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This is basically a Black Mirror type story….but from 1896. And it’s about bicycles. Fascinating.

• Dylan16807 1y ago
  A guy refusing any training and then immediately getting hurt doesn't really feel to me like it has the same skepticism for the actual technology. Especially when basically the same thing could happen with a horse.
  • pxc 1y ago
    This! It's about what a clown this guy is and laughing at a small comeuppance.
  • JimDabell 1y ago
    It does, however, have direct parallels to the developers who believe they can just use AI without a learning curve because they can already write code, fail at doing so, and conclude that AI is terrible instead of learning how to use it.
    • andrepd 1y ago
      Nowhere is safe.
    • zahlman 1y ago
      It makes no sense to suppose that a special skill needs to be learned, or training done, to get good use out of something that is supposedly going to obviate huge swaths of intellectual work.
• noobermin 1y ago
  May be this is a bit of anachronism but this poem does not read as being anti-bicycle more so than it having hubris and lack of experience with new fangled thing (bicycle).
• andrepd 1y ago
  When someone passing through first rode a bicycle through my grandmother's hamlet, there was a general panic and someone even shrieked "the Devil comes, in two wheels!". This was in the 1930s.
  • BaseBaal 1y ago
    I vaguely remember reading somewhere about people seeing warriors on horseback for the first time calling them four legged demons or some such thing. I wonder what it would take to elicit that type of panicked response today?