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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Having ridden DI2 for over 10 years, in the Canadian winter, with salted roads, I have to believe you’ve never used/maintained/serviced an electronic drivetrain.

    The mechanical parts will fail as equally quickly - in the same places - if not maintained.

    I’ve not yet had an electronics failure on my three electronic drivetrains. Mechanical bits will wear out as per usual.

    Until the recent influx of low-cost electronic group sets, the ones on sale from SRAM and Shimano were high-end enough that they were/are incredibly reliable with the exception of the first generation external Di2 Dura Ace battery which had a poorly designed mount that would indeed cause issues over time. The internal battery remedied that issue.


  • I’ve been running Di2 since 2014 on my gravel grinder. It was a mullet setup with Ultegra DI2 / Wolftooth extender, XT cassette, SRAM 1x chainring and crank. I moved up to a clutched XT Di2 rear as soon as it was available. No dropped chains.

    The shifting, now 10 years later, is AS GOOD as the day I got it. The battery, also 10 years old, still only needs charging 1-3 times a year depending on how much I’m riding that bike.

    I went SRAM Eagle AXS for my bike packing bike.

    It’s not as good as 11-speed XT Di2, even though my Eagle is XX. But the small drop in shifting performance (still sky high) is made up for by the ease-of-use. When I bought the bike, it was lightly used and setup as a single speed. Wireless electronic shifting made the switch easy. The most complicated thing was changing the freehub body to XD. After that it was put on the shifter, the derailleur and I was off to the races. I’ve taken it on days-long bike packing trips and I can do it all on a single battery, but I keep a spare on me because it’s so tiny.

    My mountain bike has SRAM Transmission on it and it’s as perfect as shifting could ever be (also bought used because the bikepocalypse is real and I might as well take advantage).

    With electronic shifting, I love that I can customize it to a level not possible with cabled shifting. I like that I can choose the speed of the shifts, which button does what, and I have my Shimano and SRAM bikes setup to match each other: same buttons for higher/lower gears and the same hold-for-3 multi-shift behaviour.

    Now, bear in mind that when I get on my cabled-bikes, I don’t really think “boy this sucks” - but I maintain them all well.

    Electronic shifting is incredible. I would never go back for my main bikes unless it gets all cloud-subscribers-enshittified (which is highly probable LOL).

    But, being honest, it is truly a luxury and in no way needed. Any bike being ridden is a great bike.

    AMA else. I’m here for it.

    Aside: hilariously this is the Shimano semi-wireless Di2 in this article which is part of the sad decay of Shimano in general (I’m looking at you unreliable-shimano-power-meter and crank arms coming unbonded). The most popular wireless electronic kits are SRAM and, if I understand it correctly, they’re not affected by this particular issue. Doesn’t mean hackers won’t find one of course!



  • Good enough? I mean it’s allowed. But it’s only good enough if a licensee decides your their goal is to make using the code they changed or added as hard as possible.

    Usually, the code was obtained through a VCS like GitHub or Gitlab and could easily be re-contributed with comments and documentation in an easy-to-process manner (like a merge or pull request). I’d argue not completing the loop the same way the code was obtained is hostile. A code equivalent of taking the time (or not) to put their shopping carts in the designated spots.

    Imagine the owner (original source code) making the source code available only via zip file, with no code comments or READMEs or developer documentation. When the tables are turned - very few would actually use the product or software.

    It’s a spirit vs. letter of the law thing. Unfortunately we don’t exist in a social construct that rewards good faith actors over bad ones at the moment.


  • As someone who worked at a business that transitioned to AGPL from a more permissive license, this is exactly right. Our software was almost always used in a SaaS setting, and so GPL provided little to no protection.

    To take it further, even under the AGPL, businesses can simply zip up their code and send it to the AGPL’ed software owner, so companies are free to be as hostile as possible (and some are) while staying within the legal framework of the license.


  • While I’ve had similar thoughts, I have to wonder if the reverse is true. We’re seeing an uprising of joy and caring; something as equally infectious as the hateful, controlling rhetoric of the Trump-era Republican Party.

    I think (hope) people see the two options and are drawn to the joy. Being angry is exhausting.

    There is a lot of terrible out there we need to work together to solve. Some of it is sad, depressing, frustrating, wildly unjust-but we can be joyful in tackling these issues. Maybe not all the time, but then no one is ever one thing or one mood or one emotion. Nevertheless, a campaign of joy can make us realize there is indeed another way.

    Looking at Trump’s tragic demagoguery and seeing what’s going on with the Harris/Walz campaign , it’s not hard to believe more and more people are thinking “you know what, I want that.”

    So hearing PP using the same old poor-us, divisive, othering talking points begins to take on some of the same burden. It’s tired. It’s ugly. It’s empty.

    One can dream right?