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token prices having tanked the last few months
Token prices have only gone up for me; I guess it's punishment for not liking Cursor (or IDEs in general, because they mess with git and that holiest of holiest shall not be touched by some dirty software.)
Problem with older hardware is what it can actually do, useful old hardware is even overpriced
You can probably get a Macbook M1 with 16GB RAM for under 1M sats. That does the trick for repetitive, well designed, preferably structured output work
smoltelligence is practically free... or literally free via API as long as you don't care if it gets trained on
When I do pipelines it's mostly confidential or could-be-confidential stuff that I'm definitely not sharing. Like OCR->Sanity Check->Keyword Extraction->Embeds and then I have a search engine over docs. I developed that concept for a client where the input was confidential, so I just kept it like that and I'm happy with it, and if I'm going to go bankrupt off 2kWh, even at the most scammy price I've ever paid at ~65ct converted to USD, for 48 hours of non stop crunching, then I will not make it and deserve to stop breathing. I wish all my problems were in the 65ct magnitude lol.
I don't know about Flock. I just think that we should always be careful when public money gets spent on tech. I know how cities/counties, state and feds source their tech - been hired on all sides of those types of deals, both sides of the Atlantic - and this is generally either consultant-driven, or vendor-driven. The functionaries of local govt often talk a whole deal but they really have no clue what they sign off on in terms of consequences. I think the backlash is deserved, but the city/county people ought to get a bit more of it, rather than just one vendor. They just switch vendors and act all the sunny days.
unfamiliar cars
This is a great use-case on terminal roads, or if you're unlucky enough to be in a cul-de-sac.
Haven't looked into the math on this index but never questioned it since it matches my lived experience, my monthly cost peaked around the same time (using on-demand billing and PPQ for non-Composer models when needed)
https://m.stacker.news/157244
IDEs
I've been using Cursor Agent more and more where I don't have or dont want it to use git... minimalist TUI. OpenCode I got wired up to Codex Auth.
cities/counties
I know the scams well, national scale launderers and operatives working every town... school districts may be even worse.
The Flock backlash is just as psyop as the datacenter backlash, but requires idiots carrying their other tracking device in their pocket to partake. Confluence of self-own, mass idiocy, and influence operations. The tech will just get re-packaged so that the same people tearing them down cheer in a year or two.
Not sure about this necessarily, esp with token prices having tanked the last few months. I live in an area with some of the highest electric rates in the country, even sticking an Avalon or something in my office as a space heater would lose money on-net if it was free.
Problem with older hardware is what it can actually do, useful old hardware is even overpriced... I just sold some RAM sticks on eBay that I found in a drawer for probably more than I paid for them new years ago.
I probably should investigate more with smoltelligence pipelines, but then again smoltelligence is practically free... or literally free via API as long as you don't care if it gets trained on. That 6GB of nVidia VRAM I have does nothing right now, can't think of anything useful to do with it except the voice model/flock stuff.
Yea there's definitely demand, it didn't come out of nowhere, they started in gated communities iirc. First company through the door gets shot though, Flock didn't stand a chance. Options were either partner with politically aligned VC, which just draws suppressing fire from the opposite political side, or stay bootstrapped and draw suppressing fire from all sides until you pick one or die.
My neighborhood use-case is mostly unfamiliar cars, the nature of my road makes them immediately sus. It'd be trivial to let neighbors tag legit cars via a webapp, get push notifications, watch their houses when their away, pull data from public (or even paid) sources, but never egress data to big brother.
Only one neighbor balked at the idea of me rolling one for us, the female politician ofc.