I have some experience in this space and I want to strongly encourage the author to reconsider their free as in beer model.
Yes, your target users don’t have a lot of money, but they also deserve a sense of whether or not you’re going to keep maintaining this project. Additionally, they are generally NOT technical and will not have the skills necessary to set up or maintain this platform.
Without a paid offering, they will have to run the software and will not have any clarity about your long term commitment to the project. Feel free to reach out to me. My email address is in my profile.
This is great but confused me at first because it's slightly misusing the term "civic tech". It's generally used pretty broadly to include all government and gov-adjacent technology. Public monitoring and engagement tools are a part of it but that's just one piece. Civic tech includes actual government projects like Healthcare.gov and IRS Direct File (RIP); organizing platforms like MoveOn.org and ActBlue; and volunteer programs like Code for America and U.S. Digital Response.
The line at the bottom of the page does a better job of describing what specifically this project is:
"FireStriker is a free civic engagement and legislative intelligence platform for community organizations, unions, PACs, and activists."
I appreciate the impetus behind this. But I'm unsure whether this warrants an HN post. The post text is AI-written, and there's no information on technical details--just a kind of vague problem statement. Nor was I able to find any code for the project elsewhere on the site.
The author might like knowing about a similar effort targeting Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR), that was discussed here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290916.
I am always skeptical about making anything useful "free". Because unless there is no cost associated with that, "free" is a fake term, which only means someone else absorbs the cost. There are cases which makes sense, but not sure "civic tech" is one of them.
I like the idea of building free apps for civic engagement, but I'm not sure how to use it or help your project along. Maybe I should ask Gemini or Claude what to do with it. I think making civic tech free is a good idea, I want more vibe coded projects to be released for free. I agree a link to its GitHub is helpful for the group of people on hacker news. I'm more likely to contribute code or documentation than to actually be a target audience for using it.
There are many good criticisms against data center. And yet, the water issue always comes up first. Must we spew false/untruthhood just so our political message is catchy? I suppose yes - in times of war/politics, the laws/truths are silent. But it doesn't have to be so here.
The word "fake" draws attention but I think the article obscures two real problems:
Training is missing from the analysis entirely (as someone else noted)
Inference water use is indeed minimal per prompt no argument there, but training the old GPT-3 consumed roughly 5.4 million liters of water. LLaMA 3: ~22 million. These are huge events, happening multiple times a year across the industry, folding them into national averages seems like the statistical simplification he article criticizes everyone else for doing…
"Small nationally" ≠ "fine locally"
The Dalles, Oregon is the clearest example. In 2012, Google used 12% of the city's water supply. Today it consumes a third, around 1.19 million gallons per day, and well a sixth data center comes online in 2026, in the same area.
The city is now pursuing a $260 million reservoir expansion into a national forest (!), where 95% of the projected new water demand will be industrial, not residential. Residents are looking at a potential 99% rate increase by 2036 to fund infrastructure that may exists primarily to serve one company. Apparently the city fought a 13-month legal battle just to keep those numbers secret, that’s like a community being reshaped around a single tenant.
Hays County, Texas residents sharing the Edwards Aquifer with incoming data centers voted to block one. Memphis is watching xAI draw 5 million gallons per day. Bloomberg found two-thirds of new U.S. data centers since 2022 are sited in high water-stress zones. Arizona have already passed ordinances capping data center water use.
This to me looks like a problem in the making, AI water use isn't a national crisis for now, but local impacts are already real, training costs are systematically underreported, and the five year trajectory in water stressed regions deserves serious attention indeed
27 comments
Yes, your target users don’t have a lot of money, but they also deserve a sense of whether or not you’re going to keep maintaining this project. Additionally, they are generally NOT technical and will not have the skills necessary to set up or maintain this platform.
Without a paid offering, they will have to run the software and will not have any clarity about your long term commitment to the project. Feel free to reach out to me. My email address is in my profile.
The line at the bottom of the page does a better job of describing what specifically this project is:
"FireStriker is a free civic engagement and legislative intelligence platform for community organizations, unions, PACs, and activists."
It relies on automated scraping + human confirmation. Louis Rossman describes how it works in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W420BOqga_s
Not sure you should be free. You want to be sustainable but not for profit.
Charging the customer is the small guys weapon to keep going.
The big guys cal also do that but they can subsidize lossy departments and sell data, sell stovk etc.
Make it GPLv3 open source if you want to offer a free.version
It is a completely fake concern. See here: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
There are many good criticisms against data center. And yet, the water issue always comes up first. Must we spew false/untruthhood just so our political message is catchy? I suppose yes - in times of war/politics, the laws/truths are silent. But it doesn't have to be so here.
Training is missing from the analysis entirely (as someone else noted)
Inference water use is indeed minimal per prompt no argument there, but training the old GPT-3 consumed roughly 5.4 million liters of water. LLaMA 3: ~22 million. These are huge events, happening multiple times a year across the industry, folding them into national averages seems like the statistical simplification he article criticizes everyone else for doing…
"Small nationally" ≠ "fine locally"
The Dalles, Oregon is the clearest example. In 2012, Google used 12% of the city's water supply. Today it consumes a third, around 1.19 million gallons per day, and well a sixth data center comes online in 2026, in the same area.
The city is now pursuing a $260 million reservoir expansion into a national forest (!), where 95% of the projected new water demand will be industrial, not residential. Residents are looking at a potential 99% rate increase by 2036 to fund infrastructure that may exists primarily to serve one company. Apparently the city fought a 13-month legal battle just to keep those numbers secret, that’s like a community being reshaped around a single tenant.
Hays County, Texas residents sharing the Edwards Aquifer with incoming data centers voted to block one. Memphis is watching xAI draw 5 million gallons per day. Bloomberg found two-thirds of new U.S. data centers since 2022 are sited in high water-stress zones. Arizona have already passed ordinances capping data center water use.
This to me looks like a problem in the making, AI water use isn't a national crisis for now, but local impacts are already real, training costs are systematically underreported, and the five year trajectory in water stressed regions deserves serious attention indeed
Or maybe the explanation is that nearly no one actually read it, that seems the more likely one.
https://firestriker.org/blog/building-firestriker-why-im-mak...
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related, author is a friend with a less active HN account https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=blakeofwilliam