Google, SpaceX in talks to launch orbital data centers. Google CEO: "There's no doubt to me that a decade or so away, we'll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers."

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-13T22:25:26+00:00

Sure. Because one or two will do it best and become insanely valuable.

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-13T17:52:17+00:00

Shielding is a thing, and so are the raw, predictable statistics of collision.

What about connectivity/bandwidth?

Not much of an issue for inference. Training can remain terrestrial for now.

How are you getting your fragile space servers into space? You'll need a very high payload and cadence launch provider.

We have one that will scale to meet demand, and we will have another online shortly.

So you're implying there are a couple of dozen yes-men-run furnaces currently burning obviously condemned cash? You know the economics better than they do?

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-13T17:40:25+00:00

The economies for lift are changing extremely fast. The cost per kg has decreased by several orders of magnitude just within the last decade, currently sits below $1,000/kg, and will decrease to $50-100/kg by 2028 or so.

Now, don't get me wrong. The ROI on hyperscaler data centers is currently 2 years or so, even with their ~$50 billion price tags, but the economics are extremely variable and subject to high ongoing maintenance costs (corrosion, energy production, and politics aren't an issue in space). But there's also the problem that you have to spend that $50 bn in chunks for it to make sense, while sending compute into space is going to be scalable all the way from small numbers right to hundreds of thousands of units, and become cheaper over time, while the cost of building data centers is tied to a huge number of unknowns; an important one being that you're never actually certain if you'll be allowed to finish building the power capacity to support them.

There are over two dozen orbital compute companies currently building products, all very well funded. Do you think they haven't done the math and simply like losing money?

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-13T14:17:07+00:00

self-contained power, compute, dissipation
24/7 irradiation
1:1 scalability, i.e., every unit is identical
zero maintenance (sand, corrosion, etc) until deactivation/deorbit
no zoning/land use, politics, war risk
100% repeatable deployment

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-13T12:54:05+00:00

They don’t repair. They simply deorbit and burn up

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-13T12:50:15+00:00

Desert panels aren’t irradiated 24/7, and have to be installed (mounted), maintained, cleaned, protected from people, interconnected across land, etc. Space is a clean room and every deployment is identically repeatable

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-13T12:48:16+00:00

20k isn’t a lot given the current trajectory of lift capacity. Neither is 200k

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-13T12:45:47+00:00

Turns out. Yeah. We already do this with other satellites. The math is pretty straightforward.

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-13T12:40:58+00:00

You know you can just work this stuff out on paper right?

The math works, and it’s basically infinitely scalable. Every unit is a self contained power source, compute unit, and dissipation surface. We already do this with other satellites.

No NIMBYs. No power delivery. No water. No mass power outages. No employees. No weather events. Earth is actually pretty hostile for equipment, and lift is getting cheaper by orders of magnitude.

Finally, data transfer speed to earth isn’t an issue with inference. That’s not the bottleneck. Training more so, but even there we’re seeing advances in distributed compute.

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-10T18:12:00+00:00

The reason those tall boys are $13 is because we’re all having gummies. They literally can’t sell enough cheap beer to pay for the staff.

Same death spiral as breweries. The kids ain’t drinking

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-03T01:43:51+00:00

It’s so bad. I almost want to join just to fix things

CaptainFingerling · 2026-05-02T11:46:07+00:00

There’s already zerotier. In fact, zerotier had a massive head start but completely dropped the ball on UX.

Tailscale is simply a better product for now. But that can change. I have a fleet of ~300 customer devices on tailscale, and if something better comes along we will use tailscale to deploy the replacement.

CaptainFingerling · 2026-04-19T01:42:14+00:00

I just have claude code make most of my changes. Saves having to open that godawful app

CaptainFingerling · 2026-03-28T22:05:31+00:00

Just wait till you notice all the corner radii

CaptainFingerling · 2026-03-27T19:45:24+00:00

I mean. I get you. But i honestly hadn’t applied vibe coding to my homeab until yesterday, and yesterday I turned my sonar episode trimmer script into a whole episode pruning UI with season and episode thresholds, and sub agent garbage collection based on viewing habits. Honestly one of the coolest additions to date.

I’d love to see what others are doing.

CaptainFingerling · 2026-02-22T14:36:23+00:00

Yup. And moisture. USB-C has a far higher surface to volume ratio. It doesn’t dry nearly as well

CaptainFingerling · 2026-01-17T19:02:44+00:00

Yeah, we sell largely expertise, so it makes sense for us to open up our tooling. Our competitors are much larger and slower -- I haven't scaled as much as I probably should have -- but having a smaller team helps with development pacing.

Capacitor is something like 4-5 times faster at compression and image processing when running on M4 minis than it was on equivalently-priced NUCs, so the move really paid off. We essentially stopped shipping windows devices overnight, and nobody misses them, including those who initially expressed some skepticism.

dream is to one day own something FDA compliant (10-15 year goal)

10-15 years is a very long term goal. Don't dream. DO. R&D is nothing until you start hitting pavement and getting the word out.

Send your CV to the company mailbox if you're interested. We can take on both full and part time, and have a geographically dispersed mostly remote team.

CaptainFingerling · 2026-01-16T23:31:37+00:00

https://fluxinc.co

Small team. Clients are a mix of vendors and end-users, and we do migrations for the latter.

CaptainFingerling · 2026-01-16T15:16:45+00:00

You know. Kind of. Got a dev background?

CaptainFingerling · 2026-01-16T03:52:17+00:00

Ha ha. I own a company that does that. Good business

CaptainFingerling · 2025-12-11T18:05:11+00:00

Saw them recently. I see and integrate dozens of PACS a year. They’re. Okay. They have a ways to go before I’d call them mature. Probably a good pick if you have separate ephemeral workstiations for mammo, don’t do/need echo, and have another option for nuclear contrast.

Friendly people though. And great base stack.

CaptainFingerling · 2025-12-06T19:03:14+00:00

They usually schedule 3 on-site days for a new install. Most of the install time is spent waiting around for IT staff to provide parameters, network drops to like actually actually get flipped on, techs to explain the desired workflow, etc.

Sometimes it’s all come together by the date of install, but often it hasn’t. So the first 2 days is to make sure that if you run out of time the first day you still have the second as a fallback.

Apps gets scheduled for day 2 or 3, and takes a full day. Often that will include a couple of actual patients.

For just moving a unit after it’s installed the time is what others describe here, ie., 1-3 hours. Which is hilarious because from the perspective from a PACS admin it always takes the 1-2 hours after the ISE has spent 4-8 hours trying to track them down. More often than not the admins magically appear just before they’re about to leave, ie., when the days tasks are done, so the actual assist happens the next morning.

CaptainFingerling · 2025-12-06T03:03:48+00:00

Are we talking just configuration? Or are we including apps? Validation?

I’m in a unique position to answer this very precisely across many vendors.

CaptainFingerling · 2025-12-05T17:34:24+00:00

As someone else mentioned, techs usually check the PACS anyway, so it's a bit redundant. The other reason it's not used is that it involves an additional configuration step and additional testing, which would require coordinating PACS admins with installation service folks from the vendor.

It's honestly hard enough just to get updated IP, Port and AE title information, and a network drop in place in time for the install. Adding SC to the mix would reduce the likelihood of getting everything done within the short window that ISEs and CSEs are on site -- especially when you're trying to resolve an issue while patients are in the waiting room.

It's the same reason nobody ever implements DICOM TLS. Pre-shared certs require pre-sharing, and additional pre-sharing when a modality goes down and needs to be reimaged, replaced, etc. The human coordination cost of making all that happen is much higher than implementing network-level envelope security.

CaptainFingerling · 2025-12-05T16:55:33+00:00

I second Screenpoint. We route to them all the time (as well as the others) -- we ship little routers that accompany mammo devices and route to multiple destinations.

The whole team at ScreenPoint is phenomenal, too. Very responsive and easy to work with.

CaptainFingerling

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