regardless of which dealer sold it to you or if you bought car used.
You can say people "won't be fine with mandatory liability insurance". That's what it's "mandatory". If you get caught operating a vehicle without one, you might just well lose your vehicle and have it impounded on the spot, have to pay a hefty fine, and have to prove you have insurance before you're allowed to drive again.
Insurers can and do detect if your telemetry stops transmitting - for example, State Farm offers a substantial discount if you transmit telemetry. If you sign up for this and then yank the device out, they simply charge you a higher rate.
We also have things like "helmet laws". You can't (for example) operate a motorcycle in California without a helmet. If you do, you'll get pulled over and ticketed and are stuck being unable to ride it away until someone either brings you a ticket or you go for a nice long walk and get one yourself, with a high chance your bike gets impounded from the side of the road.
I don't know why the attitude persists that the government can't regulate things and enforce laws. They certainly can.
Sorry but your post is all over the place. It's not nice to introduce random things in a conversation and force anyone who wants to respond to you to address all that randomness.
> I don't know why the attitude persists that the government can't regulate things and enforce laws. They certainly can.
Who said anything about government regulation? The latest part of the thread was about "the market" handling it, you yourself even said "with liability lawsuits", now you talk government regulation which is the opposite of that.
> Amazon and Temu aren't allowed to sell cars
Who said anything about cars? We're talking bicycles and other things people want to stay unregulated. They sell bad products and "the market" didn't handle it, not with lawsuits or regulation or enforcement. So many ebikes were catching fire in my complex while charging that the administration banned even storing ebikes in the underground parking or the individual storage units. The importer of the bikes (Amazon store?) was of course dissolved by that time.
> because we still regulate our cars somewhat
Who said anything about car regulations? That's exactly what people don't want with bicycles. Look at this discussion, people want to pretend even mopeds should still be called "just bikes" so they stay unregulated. The whole point of a bicycle is to be a simple unregulated vehicle with minimal capabilities. Not multi kilowatt motor vehicle that can carry heavy loads up a hill at speeds that most people barely cycle on the flat.
> You can't (for example) operate a motorcycle in California without a helmet.
Who said anything about motorcycles? You can operate a bicycle without a helmet because people weren't fine with mandatory helmet laws. Just like it will happen with "mandatory liability insurance and telemetry" for bikes. It might happen when we all live in a dystopia where everything you do is tracked, or for some bicycles that aren't really bicycles (mopeds and higher categories).
Whoever wants powerful motors or high carrying capacity should stop calling it "a bicycle" and call it a "moped" or "S-Pedelec". These already require insurance and a license plate. There are enough categories here [0] to cover all needs. Pretending everything on 2 wheels is a bicycle does cyclists a disservice and is like calling my car "an umbrella" so I'm allowed to take it everywhere with me.
My opinion is been that 747’s, cars, trucks, bikes, E bikes, an even pedestrians should be regulated on kinetic energy - basically their ability to do harm to others.
My fear is that without it, regulatory arbitrage will turn every inch of land that doesn’t have a building into Death Race 2000. Cars are not allowed on sidewalks to protect friends? No problem - here’s an electric motorcycle disguised as a bicycle. Hi
Doing some quick math, if your bike is using 3kw to climb a reasonably steep (15% grade) hill at 8mph, we can calculate the weight it must be carrying, which ends up being about 1,200lbs
To answer your question, the limit on motor power exists as a proxy for limiting the weight, speed, and acceleration of ebikes within safe limits, since having an ebike charging uphill at 20mph with 500lbs of payload would present actual safety risks. Trying to regulate payload/speed/slope combinations directly has practical problems (police officers don't really want to stop delivery drivers to weight their cargo), while regulating motor power is much simpler.
You don't need 3000W, 1kW is plenty. I have a Yuba Mundo (one of the biggest long-tail cargo bikes) and my Bafang motor tops out around 1kW and it's plenty even for the biggest hills here in Bloomington (which is quite hilly).
The problem I see with the e-bikers is that they just can't ride even at 20 mph. They don't fall off the bike because it moves fast enough but otherwise they are completely inept: break with the rear wheel only, can't stay in the lane, can't corner, don't signal turns, don't warn when passing etc.
20 mph is a moderate speed for a road bike, however, you need to ride a lot to comfortably get to this speed and as a result, when you get there, your skills are adequate. A roadie riding 20+ mph is not going to enter a blind corner in a left lane or skid out trying to maneuver around some trash on the path. Why should we punish people who bike for exercise? It's not like e-bikers are going to wipe much less at 20 mph, your 100 lbs "sauron" without front brakes is going to skid even at 10 mph.
See - I actually think this is a pretty interesting idea. Stool/Urine are fairly solid indicators of personal health in a lot of ways.
But I think this is a product that probably shouldn't be allowed to exist as a standard SaaS/IoT product.
If this was a box I could hook up on my toilet that showed useful info on a screen locally - with zero network access... I'd consider buying.
---
People are really glib about the loss of control relying on someone else's computer brings.
between service enshittification, company death (out of business), privacy concerns, and ownership contention (do I own a device if a company keeps keys to the locks inside it and won't give them to me? I'd argue a solid and resounding "NO")... I don't want anything to do with most modern networked devices in the form of IoT.
Sure. Load the data locally onto an SD card that I can use to share the data with my doctor. Sending the data off to some remote third party via a questionable internet connection is a no-go for me.
And like cars, replacement ebike batteries are absurdly expensive. $500-600 for a few 18650 and a BMS.
Part of it is that a battery pack is legitimately dangerous at that scale (so lots of testing/safety certifications etc). But those are one-time design costs that should be amortized.
I would really like to see some standardization around battery packs for both cars and bikes, so that it could become a commodity market for packs.
I really dislike it when a turing-complete language is used for configuration. It almost always breaks every possibility to programmatically process or analyze the config. You can't just JSON.parse the file and check it.
Also I've been in projects where I had to debug the config multiple levels deep, tracking side-effects someone made in some constructor trying to DRY out the code. We already have these issues in the application itself. Lets not also do that in configurations.
> It almost always breaks every possibility to programmatically process or analyze the config. You can't just JSON.parse the file and check it.
Counterpoint: 95% of config-readers are or could be checked in with all the config they ever read.
I have yet to come across a programming language where it is easier to read + parse + type/structure validate a json/whatever file than it is to import a thing. Imports are also /much/ less fragile to e.g. the current working directory. And you get autocomplete! As for checks, you can use unit tests. And types, if you've got them.
I try to frame these guys as "data values" rather than configuration though. People tend to have less funny ideas about making their data 'clean'.
The only time where JSON.parse is actually easier is when you can't use a normal import. This boils down to when users write the data and have practical barriers to checking in to your source code. IME such cases are rare, and most are bad UX.
> Side effects in constructors
Putting such things in configuration files will not save you from people DRYing out the config files indirectly with effectful config processing logic. I recently spent the better part of a month ripping out one such chimera because changing the data model was intractable.
This is what's nice about Pkl, you define a schema as a Pkl file, you define a value of that schema as a Pkl file that imports the schema, `pkl eval my file.pkl` will do the type check and output yaml for visual inspection or programmatic processing, but keeping it to one file per module means that I almost never obsessively D-R-Y my Pkl configs.
Actually that's not the biggest benefit (which is tests for schemas) but it's nice to have the “.ts” file actually log the actual config as JSON and then the app consumes it as JSON, rather than importing the .ts file and all its dependencies and having weird things like “this configuration property expects a lambda.”
I still have to see a JS project where the config for each tool could not be something simple like `.toolrc`. We could have some markers to delineate plugins config.
Instead, there’s a another software in the configuration of sample projects, instead of just using good code organization and sensible conventions.
It's been a bit since I've done this (I'm not watching live TV anymore), but something like HDHomeRun worked fine.
It basically pairs an antenna with a small computer to convert to network traffic, then gives you an app on your streaming device to play it back.
You do need to be able to run the vendor's app, and you'll get stuck with that UI for live tv (So yeah - totally agree that you're compromising the UX). But still no reliance on the "smarts" built into the tv.
I have an HDHomeRun box and use it through Plex. I've never installed the HDHomeRun software. Plex immediately recognized it as soon as I plugged it in. There is a noticeable amount of latency between selecting a channel and starting the stream, so channel surfing is pretty cumbersome, but I almost never do that. With the paid version of Plex (Plex Pass), you also get DVR support which automatically removes commercials from the recording, so that's pretty much the only way I use it.
Good to know - At the time I wasn't self-hosting as much so I hadn't explored that.
You're right, though - both Plex and Jellyfin seem to have pretty good support these days, so if you're already running one of those it's a nicer integration.
You generally don't want a smart tv you can hack. You want a decent computer you own sending signal through the external inputs.
The SBC in the TV is, hands down across basically every "smart" TV I've interacted with, a cheap piece of crap (even well into the "expensive" brands and models).
Manufacturers stick the absolute cheapest garbage in there that can output the advertised resolution during playback without stuttering.
So you can spend hours/days/week wrestling this cheap, underpowered board back from the manufacturer... or you can just side-step it entirely and spend much less time and effort sticking a decent computer you own behind the tv.
Personally - what you're asking for is type definitions.
And it's a blurry line, since type definitions are a good form of documentation. It's just that type-system tooling has mostly replaced the need to go read through the docs for that. I expect to get it easily and obviously in whatever editor or IDE I've configured.
I think the prevalence of example based documentation is because of this trend - don't waste time manually writing the same thing type tooling is going to give your users anyway.
When I hit docs - I'm much less interested in the specific arguments, and I'm very interested in "Capabilities": Problems this tool can solve.
Examples are a great showcase for that. Especially if I have a specific problem in mind and I just want to know if a "tool" can solve that problem, and how to use it to do so.
---
If I have a type system: I want examples first.
If I don't have a type system: 1) I'm not happy. 2) I want examples first, followed by the detailed arguments/return/data structure docs you're referring to.
It's the API specification. It's not just the functions and their parameters, it's also an explanation of what they do.
> I'm much less interested in the specific arguments, and I'm very interested in "Capabilities"
And that's exactly what an API specification provides you, and that examples do not. Examples only tell you how to use the API on the same way that the author is using it.
I really want both. I can follow examples and read specifications, but i likely want the simplest example first if I'm using a tool, and then the specifications after i've used it a few times.
it's much harder to imagine everything a tool can do with only the specs, and I'm not clear what things I'm missing. Examples make it concrete
The most annoying problem I run into with strongly typed languages or even typed python for that matter, is what on earth do I expect this to return?
With python, it could be a mysterious class that isn't explicitly mentioned.
For Rust, you often need to know 4 layers deep of nested types for various error and flow control, and once generics are introduced with the expectation of implemented traits, it all goes out the window.
If I need to declare the type of a value ahead of time, or know it's shape to serialize, check, etc, I want a very clear "this is what it returns, this is how it's expected to be used".
It's not like this is going unnoticed either, though.
The International Ski Federation (FIS) now bans fluorinated wax in all their competitions, and this wax is explicitly called out alongside cookware in much of the legislation that's going around in places like CA/CO for PFAS bans.
Two of the four core tests for fair use hinge on this.
1. Purpose and character of the use. With emphasis on whether the copy was made for commercial use.
4. Effect on the work's value, and the creator's ability to exploit their work.
---
Both can be dramatically impacted by the intent of the copy, usually with enforcement and punishment also being considerably stronger if the copy is being made for commercial gain and not private use.
reply