Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Photography
  4. s

Want to be an ace pilot before you buy an expensive drone? Practice with this $120 quadcopter

Add as a preferred source on Google

As far as drones go, the Swann Xtreem Gravity Pursuit is as stripped-down as a bowling ball. It doesn’t contain GPS,  or any sort of piloting assistance to aid you in flying. But its $120 price point makes this one of the most affordable mid-sized drones you’ll find, and it’s perfect for those who want to get into the drone hobby without learning to fly for the first time on a $500+ platform.

Higher-end drones do have smart features to make it easy for anyone to fly, but they don’t always work all the time. So learning to fly on the Gravity Xtreem is akin to learning how to drive a stick shift car. You’ll have to be in control the entire time you’re flying, and you’ll also have to correct for wind and even occasional drifting. The learning curve is a bit steeper, but the experience will help make you a better drone pilot when you’re ready to up your game and graduate up to a more advanced multicopter.

Alexander Thickstun
Alexander graduated with a degree in Aerospace Engineering in 2005 and an MBA in 2011. He's an outdoor enthusiast and avid…
A new startup wants to fix the military’s working-dog shortage with cloning and gene editing
Promising pitch, plenty of unanswered questions about the dogs.
a new startup wants to fix the militarys working dog shortage with cloning and gene editing warhound featured image

Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.

Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).

Read more
AI can describe a picture, but it still struggles to understand blind users
A University of Maryland study finds that Be My AI often buries useful answers in lengthy descriptions, leaving blind users to work harder to get the information they need.
Blind Man using walking stick

AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.

The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.

Read more
Etsy cracks down on AI slop listings. Everyone else needs to take note.
Now every platform must decide what counts as handmade.
Etsy featured image

Platforms tend to shrug off AI clutter until it threatens what they sell. For Etsy, that thing is trust in the maker.

To protect that, Etsy has banned AI-generated how-to guides and listings made entirely by bots. Most sellers must show at least one unretouched photo of the item (via Etsy Seller Handbook).

Read more