Starlink is profitable. It is not unsustainable at all when you own the rockets and the satellite manufacturing. Read the audited financials if you don’t believe it. Other parts of SpaceX are a different story.
It's profitable if you don't pay for the rockets. The audited financials say the launch cost is $0 for Starlink (and -$whatever for Space [the launch business] but as depreciation over five years and not as direct costs).
So it's almost certainly the case that Starlink itself would not be profitable if it had to pay for its own launches. If Starlink paid for its own launches, the launch business would be closer to profitability but still not profitable, i.e. you'd have two unprofitable businesses instead of one.
It's profitable if you pay for the rockets. Starlink is a massive business now and it keeps getting larger, and it has good margins. It can trivially pay for the rocket business over time.
... if it pays for the launches, it has negative margins. I'm not sure what's hard to understand here.
It might be the case that once you get enough satellites up and replace them consistently enough that margins go positive, and then you can start paying back the cost of "the rocket business" (i.e. more than the marginal cost of launch) but... it's not at all clear that's even theoretically possible. At least not without launch costs coming down significantly from where they are today, which Starship is not clearly en route to achieving.
Unless I’m misunderstanding something OP is saying that the only reason Starlink is profitable is because they don’t pay for the rocket launches. But the rocket launches still cost money, it’s just that SpaceX pays for it. But given they’re part of the same overall organization it just seems like an accounting trick.
This is correct. I’m not an accountant so not qualified to say the degree to which it’s tricky, but it does add an addendum to “Starlink is profitable [if you completely exclude the primary source of variable cost by burying it into a different business segment].”
Starlink is already showing net income and has shown net income for at least 3 years.
There's always people out there to minimize success of others.
It's not first. It's nothing new. It's not innovative.
There's an old article in WSJ that claimed SpaceX told investors that starlink was profitable if you excluded certain costs. We found out from the IPO that that was nonsense. SpaceX was charging starlink the internal cost of launch. Not the public pricing that everyone else charges.
That makes sense if you're not trying to split the company.
> I realised then when I became more of a manager than a coder that then types of code quality issues engineers obsess over are practically irrelevant.
Until you find out your TLS key is 4 or that a 255 char password will bypass your auth system. Management is a necessary evil that needs to be kept in check by knowledgeable and skilled people.
When you say "context" do you essentially just mean skills? Like everything that goes to an agent is prompt right? So you want to know how we are managing a library of prompts (which the industry calls skills) so we don't type the same thing over and over?
It's a git backed tool with a custom protocol that can be externally accessed over a Cloudflare tunnel.
You an connect your sm client to any endpoint, and each endpoint runs a server inside a git repo, so you can have as many separate instances per client as you like, just switch your ~/.skillzmouse.json file and it will point to a different server.
It also has a script distribution and patching system. Skills and scripts constitute what I would refer to as my "standard operating procedures" which broadly transcend harness (and I have used this with multiple harnesses).
It "plugs in" by including a header at the top of AGENTS.md that tells the agent how to use it, and the first step is for the agent to load the agents skill, which is a bunch of stuff applicable everywhere, and then that also builds the skills header describing the list of skills, and then skills can refer to libs which are not listed and can be loaded on a case by case basis.
I am not using it with multiple harnesses anymore though because I built a harness, which integrates skillzmouse and has "factory workflows" that are loaded as skillzmouse scripts. My harness can be described as "deterministic control of intelligent agents", ie. the agent can't spawn sub agents, the agents can't talk to each other, and the workflow scripts can build and pass context in a deterministic way between sessions that are created during the execution of a given workflow.
But you could use skillzmouse in any harness. I've used it in pi, Junie and Kimi Code. Junie CLI had problems with compliance.
I don’t have this problem and it might be because I have skills and workflows that focus on decisions. When I open each session what I am looking at is mostly a series of decisions presented to me and if one of them doesn’t have sufficient context I ask for clarification but provide answers for all the ones that do. The agent can keep track of the overall goal and then produces either a document or a fix at the end.
So to me having 50 concurrent sessions is like playing 50 games of chess simultaneously: I can’t possibly remember my previous analysis or planning but that doesn’t matter because everything I need to know in order to make a decision is in front of me.
Idk where people get that from. Having word processors with auto-correct, dictionary and all the other plugins accessible to everyone never solved the writing problem. Why would Claude Code solve software production?
My comment is somewhat tongue in cheek: I know that Claude Code (and AI agents generally) do not mean the end of software engineering altogether, because I have been creating code with AI for a year, written a coding harness, and have non-coder colleagues who use said harness to create software.
But "where people get that from" is precisely from the same guy who is now saying "oh well, if you're going to commit your passwords then well!! you should know better than that!!"
That link doesn't say anything about Cherny saying software production being solved. It says he said coding is mostly solved. As in it's increasingly easier to generate working code. But coding is neither the beginning nor the end of software production; there is quite a bit more to the thing, from requirements gathering and scoping to thoroughly testing a release to ensure it meets said requirements from the users' perspective.
"I think by the end of the year, everyone is going to be a product manager, and everyone codes. The title software engineer is going to start to go away"
Or this:
"Someone has to prompt the Claudes, talk to customers, coordinate with other teams, decide what to build next"
He doesn't mention "configure the git repository so we don't accidentally publish our passwords". That would sound WAY less impressive.
Dario has gone out and said that AI will cause mass unemployment. He said that AI could do 50% of jobs within 1 - 5 years.
OpenAI are much less flagrant with this shit but Anthropic have been banging the drum that their coding agents can fully replace workers for ages, at every available opportunity, and then something as fucking fundamental as publishing passwords shows up and he's all like "Oh well, you shouldn't do that should you that's obvious!!".
It seems to me you're confusing things again. A lot depends on company size and structure, but - given a reasonably sized enterprise - for the most part a software engineer takes specs and writes code meeting those specs from the dev perspective, then QA tests the release from the user perspective, and devops actually publishes the release to wherever. Of course the smaller an enterprise is, the more roles a single person will have.
But something like fully configuring a git repo isn't really the concern of a software engineer, per se; their concern is to create code that works, and git is just something to help with managing and passing on their creation. It's the one with the devops role who's really responsible for publication aspects (of course the same person may be doing both creation and publication) and should be ensuring repos don't have things committed which shouldn't be published (or even security if that's a separate role).
> Dario has gone out and said [...]
Different person from Cherny, but also I don't see anyone giving reasonable arguments as to why his prediction may be incorrect, only a lot of outrage. And I'm inclined to agree that AI will be able to do a lot of jobs; it's already on the way with quite a few, for example the software engineer role. I for one have been successfully using Claude Code for said role, while I handle the other aspects, and as it becomes good enough at other things I'll keep handing off more of the software production process to it.
I created a “factory” for these that sets up the initial distribution with a script then you can back it up and flash your distribution onto subsequent sticks preserving the IMEI for a full factory restore. I have about 300 that I need to sell.
I have about 300 that I need to sell and I have some software that can run a “factory” to flash and restore your Linux distribution while preserving the IMEI.
They are all the same board variant on which the SIM works and have the msm8916 chip.
If anyone’s interested in have about 300 of these that I need to sell. They are all equipped with the board edition on which the SIM card works with the OpenStick, and come with the original IMEI/firmware.
I also have factory software that flashes and restores them while preserving the IMEI by saving the firmware to GCS.
I'm interested in a handful, but I'm in California, so I'm guessing that shipping from Australia may be more expensive than it's worth. Still, if you can post more details, I'll take a look!
A few people have emailed asking for some, maybe if I ship a bunch of them to one person who then sends them on it'll make it worth the shipping cost. My email is in my bio. Thanks!
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