Week Links #3 #
Rad Power Bikes—North America’s largest ebike company—sent a notice to its employees that it may go out of business as soon as January 2026. Although I went with a similar rival company when I bought an ebike a little over 4 years ago,Market dilution is one, but not the only, issue Rad is facing. They are partially a victim of their own success, having created a market. the Rad headquarters near where I live in Ballard in Seattle is the first place I rode an ebike. I’m broadly a big fan of ebikes since they help so many people replace trips they would otherwise do by car and can really help move things forward, so it’s sad to see this collapse unfolding. Anyways, GeekWire has a bit more detail on the rise and fall of Rad.
I’m an avid watcher of Top Chef and have long been a fan of now-former host Padma Lakshmi. So I was happy to read this interview of her, which mainly focuses on her new book. They do, however, also tease a new cooking competition show that she will host at the end. Can’t wait!
Corporations are people: groan. But so are ships, and some other unexpected things.
The great Len Necefer has a long piece on why the environmental movement has been struggling, focusing on a certain kind of stasis in communication and lack of imagination from the large organizations behind it. He always strikes me as someone on the left with a robust theory of change who’s not afraid to express it and who’s also not afraid to have a (often very funny) personality.
I’m looking forward to Age of Audio, a documentary on the history of podcasting.
It’s long, but you must read An Age of Hyperabundance, where Laura Preston recounts her experience at “The Voice”, a conversational AI conferenceShe calls it “the” such conference, but I’m not sure it’s deserving of that article. where she was invited to be the resident skeptical keynote. The conclusion of a sad anecdote from her from 2019 when she was the human fallback from an apartment rental chatbot:
The story of Ella was an example of a chatbot working badly. It was also an example of a chatbot working wonderfully. Not once was a landlord’s silence disturbed by this woman and her problems. She was not even a person in the database, but a hysterical pronoun. And how apt, in the end, for her troubles to divert to us, a group of poets and novelists hired specifically for our feelings, who could feel for her endlessly but do nothing else, as we did not know the landlord’s name or how to reach him and lived very far away.
The rest of the story from the conference reads like satire but, alas, is not.