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.
Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
#22I 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, the…
Hey this is a good comment about the value of something being free that I hadn't thought of before. If it's open on GitHub though couldn't another person fork and continue along if the original author vanishes?
Re: Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
#23[dead]
Re: Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
#24All civic tech is awesome, but a word of advice (may or may not be applicable in your particular neck of the woods, but definitely is in mine): Public comment is one of the least effective mechanisms for influencing policy, at least at the margin. You can drastically amplify your influence with a simple change: move from public to private commentary, directly and personally addressing your state and local reps. They…
Regarding public comments, I don't believe a good politician will make a snap decision at the dais following public comments. Most of them will have received the meeting agenda in advance and formed an opinion about how they are going to vote and the questions they are going to ask. If this is the case, public comment is just a waste of time for them, as they won't really get swayed by it. At most, they will mention a point that a public commenter made to support something that they were already going to do.
Emailing them privately in advance of the meeting will give them the opportunity to think about your input and, in some cases, reply and engage with you about the policy. It might not change their mind, but it will definitely help them see others' perspectives on their upcoming decision.
Re: Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
#25All civic tech is awesome, but a word of advice (may or may not be applicable in your particular neck of the woods, but definitely is in mine): Public comment is one of the least effective mechanisms for influencing policy, at least at the margin. You can drastically amplify your influence with a simple change: move from public to private commentary, directly and personally addressing your state and local reps. They…
Regarding public comments, I don't believe a good politician will make a snap decision at the dais following public comments. Most of them will have received the meeting agenda in advance and formed an opinion about how they are going to vote and the questions they are going to ask. If this is the case, public comment is just a waste of time for them, as they won't really get swayed by it. At most, they will mention…
In the best case, you're betting on some subset of whatever board showing up not having counted the votes they need for their preferred outcome. If something's on the agenda, it's because the board wanted it on the agenda!
Re: Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
#26I 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, the…
Hey this is a good comment about the value of something being free that I hadn't thought of before. If it's open on GitHub though couldn't another person fork and continue along if the original author vanishes?
Well, sure. But what if another person doesn't show up to continue along? How does a non-technical customer validate that the fork is going to fit their needs and does what they say?
Re: Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
#27Kind of sad to see AI water use as the first listed issue motivating this. It is a completely fake concern. See here: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
There is so much nuance and context missing that I can't see this as anything other than astroturfing. I can get behind "AI water use is not a serious concern" if all you are talking about is selling inference, and you're comparing some sort of usage metric (e.g. "water use per request"). Water and power use for inference is on the level of other heavy Internet products like video streaming or cloud compute. There is…
It's completely trivial when you compare it to livestock agriculture's water usage (and even more trivial when looking at overall environmental damage), yet mysteriously 99% of people clamoring against GenAI's water usage have never opened their mouths about that. Or ever skipped a hamburger due to it. It's a joke. There are a hundred other good reasons to criticize GenAI, go pick one of those. The truth is that people are embarrassed of the real main reasons they dislike GenAI, yet they shouldn't be. Unlike this one, they're perfectly valid reasons.
I've known this for a long time and ironically this very article proves me right. The article is straight LLM slop, right from the mouth of GPT, Gemini or Claude. It's overt. Out of all 30 articles on the current HN frontpage, this one is by far the highest % LLM-written of all of them - I took the time to skim through each of them. This tells you all you need to know. With this in mind it's poor behavior to accuse GP of all people of astroturfing.
Re: Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
#28104 points huh? HNers really love 100% LLM-written slop nowadays, it seems. Kudos on getting through to the end.
Or maybe the explanation is that nearly no one actually read it, that seems the more likely one.
Re: Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
#29Kind of sad to see AI water use as the first listed issue motivating this. It is a completely fake concern. See here: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
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
Re: Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
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