For folks who recently found my Twitter -- I'm the founder of
@FlybyRobotics
. We make American-made drones that bring the power of
@nvidia
GPUs to the sky, enabling a full machine-learning stack in flight. Here’s why and how we're doing this.
Taiwan could do the funniest thing by holding a referendum to become the 51st State of the United States.
1. Huge boost to US and Taiwan tech/Econ lead
2. New 3rd most populous state in the Union right after Texas
3. Freedom of 23 million Taiwanese secured for all posterity
Memes aside, the game theory behind this is:
1. China (PRC) plans to invade Taiwan
2. Main thing stopping Taiwan from being invaded is deterrence (own strong military, US potential defense)
3. If ur Taiwan, u want to maximize deterrence
4. How you get peak deterrence?
Damn, don’t want to fight with rabois but for folks in American hardware space…the Exo Blackhawk 3 looks spooky identical to Husban Ace 2. Husban is huge in Shenzhen. They’re not as well known as DJI but is one of the top Chinese drone companies.
@ThomasHoufek
Btw Hawaii Statehood was only 1959, at the time it only had a population of 600,000 and a economy on the bottom list. It still ranks only 41/50 states. Taiwan would be in top 10 by economy. And top 3 by population.
DJI is the hardware version of Tiktok.
- Gets American operators addicted.
- Steals data, intelligence to PRC.
- Hollows out domestic drone production capacity.
Every American dollar going there is funding the Chinese military industrial complex.
Palantir 🤝 Flyby Robotics
The future is American-made massively powerful ML drones.
Excited to show the world what we’ve been working on with
@PalantirTech
at
@scsp_ai
May 8th at 3pm in Washington, DC. We got passes for friends of Flyby if you want to come to
@scsp_ai
.
If you have “Robotics” in your startup’s name you should build actual physical robots or electrical components and not just “SaaS for robotics companies”
@ThomasHoufek
But sir you just described the debate that every US state went through when they go through the process of admitting to the Union after the original 13 founding states. Alaska House vote was 210 for - 166 against. ~44% voted against
The cycle:
Engineers: *builds something fast, test real world asap to understand what needs fixing
Public: “haha look at how the pad got completely destroy, absolute fail, starship will never work”
Engineers: *fixes issue
Maybe there’s more info not public but man it doesn’t feel super great seeing a Chinese-made drone promoted (hence the thread tho rabois plz don’t nuke me)
@1258632
Taiwan could wait and get invaded by PRC anyways or seize the initiative to build greater deterrence. Being the 51st State is as deterrent as one can get. This might be the path to avoid war
@Alpha7987
US as well. We could use a greater young technological population and all the chip fabs. It will kick start another golden age of innovation for America
Just met a gigachad Anaheim CA machine shop
-*gets cold call we need an urgent low tolerance part 9am in the morning
-*makes it in 2 hours, sends us pics that he already did it BEFORE we even paid him or got our order. The dude just builds
-*refuses to charge extra
Legendary
Back in 2007, family and I hastily left China after we were tipped off. I step out of a 20 hour flight from Shenzhen to Anchorage, Alaska. On American soil for the first time.
The feeling going from oppression to freedom is indescribable. But this is what it felt like. 🇺🇸
The ideological winner during technological inflection points is important. It determines wether things like these will be built by democracies or dictatorships
@SpencerMac101
I can do it if someone throws me $100m.. I will have verticalize all components (flight control chips, motors, esc, batteries) and do the miniaturization myself to retain margin. Zero off the shelf parts. And then build a robot factory that makes 100,000 units per year
For those that call investing in American dynamism a new fad, sir how many satellites can your shitcoin put in orbit? Please tell me more about the effectiveness of NFTs on countering main battle tanks. Really appreciate it.
If you’re an aspiring builder for the drone space or an investor wondering why China dominates this space so much + how we can fight back, check out our guest post with
@Noahpinion
Btw our drone streams through to an on-board Nvidia Orin. Which means next step we’ll be doing some on-edge machine learning with this. It’s gonna be sick.
Proud moment for our team’s release of Flyby’s Payload Integration SDK. Now you can put any sensor on any F-11 drone and do ML off of it. Have multiple paid users already starting building :)
How much $ does a single cargo run to Pandora actually net?
*ISV Venture Star carries 350 metric tons of cargo. Assume 300 tons usable
*Unobtainium is worth $40m per kilo refined
*So 300,000 kilos * $40m
*That’s $12 TRILLION per run. Yeah no wonder we’re bombing the Na’vi
@IASturgeon42
The guy in the image was putting a proposal to provide Japanese immigrants a path to citizenship to help combat aging population, traditionalist parties violently opposed. Dude passed it any ways! He won at the end
Flyby F-11 drones with AI that can automatically detect weapons with ultra high res cameras. Patrol 400 ft above presidential events w/ minimum profile
Where’s Waldo exercise is tough to do consistently for even the best trained human operatives. Aerial ML machines can help
In every F-11, we give you FULL ACCESS to the onboard electronics.
8-core ARM Cortex CPU
1024-core NVIDIA Jetson Orin GPU
16GB RAM + 1TB SSD
Embedded flight controller running Ardupilot, the easiest flight controller to develop on instead of lock-in flight control
Thank you
@amit_ajwani
for the awesome long form on the risk of continuing use of DJI drones + what we’re doing at Flyby that can help. Super appreciate it!
DJI drones pose the national security threat of TikTok, but with wings.
— Congresswoman Elise Stefanik
Well, thank Gov for letting Jason H. Lu immigrate to America then.
Jason is Co-Founder of Flyby, a company building American-made drones.
Why is that an important
Most importantly, it’s built right here in the U.S.of A.
We offer the F-11E, compliant with 2020 NDAA Sec. 848, and the F-11D, compliant with 2023 NDAA Sec. 817.
Before you ask: the motors are Swiss, the housing is injection-molded in Detroit or 3D printed in LA
Me: “I need an affordable daily commuter car to drive to work”
Hyundai: here you go dude, need anything else?
Me: “would you know anyone who sells an 155 mm self-propelled howitzer with a 50km firing range?”
Hyundai: you’re not gonna believe this
We believe in a philosophy of YCDWYW: “you-can-do-whatever-you-want.” American ideals of freedom embodied in hardware form. LIBERTY FOR AERIAL COMPUTE. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Zane was running a profitable hardware co, building in defense, at the Gundo all when only a few dared to do all these things. Truly a based founder. I salute you sir 🫡
But thousands of incredible builders are developing the next generation of software + hardware solutions on UAS — from computer vision for detecting diseased crops to GPS-denied navigation and even laser-based communication with AI. Why limit them on compute and hardware access?
Today, drones are frozen products. If you’re building something new, your ability to change the software or hardware is extremely limited. If what you want to attach to the drone is off by just an inch, you’re SOL.
- No accessible onboard compute
- Closed architecture
-
Thoughts: Building an Nimitz takes 40 million man hours. Rn an Nimitz costs $4.5bn, let’s say 0.5bn is yard/mgmt, $4bn at 40 million hrs is just $100/hour on avg. The “man-hours” you can scale via general or specialized robots + cost per hour reduction may lie the answer
Where's the hard tech startup that's going to revolutionize shipbuilding by combining large scale robotics and 3D printing to speed production and lower cost?
Bonus points for easy future integration of fission/fusion power plant options!
My friends. s2 eps 4 of the Foundation is actually good now. I’m a book reader and also found s1 to be extreme cringe except the Empire arc. But what they did this episode & the last one with Bel Riose/hober mallow is actually very good
@SpencerMac101
For US to do it, cost of engineers from SWE to EE is much higher. Human labor needs to be replaced with robot labor (higher capx). Need to automation all PCB fab too. You need to really attack at each component level and automated manufacturing level. To do this need really
Historical quote just happened:
Press: “When was the last time US fighters were scrambled and shot something down in US airspace?
DoD: “I believe this is the first time in United States airspace where we had taken kinetic action against airborne objects.”
*dead silence
And here I am thinking getting parts to fit perfectly at assembly is just a seed stage early aviation startup problem…surely the $32bn Boeing guys could do better
This allows for the top and bottom of the fuselage body to be 3D printed to fit to customer specs, so you can have access to whatever interface ports and mounting hardpoints configuration you need without any lost in flight performance, stability etc.
The airframe itself is configurable. We designed the drone body so it can be entirely 3D printed at the start (*drone body below pic is 100% 3D printed)
We then swapped the mid-section that needs to bear the most load into high-strength injection molded carbon composites