I can't has cheezburger

“Holy shit, that’s fast.”

The red light had just turned green and I press on the throttle with my thumb. Instantly I am thrust forward, and I hit 20mph in three seconds.

If ALSO could only demo a single thing about the bike, that’d be the feature to sell me on. I’m guilty of gliding past so many a yellow light when biking, because when you stop at a red light you lose all your momentum. You’re stuck shifting down, maybe adjusting the pedal assist level, and then slowly lurching forward once the light is green again.

As I passed by another test rider who had just tried the same thing with the throttle I heard him exclaim “fucking hell!”

But this bike is more than its ludicrously fast acceleration that goes from 0–20 in 3 seconds, fast enough to make you think you’re about to do a wheelie (which a representative assured me won’t happen because the front wheels detect being off the ground which will cut power to the motor).

ALSO started its life at Rivian before it got spun off into its own independent company, and you can see Rivian’s DNA all over this bike, from the shape of its headlight, to the sound design of its electronic bell, to the fact that they use Rivian EV battery cells to power the bike’s drivetrain.

And coming off the pandemic years when it seemed like the market was flooded with e-bikes and e-bike companies (of which many no longer exist, including my beloved DOST), ALSO is here trying something completely new.

The TM-B is nominally a bike-shaped bike. But if you look closer, almost everything about it is custom, and the most custom part of this bike is its drivetrain system.

With every other bike and ebike, your pedals are mechanically connected to the wheels, sometimes directly, and sometimes through a series of gears and other mechanical contrivances. The TM-B is different. When you pedal the TM-B, you feed power into a generator, and that generator (plus the battery) powers a separate motor that actually propels the bike.

This is super cool, because the amount of energy it takes to pedal is constant, whether you are on flat terrain or on a steep hill. It doesn’t feel fake like an exercise bike either; it just feels like you’re riding a bike. The resistance grows as you push harder, and the bike moves faster. It’s an incredible feeling.

I’m quite enamored with the cool things ALSO did with the custom design of this bike too (another general characteristic I love about Rivian’s EVs). Everything is super tightly integrated. You have built-in lights (and turn signals), as well as an electronic bell. There is a nice looking color center screen that displays surprisingly well even in bright daylight. The seats are interchangeable, and you have a few different options including a bench seat, a cargo setup, and a plain old bike seat.

The bike takes a little getting used to, though. I test rode one with standard handlebars (which provide a more upright experience) and I still felt like the handlebars were low for my taste as a 6’2" rider. I feel like I’m leaning way more forward than I do on my current bike. The crank length is also shorter than what I’m accustomed to, and it made the pedaling motion seem a bit shallower. The handlebars are not able to be changed in height, but allegedly the crank could be changed as it uses standard parts (according to a post I saw on a forum). It wasn’t uncomfortable, just different, like I was getting into a smaller sports car. When my ride was over and I got back on my own bike to ride home it felt like being back with an old friend. It almost gave me pause about my preorder, but then as soon as I had to stop at a red light with my existing bike and then get going again, I realized I’ve been ruined. I don’t plan to get rid of my current bike anyway, so if I ever am craving a comfy ride on a big framed bike, I can just hop on the old one. But I have a feeling I won’t do that often.

As the owner of a bike made by a company that has gone under, I realize I’m taking an even bigger risk with the TM-B. My DOST Kope is made with largely off-the-shelf components and my local bike shop has never balked at servicing it. But the TM-B is a whole other ballgame, and if they go under then I’m at the mercy of the longevity of most of the bike.

But I’m hoping it doesn’t come to this, and I am optimistic it won’t, because this bike feels like something entirely new.

As I was riding home today, I was trying to think of an apt comparison. If a standard bike is like a gas-powered car, and traditional pedal-assist e-bikes are like a plug-in hybrid car, then the TM-B feels like a proper EV. It’s a glimpse at a reimagining of what bikes can be. It’s the kind of bike that you could show an open-minded person who has never thought it possible to commute by bike and they could be convinced to take the leap. This bike’s drive system feels well-suited to last mile commercial delivery as well, and with the right attached equipment could probably be sold as-is to delivery companies.

If you’re a bike enthusiast and you love bikes for the limits they currently have, it’s a toss up whether you’re going to ride a TM-B and like it. But if you’re not a biker at all right now, this is the bike that could make a bike enthusiast out of you, and I love that about it.

About a week ago someone finally noticed the 18 year old vestigial PHP apps that were sitting in my shared hosting server and decided to turn icanthaszheezburger into a zombie site.

I think I’ve got everything back in order again now.

If anything still seems off, let me know.

I gave a talk last year at XO Ruby about how it’s felt like the vibes have been off in tech for some time.

I feel differently about the overall tech industry vibes a year-ish later, but one thing has gotten decidedly worse: fascists remain way too comfortable and powerful in tech.

Case in point: DHH has developed this annoying habit of going on increasingly racist tirades on X and his blog, complaining a lot recently that there are too many non-white people in Europe. It’s transparent white supremacist bullshit, and people take notice.

But not enough people notice. Recently, he went on a press tour for his new Linux distro, and my YouTube feed has been filled with videos of dudes (because of course it’s all dudes) credibly reviewing it and singing its praises as an OS while completely ignoring the racist bullshit DHH is spewing on the regular.

And it gets even more discouraging because DHH has managed to secure over $12 million in funding from a bunch of other tech buddies including the CEOs of Shopify and Stripe, and 1Password also decided to throw a six figure sum into the mix.

DHH was already independently wealthy before this, and there are hundreds of other open source projects that are way more load-bearing to modern tech infrastructure what are way less fascist who could have used that $12MM more. But these contributions weren’t actually about helping a fledgling software project; they were rich, powerful racist dudes in tech propping up their even more racist buddy.

This pattern is absolutely not isolated to tech, but the tech world is my home, and that feels like more of an affront. In many ways tech and the internet are my home in a deeper and more existential way than any physical place is my home. And for much of my adult life the industry has grappled with these issues in the open and for awhile I felt like they made decent progress.

But that progress has been blown apart in recent years. I’m sick of seeing my home become overrun with far-right crackpots.

I’m sick of seeing the bad guys winning.

On a deeper level, I’m frustrated that the far-right is so well organized while we aren’t. They are rich and well-connected. If you are in law school there’s a Federalist Society chapter, ready to groom the next generation of lawyers to become judges SCOTUS justices and authors of Project 2025. They’re super methodical, spending decades stacking the deck in their favor, and they can do it because they have the resources and the ability to be patient.

But everything the right is doing and pushing for is broadly unpopular, and that weirdly gives me optimism.

It takes a massive and expensive machine of propaganda and pushing on the fairness of elections themselves to keep the far right in power because every policy they make really obviously sucks, is wildly unpopular, and makes life visibly worse for people. It requires that the rich spend tens of billions literally owning the social networks we communicate on so that they can tip the scales in favor of their causes.

And the more unpopular the right’s platform becomes, the more money it takes to keep that afloat.

So even though the bad guys are catching mad Ws right now, it can’t last forever.

The tech industry has a lot of DHHs unfortunately. But I think it has more non-DHHs, and I think it has more conscientious people who think and care deeply about the specific corners of the world they are committed to making a better place. I’m trying to do that too, in my own little weird ways.

For my own spirit, I need y’all to start being louder. You don’t have to spout your anger (but you can if it helps you feel better). I just want to hear about what you care about so I can celebrate that y’all exist and care about those things.