Again with the maintenace costs. So again, can you please explain why you think maintaining the fleet is going to be worse than intially launching the fleet?

So much wrong with the big fat juicy government contracts statement. First of all, the phrasing is just plain intellectually dishonest. You know damn well that SpaceX is charging the government less than other commercial providers. You wanna talk big fat juicy contracts? Go compare what ULA is charging for say a GPS satellite. ($214 million vs $143 million ish) You should thank your lucky stars SpaceX is being so evil.

Second, the government contracts certainly help the bottom line, but are not required for profitability. In terms of pure launch services, the government is providing about half their revenue - roughly 2 billion for third party launches and 2 billion for governent (split pretty even between NASA crew/cargo and military/intel). Again, those contracts are saving the government money over what ULA or Russia charges. On the Starlink side, the 8.7 billion from the consumer and commercial side dwarfs the 2.7 billion from StarShield.

Math gets fuzzy as while it easy to simply wipe all current government revenue from the SpaceX books, you have to get into serious guessimating to figure out how much of their expenses would go down if they lost all government contracts. And gets even more theoretical since SpaceX is absolutely financially bogged down with that massive xAI tumor Musk bolted onto their side. But very roughly if you strip off xAI numbers SpaceX with government is 3.8 billion operating income vs around 1.5 billion without.

Nope. There are brokerage penalties for retail investors trying to flip IPO stocks immediately but that varies by brokerages and applies to all IPOs - not a SpaceX specific policy. Insiders who had preIPO shares do have restriction. Traditionally preIPO insiders have been locked in for 180 days to avoid an immediate cashout SpaceX structured their lock in period to avoid a 180 day mass sell off by allowing a percentage to be sold at 70, 90, 105, 120 and 135 days. That is the only 120 day number I can find.

Musk, by the way, is not allowed to sell anything for a full year.

Nope, depends on the fund. S&P 500, nope. They have a year long seasoning rule and a requirement on profitability. Nasdaq-100, yes. They recently shrunk their requirements in order to attract SpaceX and OpenAI listings over other exchanges such as NYSE. Now only 15 days until they include SpaceX stock instead of, I think, December.

Corruption? *snort* Yeah, that horror of charging $71 million less to put a GPS into orbit than ULA. Space Force phase 3 is $5.9 billion to SpaceX for 28 missions. ULA $5.4 billion for only 19 missions. $74 million per mission cheaper going with SpaceX. Similarly massive savings for NASA having SpaceX do manned launches vs paying the Russians. I can stand more of this corruption.

Aren't we discussing the June 9th Landspace launch?

That launch did not fail on the way up. Its second stage successfully deployed two different direct to cell test satellites for two different providers. The failure came later - believed to be when it was about to start up for its reentry disposal burn.

Curious as to what number you are using for the Starlink altitude.

Their shells are in quite a wide range. Over the last year the bulk of the established satellites have been shifting lower and many of the new satellites (especially onces with direct to cell capability) are being deployed even lower than that. Those lower orbits measure decay time in weeks to months.

Wow I guess someone had to miss him; I thought he was ridiculously overrated myself and didn't care for a lot of his design work over the years.

If you need Ive back in your life, you could check out the new Ferrari ... most of the internet hates it, but maybe its for you.

Oh no, did no one at SpaceX realize that Low Earth Orbit is not permanent and they will have to replace satellites over time?

They have already built a constellation of 10k. As some of the first ones are deorbiting, they are still launching new ones at a rate that the constellation is still growing. Yet somehow they are making money. With the recent S1 filing we have our best view into SpaceX finances. $11.4 billion in Starlink revenue. $4.4 billion in operating income. Even after accounting for massive capex that is the constellation they had somewhere around $2 freaking billion in free cash flow from their Starlink segment. It is a bloody cash cow while they are replacing deorbiting satellites and expanding. Will only get better when they if they ever reach the point where they are not expanding the constellation. Even more betters if they ever get Starship working operationally.

There is a monstrous gulf between keeping a piece of hardware running forever and replacing the hardware after a single use. You don't buy a new Accord after a single run to the grocery store.

There are three Falcon 9 boosters now over 30 launches. Ten over 20. No one think reusuability means you have to fly a booster past the point of economic sense. SpaceX is far from finding that limit.

I am literally laughing. The I hate Elon therefore I must hate on anything SpaceX does crowd are legendary for their inability to back up their statement and hiding behind shadow bans and blocklists. They hate facts. SpaceX fans are on every social platform loudly flying the flag. Hell, many are so enthusiastic about it a common thing is, "I hate SpaceX because their fanboys are everywhere." Saying they hide in their own communities is absurd.

They recently bragged about how much they were getting done with AI vibe-coding.

Could it be related to the wave of bugs? Say it ain't so!

Exactly yes. You don't need a license to "copy" something to your mind.

You technically do need a license to copy something to a disk or to RAM. A number of cases around hacking/cracking have hinged even on the nuance that the hacker, by violating the "terms and conditions", no longer had a software license to make the "copy" of the software that was loaded from disk to RAM for example, and it was therefore copyright infringement.

In any case, yes, you are of course also correct that although you are free to remember anything, what you produce from that memory *may* be an infringing copy or infringing derivative work that requires a license.

But the difference of course, is that the LLM itself is already an infringing derivative work before it even produces anything. Your mind isn't.

And everything the LLM produces is basically just taking that collection of derivative works, and rolling dice on it to generate output. The output is a strictly a function of the input. On some level, it can't "not produce" derivative works. The best it does is slice and dice so many of them together that we can't tell.

I suppose that might be what the total sum of what human creativity is too, and some people genuinely believe that. It appears to be a surprisingly capable facsimile in some respects. But most people think there is more to the spark of human experience of creativity than *just* that, at least for now.

"It is no more "theft" than you are."

Yes. It is. Quite different in fact.

You see, Rei, ... suppose we assume you are "correct" that the LLM is doing the same thing as the human brain here. (This is a point I don't necessarily concede, but don't really need to actually engage with that here.) It just doesn't matter, they are legally distinct situations.

No amount of argument that "its doing the same thing as you are" changes that fact. What happens in a machine is covered by copyright law. What happens in a human mind is not.

It doesn't actually matter if the two are doing the same thing.

One is copyright infringement aka "theft", and one isn't.

You can potentially make the argument that there is no ethical difference if you like, but legally, they are worlds apart. Don't confuse ethics with law.

Even if they are doing the same thing, perhaps collectively society wants to carve out exclusions for copyright law to enshrine human beings right to see and remember things without requiring a license to do while continuing to want to require machines to require licensing to perpetuate the socio/economic contract that copyright is supposed to reflect.

That is not hypocrisy.

Ok, I'm imagining a class of high school students breaking the guardrails, getting it to report that they're doing brilliantly and deserve A+ while they watch tiktok... at the very least they'll make it say racist things and publish that on tiktok for the lulz. It'll also find a way to organically mention how much its been hearing that everyone else really likes new Pepsi Cherry Zero on a daily basis too.

Is that not the outcome you were imagining too?

Oooh... yes please, i can't wait for virtual Feyman prefacing his lectures with the lords prayer, explaining how God created the universe and all the physics in it; and also: you look thirsty, there is a Pepsi machine with new Pepsi Cherry Zero in the hallway; have you tried it?

Einstein meanwhile extols the virtue of Zionist colonization in Palestine...

Wait? Do you actually think that it would go differently? If we create puppets of brilliant revered thinkers they'll inevitably say whatever slop some combination of political appointees and advertising companies want them to say. Why on earth would anyone think they would be used for anything else?

Its frequently used on general elective courses because they're big enough (often hundreds of students) that the statistical variation between student cohorts fits normal curves pretty well.

That doesn't even make sense. The defining characteristic of a credential mill is that it passes everyone who goes. A curve grading system assigns Fs and Ds and C- to the bottom of every class.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, right now, everyone who goes and shows up to class passes, and half of them get As. How is that not "essentially a credential mill" right now?

Even more damning, a generation ago 25% of them got As. What's your theory on that? Harvard students this generation are just a lot smarter and more studious and they're mastering the material at a much higher rate? Or that Harvard is handing As out like participation trophies now?

I know where my money is at. And Harvard's own teaching staff agrees.

Your splitting hairs. The OP complained that having your grade affected by the grades of your peers was wrong. Then you said, well it would be fine if they based the grades on the "top score" which is still having your grade determined by what (one of) your peers did.

If your 40% on the exam would be an A if the brightest kid got a 44% but would be a B+ if the brightest kid got a 48%, I doubt the OP would be any "happier" with that situation.

My daughter recently took a course where the average final exam score was around 30%. Nobody hit 50%. Nobody completed the test. They were graded on the curve, as everyone expected they would be, and the A's, B's and C's were distributed pretty appropriately in the end.

In your world, apparently this was simply the dumbest cohort of 4th year university students ever to walk the halls, and they all deserved an F ??

Or maybe, just maybe, it was a brutally difficult exam.

Grading on the curve works perfectly fine if you realize that the student cohorts tend to be more consistent than the tests are from professor to professor, year to year.

The only way "your way" makes any sense at all at approaching fairness is if the tests are standardized... but that creates a whole whack of new problems. -- If the test is standardized, then students are incentivized to just study the test, not the material. Meanwhile, In many advanced degree courses, the material taught from semester to semester varies by professor and year for the same course. How do you standardize the test when even the material is variable?

Unsurprisingly the teaching staff at Harvard know a lot more about this than you do.

High level undergrad course work, and graduate level course work isn't like a primary school arithmetic or spelling test.

The program is still deterministic - the output is determined *entirely* and deterministically by the input. (Where the input is the set of the prompt, the sequence of numbers returned by the calls for random(), and the LLM data model itself.)

Your "mistake", if we want to call it that, is treating the random() function as an innate quality of the LLM. It isn't it is simply part of the input.

Provide the the system with the same model, the same prompt, and the same sequence of numbers, and you WILL get the same answer, regardless of how complex the question is, or who asks it.

You absolutely can though. There is nothing stopping you from seeding the run with a single LLM, or even substituting the function definition for random() with:

random() { // determined by fair dice roll
        return 5;
}

We can trivially and easily do this.

And further, it seems you are now suggesting that substituting the above random function for this one:

random() { //
    input = ask-user-for-fair-dice-roll();
    return input;
}

and now you sit there rolling dice and inputing the results, and the computer program gains consciousness?

really?