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Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

I've had the original Mini since it came out.

Other than damaging a prop from it hitting a blade of grass on landing it is in perfect shape. Yes, they are so fragile I landed very smoothly in the grass and soft grass is enough to damage the props!

I don't fly it as much as I used to. These new ones are certainly an engineering marvel with how much they have added and still kept it under 249g.

The big one to me though is the wind resistance. 10.7m/s is 23mph. The original specs 17mph. It is hard to say at which point it starts having trouble, but 23mph is a non-trivial improvement, it probably means 2x as many days you can actually fly.

Now the things that suck about DJI, and I wonder if they are actually at all improved with a new drone:

- Geofencing sometimes locks you out of legal flights, no way around that unless you can jailbreak

- Some legal flights require you going through an unlock process, and if the DJI web infrastructure is having a bad day you also get locked out of flying in a legal place

I would probably buy from another competitor, especially a US one, just over the unlock experience with DJI.

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I'd like to find a good competitor too, and not just because of the geofencing. DJI has been identified as a national security threat by the US DOD, essentially because there's no way to be sure that every second of GPS-tagged video shot by a DJI drone isn't going into a giant server farm owned by the Chinese intelligence service.

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/270608...

> there's no way to be sure that every second of GPS-tagged video shot by a DJI drone isn't going into a giant server farm owned by the Chinese intelligence service.

I checked your source and it didn’t back up this claim.

I’m not a networking specialist but isn’t it possible to detect if something is transmitting a massive amount of data (such as video) to an undetermined destination?

seems like this type of blatant data export would be easy to detect and subsequently ban the device doing it.

I’m just a simple software developer, so the network stuff can go over my head sometimes (heh), but the claim that such a large amount of data is being transmitted in a way that couldn’t be confirmed enough to ban the product seems dubious.

Given the volume of data, they can just box up the hard drives and ship via container ships or planes.

I assume he means at the device level.

I did. Thanks!

I don't know how DJI works, but presumably it ships the video out to a service that you then log in to to view?

If so, it's on their servers and there's no "networking" you can do to know whether they forwarded it on from there.

If that’s true then you’re right but I don’t know if that’s true.

The DJI Mini Pro 3 works without Wifi and using the expensive controller, without a phone app, so the opportunities to upload captured data to China are very limited.

Unless you use their recommended software. https://www.dji.com/lightcut

What a strange assumption to make. No it doesn't work like this at all. The video is saved to the SD card in the aircraft, which you then remove and insert it into your computer to download the files.

And potentially use their recommended software to work with from there: https://www.dji.com/lightcut

So not that many jumps from what I described.

"I don't know" - so why leave a comment?

Because you can doesn't mean you have to, especially when you don't actually have any knowledge on the topic at hand. (And, as people have pointed out, this is both a weird and incorrect assumption, adding nothing to the discussion other than confusion.)

Except that they do offer exactly that. No need to be so condescending.

https://www.dji.com/lightcut

There's certainly no requirement to use that (it's literally a separate app from the DJIFly app you use the control the drone), and I do know as I fly a DJI mini drone.

What's worse is that I don't think it actually works how you've assumed. The drone has no internet connection itself, the software is instead pulling the files down over wifi, which is something the standard software supports if the drone is close enough. This is the "no need to export from your DJI device" - LightCut can presumably access the drone files directly. None of this requires uploading the videos to anywhere, and doing that wouldn't even make sense - these are large video files, people would notice their data plans being ravaged by multi-gig uploads every time they flew their drone.

As far as being condescending, I think that's less of a negative trait than offering unbacked "I don't know, but" comments which add no value to the discussion.

I did consider the value of my own comment at the time, but I think there is a big problem in tech discussion with people with no actual experience or relevant knowledge feeling that their off-the-cuff suppositions are as welcome and useful as meaningful input from people with direct experience, and highlighting this behaviour as negative and unwelcome is worth risking the inevitable backlash in response.

>What's worse is that I don't think it actually works how you've assumed.

Holy irony man

Yes, based on my experience with the device I can extrapolate how that software could work. What experience did you base your assertions on? Nothing at all? Right.

15 years of working on SaaS products and a "how I would build it" guess. So basically exactly what you're doing.

You do not need to transmit the video first. But coordinate or interested person. Even a sport watch can be a security threat as demo by some exercise army personnel. They just know who and when and where these places are.

For the transfer part it is much harder as said and easier to detect in peace time.

But then what happen in war or proxy-war time. You have to know how many senior Russians are killed by using a phone …

> Even a sport watch can be a security threat as demo by some exercise army personnel.

In the early days of the Afghan (or was it Iraq?) war, people used Strava to figure out the locations of American bases. They'd see a bunch of smart watches suddenly wake up in the morning and start exercising at the same time, a dead giveaway.

Recently a Russian commander got killed because he shared his daily running route on Strava which was seen by the killer.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/11/europe/russian-submarine-...

I wonder if killing their dumber commanders might inadvertently be helping them…

what a strange argument to make

It's fair, but they've been working on improving the quality of their officers since 1904.

Don't know if you were attempting to make a joke, but Stalin purged the army of older, most qualified officers in the late 1930s, because they came from the pre-revolution times and were viewed as a loyalty risk. One of his biggest blunders that severely disadvantaged the country when the WW2 started.

Many white-era officers did serve in the Red Army; including Zhukov and his ex-boss Rokossovskij. Being a cadre in pre-revolution times wasn't the issue itself; willingness to sabotage their own country was.

Incidentally, the blunder in the 1941 in the Red Army was an issue of loyalty indeed. Navy didn't experience the same problem.

The short version: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yzGqp3R4Mx4

I mean, I assume it's mostly a joke, but if you assume that their system of selecting high officers isn't merit-based (which you would tend to assume given that it is Putin's Russia) then assassination which preferentially kills off the more incompetent officers would indeed be beneficial to the military as a whole.

Arguments based on natural selection are sometimes unintuitive!

Yeah, I'm serious, I'm not making a 'if you kill your enemies they win' argument but part of learning by doing is having the people who make poor decisions suffer the consequence of those decisions so that there are fewer people around making poor decisions. Especially in the military where you're spending other peoples money and other people suffer the consequences of your misadventures. Of course there is quite a lot of randomness in outcomes, but a blunder of this magnitude is inexcusable considering their line of work. Because of the corruption in the Russian army I would assume there is only a weak link between competence and rank and having an actual enemy around to punish mistakes would be helpful in winnowing out the morons. I'm pretty sure Russia knows they're corrupt and have deliberately adopted a learn by doing strategy to improve their warfighting capability for this very reason.

A big part of the process in undermining an opposition is promoting the worst aspects in them. Instead of killing off a moron, perhaps secretly encourage them to run for office and donate to their political campaigns, secretly buy media coverage for them, etc.

Even steelmanning the argument, it probably doesn't. For one, commanders need some level of experience and training, you can't replace them for free. But more importantly, having a lower technically skill, which might open one up to inadvertently sharing their running route, probably does not correlate too much with the skills required to be a successful commander. Now, in general (hah), stupid people will probably both be more open to these kind of mistakes and be worse commanders, but being a good commander doesn't mean are not making minor opsec mistakes like this, so in the end you will still loose strategically valuable people.

We disagree on the severity of the mistake, hiding information from adversaries is a core competency and a big part of training. Someone who failed to learn from that training has a low innate intelligence and even if trained is unable to use the training effectively and is a liability.

The CIA for example drills into their people this same information denial training but they appear to neglect randomness so you end up with a bunch of people with the same peculiar behavioral patterns so they’re ironically rather easy to detect if you have access to click stream data. For example, they’re told not to follow each other on social media, but they still interact so you end up with two people who freely follow lots of people who interact with each other frequently but don’t follow each other. It’s weird, I’m not saying everyone who does this is information hiding but you can extract networks of people who behave in this same weird way with each other.

In order to protect the enigma cracking secret the UK randomly allowed themselves to be bombed with a bias towards less strategic targets. That’s the kind of thing you have to do to hide information, letting yourself be bombed should denote just how serious it is.

Neither. The US’ wars in both places predate general availability “smart” devices by quite some time.

There were devices like black berries and tmobile sidekick, and gps trackers from garmin (etc) but I think the incidents you were referring to happened much later (2018 vs 2001/2002).

The issue with the watch is the data is publicly available (social aspect) and requires no effort on the other side to figure out.

but the us only left Afganistan two years ago

I believe the incident you’re referring to happened in 2018 [1].

Also happened across a few American bases across Syria, Yemen, Niger, Afghanistan, Djibouti and more. Some British and Russian bases were highlighted too.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42853072

That happened not that long ago, in 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

That release is about using DJI drones in government and military installations. There is not a suggestion that DJI is being used to do wide spread civilian spying.

Meanwhile in the US...

Also a national security threat because they're game changing weapons and they make the most and best of them.

Best because of the price not the performance. Though the outrageousness of the black hornet drone costing 200K is too much. https://flymotionus.com/2021/11/05/flirs-black-hornet-is-the...

> identified as a national security threat by the US DOD, essentially because there's no way to be sure that every second of GPS-tagged video shot by a DJI drone isn't going into a giant server farm owned by the Chinese intelligence service.

There are far more obvious reasons for that. These drones are of enormous military value. By buying them, US consumers are funding an obvious foreign military hardware production. US money may well be funding production of drones which may once be used to correct artillery strikes on Los Angeles.

DJI are particular seem to work in concert with "military civilian fusion," and have hardware, and software to defeat both very serious jamming, and attempts to fry its radio with pulsed microwaves. Military jammers for 2.4g band seemingly have near 0 effect.

>US money may well be funding production ...

This statement would be correct for any product of Chinese origin - no?

Yes, and these drones would be a drop in the bucket compared to everything else bought from China.

Jammers don't have much effect because of the frequency hopping technology of 2.4ghz band used by hobbyist has been improved upon for years. We used to have flags and announce use frequency during the FM days, now we just go out and race without worrying about interference with other users.

I had the original mini too. Really fun, but mine is RIP in the water under a waterfall ravine. It's hard to say whether it was a GPS bug, a gust of wind, or just my own fault, but as I was shooting a video next to some rock walls, it went towards the rocks and I couldn't get it back. After the first hit it tumbled and hit some vegetation, and then it went all the way down, no way to recover.

It's a good thing the new ones have collision avoidance, it could likely have saved mine back then. I'll someday get one of the newer ones, it was pretty fun and an impressive piece of engineering. Sometimes I think to myself "this would be a really great shot with the drone", or wish I had it to scout some terrain ahead when hiking or exploring. It's a pretty cool gadget!

My friend was flying his, lost it and asked it to fly back to him and it went absolutely full speed into a waterfall about 10 meters in front of us.

It was hard not to chuckle.

RIP.

I think it's a good thing the props are fragile as the motor would be damaged if the props hit an object without absorbing the force of impact.

haha, check out freestyle fpv. you won't believe what the motors can survive.

Do you have a recommendation of a drone with similar features that doesn't require jailbreaking?

I've heard good things about Skydio.

They have discontinued their consumer products sadly: https://www.skydio.com/blog/skydio-to-sunset-consumer-drone-...

Yup. They could not get competitive so they had some politicos pimping for them and can now feed on taxpayer's money.

The empire is collapsing so might as well rip the last remaining scraps of wealth off the walls before it goes all belly up. I would do the same if I were in their position.

The US isn't an empire and it is not collapsing... Don't believe everything you hear on social media.

Autel drones tend to fall around a generation behind DJI's in terms of capability, and they don't have geofencing. Unfortunately, they are much more expensive like-for-like and if you are also concerned about China, they share the same China-problems.

There are no US or European drones that really come close, unfortunately. Parrot are 2-3+ generations behind DJI in terms of capability: wireless link, camera, and even basic flight stability are all quite a distance behind. Skydio had unique autonomy capabilities which were really cool but were a long way behind in controller capability, camera, and wireless tech and exited the consumer market.

Honestly, DJI no-fly zones in the US are not too onerous in my opinion - most of the places that are banned probably should be banned. I would recommend a DJI drone with a standalone remote (to avoid needing to install DJI apps on your phone). However, generally speaking in Europe their no fly zones are more restrictive and can be quite frustrating.

I think it's also worth pointing out that DJI's first-party app isn't required to operate many of their drones. Most of their drones, apart from all but the most recent (i.e. the one this announcement is about probably won't have support for a while, but the previous gen will) has support through apps like Litchi and Dronelink via the developer API, which have additional features and don't have the exact same permissions/data requirements as DJI's first-party apps.

[1] https://flylitchi.com/

[2] https://www.dronelink.com/

TIL. Thanks!

> The big one to me though is the wind resistance. 10.7m/s is 23mph. The original specs 17mph. It is hard to say at which point it starts having trouble, but 23mph is a non-trivial improvement, it probably means 2x as many days you can actually fly.

That’s a huge one for me as well (also own a mini). I live near the sea and the number of days you can actually fly is surprisingly low. 23mph is still pretty low, but I understand the weight vs windspeed tradeoff.

I have a race drone. It was fun to fly it through tall grass like a weed whacker.

The first few props were super brittle and shattered at the slightest botched landing. I also think they were poorly designed with no fillets, so the stresses would concentrate at the base of the blades and the plastic would crack.

A bought another couple of bags of props, and they were MUCH higher quality. Often I can just bend a blade back after a rough crash landing.

Are there any good US competitors recommend?

No because DJI, XPENG, BYD, and a ton of other Chinese companies have this 'move fast and break things' mentality X100 that most American firms don't have. They ran circles around GoPro and their attempts. Closest analog is Tesla/SpaceX but who knows if even those guys last long term when the guy running it is so easily distracted by nonsense (eg. Buying Twitter, starting yet another company, playing hours of Polytopia etc. )

Come on. American software startups literally invented that motto. Just because you may be working at a slower paced company doesn't mean America does not have it.

I did label a few American companies that are operating at that speed. Nevertheless in many different fields China is determined to win and they will move as fast as possible to make that happen. Its a foregone conclusion in Renewable energy, nuclear, a lot of consumer electrics, and soon EVs.

Ah yes, "breaking things" and nuclear are surely what I'd call a winning combination.

If you look at China's innovation in nuclear tech they have soared past the US. That ship is LONG gone.

American startups are only focused on getting an ipo or exit as soon as possible. Such thing doesnt exist in the mentality of the Chinese.

They invented the motto for BS social apps and pivoting until they're bought or IPOed.

Not the same as hardware at all.

American companies invented it as a marketing label to sell to VCs. Chinese companies actually do it

> No because DJI, XPENG, BYD, and a ton of other Chinese companies have this 'move fast and break things' mentality X100 that most American firms don't have.

Respectfully, that's ridiculous. The Silicon Valley has a long tradition of "move fast and break things".

No no no, this time, it's just that the Chinese companies are simply a lot better than the Western drone companies. Yes, there are many excuses to make ("it's cheaper for them"), but even without considering the price, the Western drones mostly feel like DJI 10 years ago.

The Parrot Anafi has been fairly nice for a few years now, but for some reason Parrot struggles to sell them (I suspect that US companies dismiss them because they are not from the US?). Skydio just announced a new drone that seems reasonable. Both quite a lot more expensive than DJI, so here is your excuse.

>Respectfully, that's ridiculous. The Silicon Valley has a long tradition of "move fast and break things".

Some companies do...like Tesla, SpaceX, and Netflix. Their iteration rate is amazing.

>No no no, this time, it's just that the Chinese companies are simply a lot better than the Western drone companies. Yes, there are many excuses to make ("it's cheaper for them"), but even without considering the price, the Western drones mostly feel like DJI 10 years ago.

You haven't explained why? Move fast and break things mean to iterate fast, that includes finding way to cut the cost, improve specs, and just make the overall product better.

>The Parrot Anafi has been fairly nice for a few years now, but for some reason Parrot struggles to sell them (I suspect that US companies dismiss them because they are not from the US?). Skydio just announced a new drone that seems reasonable. Both quite a lot more expensive than DJI, so here is your excuse.

Is it or is it not competitive what what DJI is selling on the market? These drones are a innovation smorgasbord in so many different fields: cameras, weight, embedded electronics, avionics, and not to mention their software is good enough to not make people dismiss all the other things and go elsewhere. The fact they can offer all of that at a lower price point is (in my opinion) a sign of things to come in other industries: electric cars, space travel, renewable energy.

> Their iteration rate is amazing.

Sure, some companies do. Though what I see from the SpaceX launches I don't respect much. They just don't care at all about the impact on biodiversity around the launch site. I would be happier with slower but more sustainable.

> You haven't explained why? Move fast and break things mean to iterate fast, that includes finding way to cut the cost, improve specs, and just make the overall product better.

Difficult to say why. They have really good people and they have built a pretty solid technology, I guess. Their software really sucked in the beginning (10 years ago), but then it got much better.

"Move fast and break things" is also often an excuse to do bad engineering, IMO. "We hacked it because we need to go fast", and then the whole product is a piece of crap and people wonder why.

> Is it or is it not competitive what what DJI is selling on the market?

Nobody can remotely compete with DJI. I just meant "if you are ready to pay for something that is not DJI for ideological reasons".

> The fact they can offer all of that at a lower price point is (in my opinion) a sign of things to come in other industries: electric cars, space travel, renewable energy.

Electric cars and renewable energy are part of a much, much more complicated problem. We just don't have any viable way to replace fossil fuels entirely, so we will have to use less energy (and hence degrow, hopefully in a controlled and smart way).

Space travel is a joke. We need fundamentally new physics if the hope is to go live in another solar system, and I don't understand why people are excited about the idea of surviving in a spaceship. Instead of paying really smart people to work on that useless idea, we should pay them to find clever solutions to degrow. Use less, better, smarter, more sustainable technology everywhere in society.

  > They just don't care at all about the impact on biodiversity around the launch site.

Why would you single out SpaceX for this? Not only is that argument applicable to every single other launch provider on the planet, it is also applicable to almost every single factory and even city on the planet. How is the biodiversity in Los Angeles? How big are the areas affected by SpaceX launch facilities compared to the area affected by Los Angeles?

Furthermore, SpaceX's newest rocket burns methane. That means that it is creating a market for a potent greenhouse gas, that is often otherwise just vented to atmosphere as a byproduct of oil extraction. Burning methane creates carbon dioxide, which has 1/20 the climate impact of methane. That rocket, therefore, actually is a net benefit to reduce greenhouse warming.

> Why would you single out SpaceX for this?

Because I was answering a comment that mentioned specifically Tesla, SpaceX and Netflix?

> That rocket, therefore, actually is a net benefit to reduce greenhouse warming.

Whaaaaat? With that kind of logic, you could breath underwater. I don't even know how to start answering that. As long as you conclude from "manufacturing and launching a rocket" that it is "net benefit for the environment", you should go back to reading about the problem.

>Respectfully, that's ridiculous. The Silicon Valley has a long tradition of "move fast and break things".

The SV doesn't do hardware for the most part, and any companies (SV or not) that do hardware, don't iterate that way and that fast. Watching GoPro evolve is like watching molasses.

Something like Tesla would be one of a few of counter-examples...

I'm not going to argue against the fact that the Chinese firms can't and don't do better than American firms (because they can and do do better in many cases), except that it's impossible to know how much or to what extent Chinese firms have financial (or other) backing from the government there. It's an open secret that many "strategic" industries get varying levels of support, often under the table.

BUT: However they got there, DJI is so far ahead on the consumer/commercial side I can't in good faith recommend any alternatives unless you're doing work for the federal and some sensitive state-level government entities.

As a consumer, honestly, go for DJI.

A few years ago, assuming you had been willing to pay more for something worse but for ideological reasons (like you would buy a Fairphone, I totally get that), I would have adviced for an Anafi. But now the Anafi AI and Anafi USA are a lot more expensive, that's not for consumers anymore IMHO.

As a company, if you cannot go for DJI, then the alternatives to Mavic are Parrot Anafi and Skydio, I guess. For the bigger drones (like the Matrice series), honestly it's hard. Just be prepared to pay a lot more for a much worse product.

Parrot (Anafi) is French

Yeah, I assumed that the question was about "non-chinese drones".

I think I paid 300€ for a Mini Fly More Combo slightly used (under 10 hours or flight time according to the drone).

It's a fun toy, but can't stand the wind at all, so it's a bit nerve wracking to fly it over open water if it's not completely calm :D

I really do want the Mini 4 Pro, but can't justify the 1000€+ price tag with the proper controller.

I've got the original Mini too, and I had never encountered this before until very recently when I tried to fly it in the US.

What happens if you turn off your cellular data (or are simply out of reception) ? Does it let you fly it anywhere then?

In Australia and the Canadian Arctic I basically never had reception, and it never cared once.

I fly on a cell phone without a SIM card. Basically, if you haven't logged-in in the last 30 days, your flights are limited quite a lot. You can only fly so far (100ft?), and so high. I just make sure to log in and get all firmware/map updates over WiFi before I leave on trips and have been fine.

Another gripe about DJI for video use is that they rip you off for a "license" to use CinemaDNG... which is an open, license-free codec.

Isn’t this because they have to pay Red for their ridiculous patent of compressed raw video?

It's also only available bundled with ProRes, although it's almost certain there's also some backroom RED RAW-racket deal going on too.

Well, that's DJI's decision.

CinemaDNG is not always compressed. I have a BlackMagic camera that records uncompressed CinemaDNG. Also, DJI has gotten around some of this by putting the recorder in the body of the drone, making it technically not part of the camera.

However, the oft-repeated claim that Red's patent applies only to internal raw recording does not hold up when you consider that Apple and Atomos have to pay extortion for ProRes Raw, which is used in EXTERNAL recorders.

I have a friend that builds his own drones (and RC vehicles, like a really big, fast tank). He sneers at DJI, but keeps one to entertain the mensch (that's me).

He also sneers at licensing, jailbreaking, geofencing, etc.

I notice that there aren't any pictures that actually show people in close proximity to the drone. The "drone in hand" picture looks photoshopped, so I assume the drone is actually not-so-mini. I have a teeny-tiny drone, about half the size of a sparrow. It doesn't have cameras, though.

> The "drone in hand" picture looks photoshopped, so I assume the drone is actually not-so-mini.

Folded (without propellers): 148×94×64 mm (L×W×H)

Unfolded (with propellers): 298×373×101 mm (L×W×H)

The size of the drone is not some secret... you can search for the Mini 4 Pro on YouTube and find a bunch of hands-on reviews.

The DJI Mini drones are very compact. The DJI Air 3 is arguably the next level up in the lineup, and it weighs 3x as much and is noticeably larger. The "teeny-tiny drone" you're describing just doesn't sound comparable or particularly useful.

It isn’t useful at all.

Quite boring, frankly.

I just realized the DJI that my friend has, is a mini.

It’s small, but some of his hand-built ones are smaller.

> It’s small, but some of his hand-built ones are smaller.

Aside from the size, how do his hand-built ones compare in terms of camera, gimbal, remote controller, radio, battery life, and potentially SDK?

from experience I know that the SDK and battery life are better on the mid-range DIY options/

Aftermarket remotes/radios are arguably better; just not as compact and conveniently set-up.

I can't comment on camera/gimbal.

There are DIY-ish units out there that are entirely controllable via your choice of language; i'm not sure if there is any SDK that rivals that flexibility.

all that said : I understand the DJI value proposition, but the company has practices that I try to avoid entirely in my life, regardless of how nice their drones are.

> from experience I know that the SDK and battery life are better on the mid-range DIY options

SDK in DIY options? Do you have examples?

> I can't comment on camera/gimbal.

Cameras and gimbals become very difficult in DIY, because they required tight integration with the drone.

would love to get an alternative but it doesn't seem like anyone else is getting anywhere near the flight times that dji has. all the non dji drones I've seen list 8 min while dji is saying 15-20 min.

There are lots of them like the Explorer LR that are under the 250g limit, and get 30-40 minute runtime.

That said in the hobbyist community power is more interesting than range. I have a DJI mini 2 and the technology is impressive but honestly, it puts me to sleep compared to my 100MPH mini quad. Every time I use it (once every few months) I have to update the app, use a trash remote, and install all this spyware on my phone.

That’s almost exactly what my friend says.

He has this tiny little quad, about half the size of the DJI, that does about 90.

He has pretty fancy video gear. He uses a VR-style headset. It’s pretty cool.

Ask him how long it can fly at 90. Few minutes at most.

Why does that matter? Top Fuel dragsters are designed for a quarter mile, you wouldn't use them for a 400 mile round-round.

Different things have different purposes.

>"install all this spyware on my phone"

You do not need to install spyware on your phone. It is a spyware on it's own. So are Alexa, "smart" TVs and many other things.

> and install all this spyware on my phone.

Now take a step back and think about what most apps on your phones are already doing, or even your OS itself ;-). It's just not Chinese, I guess that's why you don't care?

Hmm… it’s interesting, the reaction I got to this personal anecdote.

It is what it is. This chap exists, and I talk to him, almost every day. He has a great deal of enthusiasm, and does interesting work. I am sure his approach is quite common, in the HN crowd.

My friend is not your typical DJI customer, and his approach is no threat to them. People like him have always been around. It’s like people that mod cars. They don’t threaten the mainstream.

But the reaction seems to have been quite defensive.

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