Hans

In this house we believe that in 959 AD Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, insulted Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of water, who cried blood for the next 52 years.

[Pratap Ranade @PratapRanade]

Can the US build a DJI?

We tore down @DJIGlobal 's 2019 and 2023 Mini drones and priced every part. It's the first public cost breakdown of either. Here's what we learned:

DJI earns SaaS-like margins on hardware: ~79% gross margin on a $139 parts BOM. For comparison, Apple makes 53% on the iPhone. We estimate US-sourced parts would cost 2-3x more, cutting margins to 37-58%.

The result: US drone makers can't compete in consumer, and focus on premium enterprise and defense.

Sovereign silicon: DJI is building its autonomy lead starting at the chip. In 2019, the drone's key chips were American and Dutch. By 2023, all four were DJI's own.

Custom silicon jumped from 1% to 26% of the parts bill. Nobody else can buy these chips.

One notable exception is the GPS chip, still from Swiss firm @ublox . Chinese alternatives exist, but DJI's flight software is built around u-blox. In modern hardware, lock-in lives in the software.

"Cheap China" is an outdated perception. DJI paid more for lighter Chinese batteries, then spent the saved grams on sensors and compute. Their first priority is capability per gram, not cost.

Better battery tech → lighter weight → more onboard autonomy. US-made @SkydioHQ has better autonomy, but needs a heavier drone and a $399 chip to get it. We lost the war on cost. The next battlefield is autonomy.

DJI's real moat is speed. Shenzhen gets new circuit boards in hours, the US in weeks. "Move fast and break things" works for hardware in China, not America.

Banning DJI doesn't close that gap. Faster iteration does. We ran this teardown with our FDEs and Atlas, our engineering agent platform.

See our full analysis: https://t.co/XHTL8X5uyW

Thanks to @JonathonPSine @AkhilIyer1, Maggie Gray and Shaun Donovan for reading drafts of this.

[Ryan Kennedy @RyanKennedy_22]

Well that's not good...

[Talkin' Baseball @TalkinBaseball_]

Pavin Smith goes deep to walk off the Yankees on a night that the Dbacks celebrated the 2001 World Series team!

[Jeff Maurer @JeffMightBWrong]

"If you could contribute just five dollars to our campaign -- five dollars! -- we will put you on a donor list and relentlessly hound you for money every election until you're in the cold ground and far beyond."

[Steven Tey @steventey]

STOP ASKING YOUR WIFE "HOW WAS YOUR DAY"

she will say "fine" every single time

replace it with this instead:

“analyze your day and find the top 3 largest inefficiencies, then create proactive agentic workflows that will fix them. make no mistakes”

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

Another incredibly creative paper from Jacob Moscona.

Patents on plants didn't exist until 1985. You can test their effect by comparing hybrid and non-hybrid plants—hybrids have de facto IP protection because they are very difficult to copy.

IP helps innovation AND farmers.

[Nick Gillespie @nickgillespie]

This, x 1000. It's perfectly transitive, too. Put in any two names and the prescription will always be: less power, please.

[Jared Gilman @realJaredGilman]

can’t believe over the next couple months we’re getting a 4-hour doc about elon musk, a 3-hour doc about elizabeth holmes, and a 2-hour doc about concrete

[thijs @cdngdev]

i gave astra a robot, a paint brush, and a camera then asked it to paint the golden gate bridge in real life!

it figured out how to control the robot, and progressively got better throughout its attempts. the timelapse is sick

[Richard Mowe @RichBoxoffice]

FORGET the over-hyped blockbusters: the surprise hit of the summer in France and now on these shores is the two-part, six-hour epic from former diplomat turned director Antonin Baudry about France's wartime leader at his finest. The magnetic Simon Abkarian portrays De Gaulle with an irascible Simon Russell Beale as Churchill. Catch the first part now at @Filmhouse and read the four-star review: https://t.co/cr1pwmYkep Meanwhile join the queue for Part Two. In France it has been embraced as enthusiastically by Gen Z as their parents and grandparents. @Entertainment @PicEntFilms @PatheFilms @MinistereCC @FranceintheUK @francediplo @FrFilmFestUK

[Cultured Swine (@culturedswine2.bsky.social) @tales_tomorrow]

Pete Hegseth: We need our military to be more like the Spartans! *immediately loses fight with Persia over an important chokepoint*

[Bluntly Put Philosopher (BPP) @SocraticScribe]

A drone with zero moving parts in its propulsion. High-voltage electrode grids ionize air molecules, then accelerate them downward an “ionic wind” carrying the craft on electric thrust alone. The same physics that propels spacecraft, working at sea level.

[Hans @antihanz]

@TheStalwart Looks like height restriction violation to me, gotta get those mountains in compliance

[Chase Passive Income @chasedownleads]

Imagine the shame of being the 1 guy at the NFL Owner's Meeting that isn't a billionaire

[George Callas @George_A_Callas]

I’m sorry but the government taking money from the private sector and then claiming that “the people” now have it is how socialists have always talked.

[Volokh Conspiracy @VolokhC]

[Eugene Volokh] "And Then … Nothing Happened, in the Most Brutal Way Possible" https://t.co/ZwbIc0qtEn

[Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 @JessicaBRiedl]

As everyone argues about the $40 trillion debt threshold, remember:

Its 100% the other party's fault. Your side has never hiked spending or cut taxes. And if they did it was for a good reason and paid for itself. And we can fix deficits entirely by going after the bad people.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Really cool at the top of the WSJ homepage today:

"An experimental mRNA-based vaccine succeeded in preventing cancer from coming back or spreading in a study of high-risk melanoma patients, Moderna and its partner Merck said Wednesday"

Last year, an mRNA cancer vaccine was also shown to stop the recurrence of pancreatic cancer after surgery.

It feels like we're just starting to pry open the heavy door of a new field: personalized mRNA cancer therapies that teach the body to fight cancers after initial treatment

[Tom Slocum for Texas 🇺🇸 @slocumfortexas]

James Talarico doesn’t want veterans to be able to do this, i’m not kidding.

Texas, we must vote for @KenPaxtonTX .

[Adam DeGroot @adegroot88]

You think farmers are sophisticated with tech and growing practices in 2026 and then you learn Peruvian potato farmers/astronomers forecasted El Nino effectively by observing the Pleiades a few thousand years ago 🤯