Regarding the prices discourse, at this point really the only thing left is to accept it. The Trump tariffs announced yesterday sealed the deal. Every single video game publisher has been wishing behind the scenes to increase game prices, they were just afraid to be the first and have to face all the initial backslash. Well, Nintendo was the first now, and we assure you the rest will follow soon. Inflation is a thing yet video game prices remained mostly static for decades, in hindsight is incredible we had the same prices for so long. And now with those high tariffs, those costs will also be passed down to customers. Remember how outrageous the PS5 Pro price was when it was announced? Have you thought that in around 2 years PS6 will be announced for even more than that? Even with all the discourse the most likely thing is that the Switch 2 pre-orders will sell out in minutes, and that's what really matters in the end. This will just become the new reality of our hobby.

I hooked up this little ESP32-CAM to my wifi. It takes a picture every 30s and sends it to flash-8B with a prompt like 'is there a person in this image?'. If the model says yes (with structured outputs), it turns on an LED. If I left this on for a month it would cost about $1. Obviously this is the worst security cam ever, BUT I think it's a compelling demo. You can put some 'intelligence' in the loop of a hobby project with <$10 in hardware and fractions of a cent per API call. You can 'program' it in natural language like 'if there is an orange cat playing with my plant'. And with LLM help, modifying the code is possibly as easy as 'make this send me a discord notification if the alarm is triggered twice in an hour'. Anyway, now that I know this thing works it has other projects it is destined for. But cool to know how easy it is to whip this up :)