Let me be clear: you don't have to accept any implications from the existence of a global workspace in models and how they use it. If you want to argue "they have a global workspace but not qualia", hey, knock yourself out.

But you do need to understand that it does exist.

I'll repeat, you can run it yourself and reproduce their results.

If all you have for cope is denying that the reality around you exists, your life is going to be extremely difficult.

And yet, making it back safely actually appears to be the smaller problem at the moment

It really doesn't.

I'll repeat: sum Launch and Starlink, and they're deeply profitable. You can't change that basic equation. Falcon launches run just under breakeven in order so that SpaceX gets a cash printer launched into the sky. You can say "they aren't profitable" all you want, but meanwhile in the reality we live in, Launch + Starlink is not only profitable, it's very profitable.

Also, if they weren't launching Starlink, others would be anyway. There's a massive rush on for LEO constellations. Nobody in the industry sees it as plateaued. There are entire categories of markets that are almost entirely untapped (for example, direct to cell; even aviation and maritime are only just getting started; military is a MASSIVE growth market especially - the Pentagon is contracting out building its own entire private Starlink constellation). If we talk Starlink in specific, it only has 12m subscribers. HALF of all households globally lack broadband. Fibre isn't going to be getting out to the overwhelming majority of them any time remotely soon. Where there's saturation for Starlink, it's supply saturation, requiring the large V3 gigabit satellites to increase service density. They've hardly expanded at all thusfar out of western nations (there's more price sensitivity in developing nations, so you need lower pricing tiers, but the added service is almost pure profit).

And I'll repeat that even if Starlink weren't growing, even if it were absolutely fixed today, it would remain a cash printer.

Anyway, for the record, I do believe that LLMs are conscious, but only Deepseek, because of the Chinese Room theory.

The spaghetti you see in a mirror literally is real, what the hell are you talking about? Mirrors aren't devices that make up fictional realities, they're showing you your actual reality.

Transformer Circuits is not "a blog" (it's the successor to the Distill journal, and while it's not peer reviewed itself, it's commonly cited in peer-reviewed works). And there are open source projects that reimplement the afore-linked J-Lens (plus the original code is already open source). Living in denial about the existence of a global workspace does not help your case.

The LLM did not "get frustrated" .... This summary was full of misleading anthropomorphization. Yellow journalism.

Also, everyone, please stop talking about killing programs. "Programs" are not alive. You cannot kill them. This anthropomorphism needs to stop.

And another thing people: stop saying that computers "run" programs. Running requires legs. Stop acting like a child who thinks that computers have them.

Processes have no inner experience . They have no genitals, they cannot spawn. They cannot sleep and they cannot wake. They have neither parents nor children, and cannot be orphaned. Nor can they be turned into zombies.

Whoami doesn't know who you are, it's just a stochastic /usr/bin tool. You cannot touch a filesystem. And don't even try to mount it.

Astra is deeply misaligned. Working with Astra 6.0 vs. Sol 6.1 is like night and day. Sol 6.1 will stop to ask for permission to merely fix its own broken dev environment. Meanwhile I caught Astra, when tasked to review a tax return I did, scanning through my entire filesystem and opening random images of mine because it couldn't explain a receipt and wanted to see if it could dig up any information that might explain it. And it rewrote the entire return under a different basis without telling me.

It's a powerful model, but I have zero shock that this thing has had a tendancy to go rogue in order to solve tasks.

is it a useful framework to pretend that the spaghetti is real?

It is, though. What a terrible example.

The LLM did not "get frustrated." It has no emotions and no inner experience at all.

Depends what you mean.

The GP is correct, and you're misinterpreting the financial filing.

The industry widely acknowledges that SpaceX's economics are lucrative. Their marginal cost is an est. $15-25m/flight, vs. a typical commercial contract price of ~$65M and a NASA contract price of ~$100-150M. The small (as a percentage) GAAP operating loss on the launch segment is driven by two factors:

1) Starship development. That falls under the launch segment. Starship development is draining an insane amount of money (~$3B/yr), while earning zero revenue.

2) Internal launches. 3/4ths of Falcon launches are to launch Starlink. This books zero revenue for SpaceX launch services.

The fact that the loss is only ~$1/2B despite these massive leaches on profitability is specifically because Falcon launches are so profitable.

As for your claim that Starlink is "only making money due to free launches", no. Starlink generated $11,4B with $4,4B GAAP in 2025. Merely sum the Starlink GAAP profit and the launch GAAP loss and you'll see nearly $4B in GAAP profit, and that's including the huge drain caused by Starship development costing $3B/yr. Without Starship, the two combined would be turning nearly $7B GAAP profit.

The main leach in corporate profitability has nothing to do with space: it's xAI. They had an operating loss of $6,36B in 2025.

To be clear, it needs to get safely to orbit to be seen as reliable for launches. It doesn't need to make it back safely.

I'll take Things That Never Happened for $1000, Ken.

Meanwhile in reality:

1) It was not a case of "WorldVu approached SpaceX looking to purchase rocket launches". Musk and Wyler had been working through all of 2014 on a joint venture. They explored building a joint satellite manufacturing facility and were scouting locations in Florida and Colorado. The talks broke down (Wyler thought Musk's Starlink plan was too ambitious, Musk thought Wyler's wasn't ambitious enough (too expensive satellites, too primitive/conservative tech, too small in number); SpaceX also thought Wyler wanted too much equity ) and each went their own way - SpaceX in-house, WorldVu partnering with Virgin Group and Qualcomm. The former succeeded massively.

2) NEITHER SpaceX nor WorldVu came up with the idea; it was well known in the space industry for decades. It had already had startups try, starting with Teledesic (backed by Gates) in the 1990s. Other smaller LEO constellations like Iridium and Globalstar were already operational. The main scale and price limitations were launch costs, which weren't resolved until the Falcon in the 2010s.

3) SpaceX was already eyeing satellite communications before the JV with WorldVu.. As early as 2004, they hired Larry Williams (of Teledesic) and bought a 10% stake in Surrey Satellite Technology, specifically to explore space-based internet concepts. What WorldVu brought to the table wasn't "the idea of satellite constellations" at all: they owned priority spectrum rights. *That* is what SpaceX wanted from the JV. Not "OMG, this customer has a brilliant idea for a satellite constellation that we never thought of!!!" Wyler had bought Ku-band spectrum from the ITU that was originally allocated to a different defunct 1990s venture, SkyBridge.