7 ms·

China made the best drones, now Anduril does

37 points by MikusR 6y ago

sneak 6y ago
Context, from wikipedia, that sheds some light on the nationalistic headline: > In June 2017, Luckey co-founded the defense technology company Anduril, along with former Palantir Technologies executives Matt Grimm, Trae Stephens and Brian Schimpf, and early Oculus hardware lead Joe Chen.[40] (Anduril, like Palantir, is named after an object from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writings.) In March 2018, Anduril began a pilot program for the U.S. government to detect illegal immigrants attempting to enter Texas from Mexico; the program led to 55 attempted entrants being caught in its first 12 days in operation. This post is advertising for a drone company that sells surveillance equipment to the militarized federal police department in the US that is responsible for running the concentration camps in Texas.
- skavi 6y ago
  Looks like a fairly well designed machine. I wish it wasn't so oriented around the whole making the world a worse place thing.
- georgeburdell 6y ago
  Your post could do without the "concentration camp" flame-bait; it diminishes the phrase for those with family members who died in actual concentration camps during WWII. Drones are basically a toy weapon, so your complaint is that a for-profit company that sells toy weapons would pursue business from its largest potential customer.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Not flamebait, just facts. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentration-camps-southern-border-migrant-detention-facilities-trump/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentratio...
    - elefanten 6y ago
      “We have what I would call a concentration camp system,” Pitzer says, “and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial.” Here we have category of "person invents a definition that advances their political goals." GP's point stands that invoking what is signified to most readers by "concentration camp" is in a different universe from what you're talking about. You can call out, highlight, criticize and advocate against bad practices without sensationalizing the discourse.
      - conception 6y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_internment_camps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_in... https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp No, that’s what they are. That’s what you call such a camp.
      - DanBC 6y ago
        Just checking whether you know that people call the camps run by Nazis "concentration camps" and "extermination camps", because there's a difference. EG, here's the Auschwitz Memorial twitter account bio: https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum > Official account EN. The Memorial preserves the site of the former German Nazi Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. You can help http://donate.auschwitz.org http://donate.auschwitz.org You said the person "invents a definition", but that's easily refuted by looking in a dictionary. concentration 7. attrib.: concentration camp, a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African War of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45; also fig.; concentration cell Electr., a cell whose difference of potential is due to the difference of concentration of the solutions in which the electrodes are immersed. 1901: J. Ellis in Hansard's Parl. Deb. Ser. iv. XC. 180 “The policy of placing the women and children confined in the concentration camps in South Africa, whose husbands and fathers are in the field, on reduced rations.” 1901: Contemp. Rev. Oct. 528 “Considerable controversy has taken place concerning the Concentration Camps.” 1930: O. Williams tr. P. Monelli's Toes Up iii. 210 “Those who returned from being prisoners were parked in a concentration camp under the guard of other soldiers.” 1934: Ann. Reg. 1933 173 “Germany..For dealing with the masses of prisoners special concentration camps were opened.” 1934: C. Lambert Music Ho! i. 52 “The purely fashionable change in the tastes of the concentration camp of intellectuals to whom Diaghileff played up.” 1935: B. Russell Relig. & Sci. x. 248 “In Germany and Russia,..those who openly disagree, even if they escape with their lives, are liable to forced labour in a concentration camp.” 1940: H. G. Wells Babes in Darkling Wood iii. i. 234 “The White Paper of Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps and elsewhere.” 1941: [see Aryanization b]. 1943: [see Aryan a. 2]. 1959: J. Braine Vodi v. 76 “He caught sight of his own arms, reduced almost to concentration-camp dimensions, the veins blue and obscenely swollen against the white skin.”
  - snowwrestler 6y ago
    Setting aside the question of Anduril, “concentration camp” is a general term that is not specific to Nazi Germany’s death camps. The U.S. operated concentration camps for people (including U.S. citizens) of Japanese national origin during WWII. https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp The topic is super partisan right now, but in the long run, the current U.S. detention centers near the southern border have a good chance of being considered concentration camps because of the intense and overt focus on the national origin and ethnicity of those detained. Immigrants of other ethnicities, even those without entry visas or other documentation problems, are not being similarly detained.
ETHisso2017 6y ago
This sounds like the ad for slaughterbots.
- imtringued 6y ago
  I always laugh at that video because once you realize what applications loitering munitions have in real life they are not much more dangerous than a tank shell or recoilless rifle. Meanwhile what slaughterbots is showing is already happening except it overly dramatizes it. The USA sends drones and deploys hellfire missiles against suspected terrorists killing innocent people in the process. The video is just some FUD crap trying to make toys look dangerous. Tattletail and Five Nights at Freddy’s are horror games that take advantage of this emotion. I would be more worried about current governments that are committing genocide with good old fashioned guns or chemical weapons. Drones are just one more tool in an existing arsenal.
emcq 6y ago
This is FUD. Skydio has produced and sold amazing drones in the US for several years. Both are invested in by Andreessen Horowitz and Palmer almost certainly knows about them.
- coolspot 6y ago
  Actually reading the post would tell you that he means that Anduril just released best Inspire-sized drone for military use. Skydio is great drone, but it is toy-sized plastic drone. Specifications of the Ghost 4 are really impressive: 100 minutes flight time with couple pounds of payload powered by standard Li-ion batteries, rugged design and materials, low sound signature and thin visible profile, on-board AI, swarming, autonomy, etc.
- coolspot 6y ago
  Impressive: > Ghost is a single-rotor aircraft. The mechanicals of the rotor system are harder to design and manufacture than a DJI-style quadcopter, and flight controls are harder to program, but the result is much lower aerodynamic disk loading that results in longer endurance (over 100 minutes with real mission payloads), near-silent acoustic signature, high max payload capacity (dozens of pounds), and high speed. Compare this with a DJI Inspire 2, a high-end offering that costs $3000 that can lumber around with a couple pounds for 24 to 27 minutes, props screaming. > Ghost is autonomous, powered by an onboard AI Core that can perform 32 trillion operations per second.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Single rotor controls are much, much simpler. At least it does not require a mandatory PID control to not fall out of the sky. Very little math involved in control of a helicopter. A 3 actuator type with 1 actuator for each axis basically has no need for any control signal manipulation, and can be made fully analog. And a helicopter can be made more or less statically stable by pure mechanics, and aerodynamics. P.S. It doesn't seem that the drone in question exist in anything, but CGI at the moment. P.P.S. And quite unsound CG at that. On some of their CG shots, a swashplate actuators are attached with their axis coincidal with that rotor..., and a tail rotor control yoke not attached to anything...
tristan123456 6y ago
This is an ad, not more not less?
heckerhut 6y ago
Wow, this guy has a war fetish. Makes the ideas and intent behind OR and its subsequent sale to FB all the more questionable. Sick, sick world.
- artifact_44 6y ago
  Yup. I was pretty sad when I found out he was a right winger.
  - jayspell 6y ago
    Really? You would rather the guy building it was associated with CCP?
    - mcphage 6y ago
      (Not the person your replying to, but) No, I don't wish the guy building it was associated with the CCP, but given what happens to US military hardware these days—it ends up in the hands of the police, who use it against US citizens—this isn't all that much better.
- d1lanka 6y ago
  I mean, I get your sentiment, but what's the alternative? So far, this tech seems to be recon + defense oriented and not straight up slaughterbot killer drones etc. If we aren't building it, someone else will - and I'd rather us have this than China etc. or some other authoritarian government.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
xnx 6y ago
Seems like a drone with these characteristics could have a lot of nonmilitary uses as well: search and rescue, wildlife research, small deliveries, etc.
jacknews 6y ago
I realise this isn't aimed at us civilian plebs (yet, lol!), but still, I guess the old adage applies, if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Unless I missed the price sticker somewhere?
- baybal2 6y ago
  Take a look on Yamaha R-MAX
CamperBob2 6y ago
"Twelve years of watching drone technology at CES emerge and then boom has made one thing abundantly clear: China Won. American companies have built a lot of cool science fair projects that get lots of media attention, but minimal real-world deployment – from light shows to food delivery. We also design a lot of interesting low-volume consumer drones, but most of them lean heavily on Chinese R&D and then go on to have their product manufactured in China. Yes, I know, I am fully aware I did the same thing years ago with Oculus." He's not wrong. A few years ago, I spent $399 for a point-and-shoot digital camera that took decent photos under decent lighting conditions. It supported resolutions up to 1920x1080 or so. DJI just sold me a camera for the same price that takes better photos. Also, it takes videos. Also, it fucking flies. It can fly for over 20 minutes, shoot a 1080p or 2.7K video two miles away, and find its own way back home. Uncle, already. In a completely-unrelated anecdote, some other people in China just sold me a 3 GHz vector network analyzer with performance and features comparable to a $10,000 portable VNA model from Keysight. It cost $70, batteries included. (And in an amusing bit of irony, its Chinese designer is currently upset because some other Chinese people used its CC-licensed design and GPL-licensed firmware to undercut her own Tindie offering.) Not many people will find the second example very meaningful, but quite a few people can appreciate the first one. If you haven't played with a quad yet and your toy budget can accommodate $399 (really $499, because you want the 'Fly More' kit), consider setting aside a Saturday afternoon to goof around with a Mavic Mini. It'll change your perspective on the evolution of consumer-accessible technology and on your own neighborhood. I can see why the Powers that Be in the US are pulling out all the stops to hose China by any means necessary. This is what it must have felt like to watch the rise of Japan in the 1970s, as they turned a reputation for being a bunch of half-assed copycats into a world-class engineering culture. (It should go without saying that none of this is an attempt to justify any political, military, economic, or social actions on the part of China's government. But it won't, so there, it's said.)
kalium-xyz 6y ago
3DR is american and makes DJI their gymbals.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwawaymanbot 6y ago
Palmer is an authoritarian/far rightist adorer!

37 points by MikusR 6y ago

Context, from wikipedia, that sheds some light on the nationalistic headline: > In June 2017, Luckey co-founded the defense technology company Anduril, along with former Palantir Technologies executives Matt Grimm, Trae Stephens and Brian Schimpf, and early Oculus hardware lead Joe Chen.[40] (Anduril, like Palantir, is named after an object from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writings.) In March 2018, Anduril began a pilot program for the U.S. government to detect illegal immigrants attempting to enter Texas from Mexico; the program led to 55 attempted entrants being caught in its first 12 days in operation. This post is advertising for a drone company that sells surveillance equipment to the militarized federal police department in the US that is responsible for running the concentration camps in Texas.

skavi 6y ago
Looks like a fairly well designed machine. I wish it wasn't so oriented around the whole making the world a worse place thing.
georgeburdell 6y ago
Your post could do without the "concentration camp" flame-bait; it diminishes the phrase for those with family members who died in actual concentration camps during WWII. Drones are basically a toy weapon, so your complaint is that a for-profit company that sells toy weapons would pursue business from its largest potential customer.
- sneak 6y ago
  Not flamebait, just facts. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentration-camps-southern-border-migrant-detention-facilities-trump/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentratio...
  - elefanten 6y ago
    “We have what I would call a concentration camp system,” Pitzer says, “and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial.” Here we have category of "person invents a definition that advances their political goals." GP's point stands that invoking what is signified to most readers by "concentration camp" is in a different universe from what you're talking about. You can call out, highlight, criticize and advocate against bad practices without sensationalizing the discourse.
    - conception 6y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_internment_camps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_in... https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp No, that’s what they are. That’s what you call such a camp.
    - DanBC 6y ago
      Just checking whether you know that people call the camps run by Nazis "concentration camps" and "extermination camps", because there's a difference. EG, here's the Auschwitz Memorial twitter account bio: https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum > Official account EN. The Memorial preserves the site of the former German Nazi Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. You can help http://donate.auschwitz.org http://donate.auschwitz.org You said the person "invents a definition", but that's easily refuted by looking in a dictionary. concentration 7. attrib.: concentration camp, a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African War of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45; also fig.; concentration cell Electr., a cell whose difference of potential is due to the difference of concentration of the solutions in which the electrodes are immersed. 1901: J. Ellis in Hansard's Parl. Deb. Ser. iv. XC. 180 “The policy of placing the women and children confined in the concentration camps in South Africa, whose husbands and fathers are in the field, on reduced rations.” 1901: Contemp. Rev. Oct. 528 “Considerable controversy has taken place concerning the Concentration Camps.” 1930: O. Williams tr. P. Monelli's Toes Up iii. 210 “Those who returned from being prisoners were parked in a concentration camp under the guard of other soldiers.” 1934: Ann. Reg. 1933 173 “Germany..For dealing with the masses of prisoners special concentration camps were opened.” 1934: C. Lambert Music Ho! i. 52 “The purely fashionable change in the tastes of the concentration camp of intellectuals to whom Diaghileff played up.” 1935: B. Russell Relig. & Sci. x. 248 “In Germany and Russia,..those who openly disagree, even if they escape with their lives, are liable to forced labour in a concentration camp.” 1940: H. G. Wells Babes in Darkling Wood iii. i. 234 “The White Paper of Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps and elsewhere.” 1941: [see Aryanization b]. 1943: [see Aryan a. 2]. 1959: J. Braine Vodi v. 76 “He caught sight of his own arms, reduced almost to concentration-camp dimensions, the veins blue and obscenely swollen against the white skin.”
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  Setting aside the question of Anduril, “concentration camp” is a general term that is not specific to Nazi Germany’s death camps. The U.S. operated concentration camps for people (including U.S. citizens) of Japanese national origin during WWII. https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp The topic is super partisan right now, but in the long run, the current U.S. detention centers near the southern border have a good chance of being considered concentration camps because of the intense and overt focus on the national origin and ethnicity of those detained. Immigrants of other ethnicities, even those without entry visas or other documentation problems, are not being similarly detained.

ETHisso2017 6y ago

This sounds like the ad for slaughterbots.

imtringued 6y ago
I always laugh at that video because once you realize what applications loitering munitions have in real life they are not much more dangerous than a tank shell or recoilless rifle. Meanwhile what slaughterbots is showing is already happening except it overly dramatizes it. The USA sends drones and deploys hellfire missiles against suspected terrorists killing innocent people in the process. The video is just some FUD crap trying to make toys look dangerous. Tattletail and Five Nights at Freddy’s are horror games that take advantage of this emotion. I would be more worried about current governments that are committing genocide with good old fashioned guns or chemical weapons. Drones are just one more tool in an existing arsenal.

emcq 6y ago

This is FUD. Skydio has produced and sold amazing drones in the US for several years. Both are invested in by Andreessen Horowitz and Palmer almost certainly knows about them.

coolspot 6y ago
Actually reading the post would tell you that he means that Anduril just released best Inspire-sized drone for military use. Skydio is great drone, but it is toy-sized plastic drone. Specifications of the Ghost 4 are really impressive: 100 minutes flight time with couple pounds of payload powered by standard Li-ion batteries, rugged design and materials, low sound signature and thin visible profile, on-board AI, swarming, autonomy, etc.
coolspot 6y ago
Impressive: > Ghost is a single-rotor aircraft. The mechanicals of the rotor system are harder to design and manufacture than a DJI-style quadcopter, and flight controls are harder to program, but the result is much lower aerodynamic disk loading that results in longer endurance (over 100 minutes with real mission payloads), near-silent acoustic signature, high max payload capacity (dozens of pounds), and high speed. Compare this with a DJI Inspire 2, a high-end offering that costs $3000 that can lumber around with a couple pounds for 24 to 27 minutes, props screaming. > Ghost is autonomous, powered by an onboard AI Core that can perform 32 trillion operations per second.
- baybal2 6y ago
  Single rotor controls are much, much simpler. At least it does not require a mandatory PID control to not fall out of the sky. Very little math involved in control of a helicopter. A 3 actuator type with 1 actuator for each axis basically has no need for any control signal manipulation, and can be made fully analog. And a helicopter can be made more or less statically stable by pure mechanics, and aerodynamics. P.S. It doesn't seem that the drone in question exist in anything, but CGI at the moment. P.P.S. And quite unsound CG at that. On some of their CG shots, a swashplate actuators are attached with their axis coincidal with that rotor..., and a tail rotor control yoke not attached to anything...

tristan123456 6y ago

This is an ad, not more not less?

heckerhut 6y ago

Wow, this guy has a war fetish. Makes the ideas and intent behind OR and its subsequent sale to FB all the more questionable. Sick, sick world.

artifact_44 6y ago
Yup. I was pretty sad when I found out he was a right winger.
- jayspell 6y ago
  Really? You would rather the guy building it was associated with CCP?
  - mcphage 6y ago
    (Not the person your replying to, but) No, I don't wish the guy building it was associated with the CCP, but given what happens to US military hardware these days—it ends up in the hands of the police, who use it against US citizens—this isn't all that much better.
d1lanka 6y ago
I mean, I get your sentiment, but what's the alternative? So far, this tech seems to be recon + defense oriented and not straight up slaughterbot killer drones etc. If we aren't building it, someone else will - and I'd rather us have this than China etc. or some other authoritarian government.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

xnx 6y ago

Seems like a drone with these characteristics could have a lot of nonmilitary uses as well: search and rescue, wildlife research, small deliveries, etc.

jacknews 6y ago

I realise this isn't aimed at us civilian plebs (yet, lol!), but still, I guess the old adage applies, if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Unless I missed the price sticker somewhere?

baybal2 6y ago
Take a look on Yamaha R-MAX

CamperBob2 6y ago

"Twelve years of watching drone technology at CES emerge and then boom has made one thing abundantly clear: China Won. American companies have built a lot of cool science fair projects that get lots of media attention, but minimal real-world deployment – from light shows to food delivery. We also design a lot of interesting low-volume consumer drones, but most of them lean heavily on Chinese R&D and then go on to have their product manufactured in China. Yes, I know, I am fully aware I did the same thing years ago with Oculus." He's not wrong. A few years ago, I spent $399 for a point-and-shoot digital camera that took decent photos under decent lighting conditions. It supported resolutions up to 1920x1080 or so. DJI just sold me a camera for the same price that takes better photos. Also, it takes videos. Also, it fucking flies. It can fly for over 20 minutes, shoot a 1080p or 2.7K video two miles away, and find its own way back home. Uncle, already. In a completely-unrelated anecdote, some other people in China just sold me a 3 GHz vector network analyzer with performance and features comparable to a $10,000 portable VNA model from Keysight. It cost $70, batteries included. (And in an amusing bit of irony, its Chinese designer is currently upset because some other Chinese people used its CC-licensed design and GPL-licensed firmware to undercut her own Tindie offering.) Not many people will find the second example very meaningful, but quite a few people can appreciate the first one. If you haven't played with a quad yet and your toy budget can accommodate $399 (really $499, because you want the 'Fly More' kit), consider setting aside a Saturday afternoon to goof around with a Mavic Mini. It'll change your perspective on the evolution of consumer-accessible technology and on your own neighborhood. I can see why the Powers that Be in the US are pulling out all the stops to hose China by any means necessary. This is what it must have felt like to watch the rise of Japan in the 1970s, as they turned a reputation for being a bunch of half-assed copycats into a world-class engineering culture. (It should go without saying that none of this is an attempt to justify any political, military, economic, or social actions on the part of China's government. But it won't, so there, it's said.)

kalium-xyz 6y ago

3DR is american and makes DJI their gymbals.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwawaymanbot 6y ago

Palmer is an authoritarian/far rightist adorer!