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.