Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived(anyhumanever.com) |
Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived(anyhumanever.com) |
Wage labor didn't exist yet and the cited source is for labor history between 1500CE and the present. The AI illustration also doesn't make any sense for the period.
This is the genuinely bad kind of slop because it's pretending to be semi-factual.
A frequency distribution of life span for those born in year X would be a helpful visual.
Had to laugh.
503CE, dead at six months from smallpox.
had you drawn a different lot in life things would be very different.
imo it is a good example of Rawl's veil of ignorance thought experiment.
How would you design the world if you will be randomly dropped into any position anywhere on earth.
well done.
He probably spoke something close to proto-Indo-European
Somebody, somewhere, somewhen rolled the dice and here we are.
Yikes
An italian, born in the 80s, and no mention of pasta in his diet?
Makes Oregon Trail seem easy…
Great, let's bring back smallpox and measles because the US elected officials are too dumb or genuinely want to destroy the world.
Yeah that does accurately sum up the 15th century.
Still slop coded bollocks though.
Of all human history, it had to pick something off by 20 years and 200km.
https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-b...
You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.
But what I was trying to get across are the ideas, not the language. I think it you were to read the whole thing, you'd probably find it interesting. But if not, feel free to let me know.
But my hypothesis is that there are people with skills for ideas that have the potential to be interesting stories, but not necessarily great prose skills; I don't think those necessarily line up in the same person. Up until now, to write a worthwhile short story you had to be among the best at both.
Maybe AI can help change that, and maybe (I hypothesize), that would be for the better. I understand that such a hypothesis would be controversial, but to me, it feels worth exploring.
So, I'm happy with it as-is; I think the ideas are good and deserve to be out there. I think it just needs a context where people will be more forgiving about AI prose because they are interested enough in the ideas that are conveyed.
But of course, the challenge with creating such a context is that one person with an AI could spew out 1,000 crap stories a day and submit them all...
And OMG, you need to edit the AI slop way way more. This is unreadable.
But I am realizing that AI writing is so offensive to many people that if they get that vibe, they just won't read it, and therefore won't have any idea what is being attempted. Maybe there could be a context where that wouldn't be the case, but HN is probably not it.
You really need to stretch quite a bit to find similarities between this post and this short story.
And since you incorrectly assumed that I didn't read it, I'll give you more unsolicited feedback. Yes the writing is horrendous, but the idea itself is not novel or thought provoking. The general idea has been done many times in the classics like Dick, Asimov, Chiang and others. And the twist at the end ("Oh my god! They couldn't see things in the future because there is no future!!!!!") is immediately predictable when they can't get samples in the future.
That being said, keep writing and enjoying yourself but 1) try to dial down on the AI assist, it really makes for a poor experience for the reader, 2) don't get on your high horse when someone points it out.
But it appears to be drawing much more uniformly from the years than you'd expect given the probability curve (population curve) pictured.
Welcome to the future I guess.
og/goat demo of synthetic data gen
only nit is 'draw' button often below the fold
What bothers me is that the statistics themselves are bad.
Modern take on Oregon Trail vibes I like it
> She was born, married at 18, had 4 children, lost her mother at 28, was orphaned at 41, was widowed at 70, and died at 71 of heart failure (degenerative illness), with 3 surviving children and 9 grandchildren.
First try. Honestly I'm going to call this a W under the circumstances.
I noticed the traffic and am dropping by. A few quick answers after scanning through comments:
Q: Vibecoded? A: Mostly, not completely. I've been programming for 30+ years, and like a lot of people have gotten to the point where I seldom need to look at code anymore. Even so, this took around 4-6 weeks (part time) to get mostly right. A lot of the effort was in assembling the data in a mostly non-hallucinogenic way. More on that below.
Q: What's up with the inaccuracies? A: There are definitely inaccuracies. One of this big issues is that the data we have (mostly academic historical sources) only exist at a certain level of granularity, and attempting to "stretch" statistics is fundamentally error-prone. Different data sets overlap and disagree, and there are genuine unknowns. There's also a fundamental issue with using independent probabilities that should be conditional. For instance, x% of people died before 15, and y% in that same population died in an accident. Combining these statistics to get an estimate of children who died by accident involves coming up with a reasonable distribution of accidents by age, which is guesswork for a given historical time/place. In all, I'm shooting for mostly accurate given patchwork statistics, and a lot of filling in blanks in a reasonable way.
BTW, in order to test the accuracy of stories, I generated a few hundred random stories and created nit-picking "History teacher" agents to evaluate each for accuracy, then aggregated and addressed issues by frequency. It would have been hard to come anywhere close to that level of scrutiny without AI on tap. It's also why I'm so sure that there are still inaccuracies to be found. I was also able to point Claude at comments here, aggregate issues and fix them (with my ok), which means that the issues reported here should be mostly fixed.
Q: Do you cite sources? A: I pushed pretty hard on trying to cite all sources, being as open as possible about where data is coming from. Each element of the story links to its source, and the sources page lists all the sources used, included the lines in each table that come from that source.
For me, this was one of the interesting bits of fallout from the project. How should we source well in the age of AI? I wound up making a distinction between actual downloaded data (from a real publisher), vs what AI "claims" is accurate, citing a source, vs what AI claims to be true, and seems reasonable, but Claude can't cite a source, making it smell funny. In the age of AI-flavored truthiness, it's important to push hard on being able to trace all claims down to their primary sources.
One more note: the biggest source of inaccuracy is the AI-generated images. Comments run about 2:1 in favor of ditching them, but a lot of people really like the idea of adding humanity to a story by supplying a human face, even if AI-image gen insists on dressing the guy from 1375BCE in a snappy crew-neck tee.
I can't imagine my daughter dying before she reaches 5, it feels like it would be the worst feeling I could possibly imagine and then some.
It's just going to skip over the fact he would have been a young adult during the Second World War? That event isn't as important as a faraway volcanic eruption to mention? Such useless AI slop.
https://anyhumanever.com/life/1025135085-1150629022-11334962...
Martha was born in the countryside near Short Pump, in 1993 CE. Her village holds about 300 people. She makes her home in a timber-framed detached house. Martha has neither brothers nor sisters. She eats mostly wheat bread and maize, pork and dairy, and potatoes and garden vegetables, with apples in season, and coffee, soft drinks and snack foods too. She knows her letters. Her height is about 171 cm (5 ft 7 in).
This is an… interesting contextualization.
I am wondering how many historical situations are sexed up to be something significant, yet were nothing to write home about in the moment. All it took was a historian with an active imagination to bring it to the forefront.
Very cool project
I was wondering if the generated people “fill up a spot” and temporarily change the stats for generating new lives. Eg, if the app already generated 10M stories, is it still using the same initial distribution for the new ones, or is generation conditioned on the stats of the already generated?
The random life I got: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...
I remember playing Real Lives 2004 (or maybe 2007) and 2010, both good. I think there are later versions but I had heard they had changed philosophy somehow and some people weren't satisfied (they said they went overboard with educational elements on top of the raw life simulation), so I can't vouch for those.
I don't know if 2010 would be easy to play in today's computers. Now I'm curious, I might try for old times' sake.
A version with the whole history of humanity, like what htis website aims to be but fails, would be amazing if it existed.
Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.
The right way would be to bucket people by something like 1 million. Everyone in the bucket has the same sex, birth year range, and location range. Then draw a bucket uniformly and infer the details.
> You have drawn a girl, born in the Ganges Plain in 1628 CE.
> She was born, married at 16, lost her mother at 19, was orphaned at 30, had 8 children, and died at 39 of pneumonic plague, with 6 surviving children.
Nailed it. Though in retrospect, I drew really well. It would have been safer to guess "toddler death".
Edit: oh it’s not weighed by population? I was expecting 99% of rolls to be in recent times.
yourlifeunderrome.com
Given the huge infant mortality rates until very recently in human history, this is often pretty misleading. Life expectancy at say, 2yo, is far greater.
Hardcore
Extra points if you can take your example life off grid.
What are the odds of 79. Must've been in the very top percentile
The firt citation for marriage data is listed as "Hajnal (RH31)", but links to a seemingly unrelated WorldCat search. The second citation is to "Kaplan (RH03)", which I was able to track down on sci-hub. It is a broad theory of human evolution that doesn't appear to mention the Yangtze Basin or China.
Another citation is to "[RH109] Model-supplied gap-fill (Claude Fable 5 and Claude Opus 5, 2026-08-05). Bounds and items written to close gaps no dataset we hold covers. Not a published work: see each row's `basis` for its stated reason. (2026)" -- this is an interesting way to describe having an LLM hallucinate something for you.
Please stop making vibe-coded websites -- it is not useful to provide incorrect facts. You are polluting the commons with garbage.
James's table is mostly oat and barley bread, pork and dairy, and cabbage and peas, with apples in season, and coffee and sugar as well. He is literate.
Odd for a gen-z person in Britain. I doubt he’d eat a lot of cabbage, and I have no idea when the “season” for apples is as they are always in the supermarket and there aren’t any orchards near where I live.
You're missing out! Try a few of the apple varieties that are not available year-rounds, that are not optimized for insecticide compatibility and tons per square kilometer (well, more likely bathtubs per football fields or something). Yes, even and especially the small & ugly ones that never ever have that flawless smooth skin that makes you wonder which ones are plastic props and which ones are fresh fruits. After dumbing down the basic supermarket apples to just a few that look presentable and can be made to work in a wide range of climates, it has lost the refined tastes of most of the other varieties they out-priced.
When I lived in Europe people were even more aware of the seasons of fruits and vegetables.
him eating apples when in season seemed to me at first like an anachronism, but actually, i do that. years ago i got fed up with apples that were whatever, so i decided to only have apples when i could find mcintosh (my favorite apple), and eat loads of them.
Not only is this pointless, it’s outright mis information. Who gains anything from having an llm create an imaginary person ?
I guess for pure entertainment, but this looks like it’s a historical website
It's all just larping, inserting the bias and assumptions of your team into the spot where knowing your customers should be.
It's techbro ejaculate. 10 minutes of euphoria for slop to come out in the end to spread to unsuspecting victims.
I hope that the author learns from the comments in this thread that dry encyclopedic data does not define reality.
I couldn't track down the first source, but the second source goes over something completely different. Maybe Claude accurately remembered the first source when it was stolen during the training process, but forgive me if I'm skeptical. Feel free to track it down yourself and let me know. Otherwise, I will assume it is an LLM hallucination.
(Also, given my background knowledge of the Tang dynasty, I would be surprised if the average marriage age was as high as 18!)
I consider the crowd here to be much smarter than I am, which is why I enjoyed the links that were shared and the discussions that followed.
The website is pretty, but the statistics and stories are the main point. Yet we are being fed hallucinated false claims, and somehow, that doesn't seem to be a problem...
I don't understand why it gets so many upvotes. We know Claude can create websites like this brilliantly now. The novel and interesting part is the transformation of the data. But if that part is sloppy, what's the point?
The site itself is a really cool concept! I just wish the information was accurate. Now that I know it's not, I feel cheated.
I suspect a lot of people don't read the comments.
That is the more important point here. Too many are arguing over whether a human researcher might have given more accurate estimates than an LLM. They may have made something more obviously internally consistent, but some facts, including a vast many historical facts, are unknowable. Hopefully, a human would say that and provide a disclaimer that these are best estimates meant for entertainment, not as a source of facts, but I don't think that's the most important point. The most important point is that readers should understand that without needing the disclaimer. Go ahead and spot check citations, but even before doing that, you need to know that no primary source knows the exact percentage of women born in 715 in the Yangtze Basin who ever married or their average age when they did. If anyone, human or LLM, makes such a claim, you should have a very high prior they're bullshitting you and demand to see how they know.
I recall trying to do simple geneaology research and my dad's side of the family drying up very quickly. Mexico didn't even have a census until 1895. The only records before that are church records, most of which didn't survive until the present day, and most of those were never digitized and aren't searchable.
I thought it provided an interesting tool for people to put things into perspective.
Yeah, I got: You have drawn a girl, born in the Yangtze Basin in 1295 CE.
Typical age at marriage: 18 Ever married (of adults): 96% Children per woman: 6.5
Life expectancy at birth: 28 yrs Died before age 5: 39% Died before age 15: 44%
Very similar to your "random" draw, and the facts are suspect. There was a link to the source, but it's behind a paywall.
Great idea but it needs more testing.
In this case there is no answer, because the percentage is just made up by the LLM. There is no methodology. Your answer is inappropriately anthropomorphizing the LLM by imputing a methodology onto its "data collection" process.
Slop.
It is like when MUI/bootstrap/tailwind came out and made it increasingly easier for no design chop folks to press a button and get a decent design going. It is like watching a kid in a candy shop when systems engineers can vibe up a webapp without having to touch html/css/js.
that is if your probabilities are actually correct, that the anthropological or archaeological or sociological field for that specific region and demographic is robust (and there is good primary evidence for supporting the claims), and you're not some vibe-coded AI tool that spits out a convincing lie constructed on not even educated guesses, casting shadows on the wall of the Platonic cave where the people who trust slop uncritically are chained to their ignorance for perpetuity
And I suppose other RPGs, too, especially ones that are more story-than-dice driven, and/or set in the "real" world.
I drew a boy who lived 11000 years ago in Mexico.
His longest travel was a half day walk carried by his family to a nearby foraging ground.
He died at 4 from a zoonotic fever. Both parents outlived him.
It’s random, it’s ai generated. Makes me appreciate life nevertheless.
I quit the app after that.
last night my wife and I were watching the first episode of a TV show Deadwood (set in the Dakotas in late 1800s), and my wife commented "I could never have lived then; I would have just killed myself immediately". The irony of course is that she would have been fine had she been born in that era as it would have appeared as "normal" to her then as the world today appears to us (ok things aren't normal right now, but I mean comparatively speaking), and "better" than 100 years earlier.
Go back not even that far and money comparisons like this make no sense. A family subsistence farming doesn't have the same kind of relationship we do with money. Also they couldn't really go down the shops. Existence was in the edge for everyone, even the wealthy.
The other problem I see is that it's seems to pick a random time before a random location. So this will favour the times when there were far fewer people. No way around this, you either end up picking mostly near modern times because that's when the bulk of the people lived, or people further back in time who are pretty disconnected from our modern society.
I think this is what boggles my mind most about antiquity: the vast majority of people rarely ventured much past where they were born (unless they did a likely once in a lifetime religious pilgrimage which took the better part of a year).
Seeing as most other people didn't venture further either, you really got to know the people around you very well. Common life limitations simply precluded much travel. The only foreigners you saw were either invading hordes, or traders who were constantly on the road.
1. Most of the population never leave their city or town of birth.
2. Some people went on multi-year pilgrim, voyage, or trading route. Even multiple time in their life.
Kingston is 13 kilometers from Hobart.
I loved it and feel inspired from it.
(It looks like it's getting a lot of traffic and might get hugged to death)
Maybe MAHA will bring this back, like they did measles.
Just vaccinate yourself and your kids and listen to the advice of real doctors.
So much of what we have has been brought to us thanks to ubiquitous fuel, ubiquitous technology, and institutions that took centuries to form and solidify. All of this built on the backs of people who sacrifiec and sometimes did horrendus things to allow us to be in the places we are. There's just so much hubris and misunderstanding of what they have been given in their lives that they don't appreciate. Pissing all this away is fine to them. Yes, I get it...they didn't get the same quality of life as their parents did(who came of age in an abberation).
What they don't realize is that it could get much worse. Many of them may not even live to see how bad it could get. This is so frustrating, and it just increases my disrespect for them.
for now
I was actually a bit surprised since it also said I was exclusively breastfed which seems to be fairly protective against diarrhea. I have a feeling this didn't account for all the joint probability distributions...
>Life expectancy at birth: 28 yrs
>Died before age 5: 42%
>Died before age 15: 50%
i knew life expectancy was obviously lower, but those stats were a bit eye opening.
unfortunately, died at 3 from an accident.
That is surprisingly similar given how few people seem to have commented so far. Makes me wonder if some part of this is starting from a constant seed or something...
"Any Korean Ever"
And so if you went to a town square or market in that time (if it's a time that had such a thing), perhaps it might still be perfectly normal to see people in their 30s, 40s, 50s.
The life expectancy of a person who lives to 18 increases dramatically across the board.
You even see this today. If you live to 70, you can expect to live 14 to 17 more years. So to about 84 on the short side and 87 on the long side.
However, make it to 75, your life expectancy is 11 to 14 years. Which is 86 on the short side and 89 on the long side.
Basically, the longer you live, the longer you should live, but eventually the range collapses. And that's because people come in under the average all the time. Some people die at 71. And those people stop getting counted when determining life expectancy at 75.
But I guess it's inevitable when you try to paint individual lives through pure statistics.
I rolled again, of course, but at that point it feels like fishing for a best case scenario. But I at least got someone from the North China Plain in 75 BCE who lived to 74 and had 6 grand children. Married at 19 and stayed married to age 71. Hard to hope for better than that, against these odds at least.
Edit: Obviously progress isn't inevitable, and at any point in time you can be unlucky. But it does seem like, for most points in history, you would rather be you, in your version of the present, than a randomly rolled person from any prior point of history leading up to your moment.
So most of the time, anyone playing this would feel more lucky to be themselves than any of the options they would have to roll for. Maybe if a version of this was offered to people 10,000 years from now they would say "crap, I rolled 2026".
Edit 2: I think the death hug might have got it.
probably like 5% of humanity has his genes now. that was fun vibe coding
I think some number are of by a magnitude (DIED BEFORE AGE 5: 4%, for Scandinavium in 1990 - according to UN it’s ~0.6%).
"He died of dysentery in the first days of life. His body was laid in a stone cist or a great urn beneath a ring of boulders, with iron tools and black-and-red pots."
Seojun - Seojun is not a real person. But his life story is created from the statistical reality of the Korean Peninsula in 1999 CE.
In 1999 CE, Seojun was born in the countryside near Pongch’ŏn-ŭp. His village is home to about 250 people. Among four children, he was the fourth. He eats largely rice, soybean paste and tofu, dried fish and shellfish, and pickled cabbage and radish, with persimmon and jujube in season, and tea as well. He knows how to read and write. Seojun stands about 167 cm tall (5 ft 6 in).
--- if it's not obvious why this is problematic and extremely offensive I don't know what I can say to you. You're talking about GenZ who has access to tiktok and food delivery apps as if you're talking about someone from Joseon dynasty from hundreds of years ago. No one's favorite food is rice and soybean paste. He knows how to read and write and sky is blue.
This 3727 BCE Korean boy died at 90.
Yeah, not even close. Neat idea, needs real numbers.
If the selection is from the population at random (as the UI indicates), but it specifically says it's based on a random year (during which humans were present) first as a filter. It's much more likely to select far from the population explosion.
this word is usually spelled exaggerate (yes, with two g's.)
The skew towards the present isn't as stark as that. World population has exploded in the past couple of centuries, but it hasn't been high for very long. 1900 to present only covers ~11% of all births.
Then again, my next two attempts died at 4 months and 4 years. But they were both from before 1000 AD. So maybe it's just the year that's skewed. But the fourth reached 65 and was from before 1000 AD. Only 1 in 4 was from after 1000 AD.
I don't think I agree. There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.
I'm not sure why AI means that people don't need to support their creations with ads. Sure, it probably took fewer human-hours typing at a keyboard to create this, but for things like this, a labor of love, that's typically not the "expensive" part.
This is a strawman.
The original point was "the economics ... have changed"
I read this as, it's much easier to spin up a project of this scale even non-monetized, and more people are able and willing to do so.
The person who built this did not have to put in months to build a cool web app. But they also did not have to put in months of research, gathering representative pictures. And they didn't. Instead they let a software create a well presented nonsense story about a boy from Anatolia in 200 BCE called Mehmet wearing a parka.
And this is not limited to software development. In just a few years, the economics of delivering healthcare, education, entertainment and legal services are going to change completely. Transportation is changing as we speak. In a decade Physical AI will completely change the economics of manufacturing, food services, elder care, and so on.
The post-scarcity world will be here sooner than we think!
And how do you think will the post-scarcity affect the daily lives of most people? My prediction is that most people even in 30 years will still work for a wage, and probably still around 30-40 hours per week, because these gains of post-scarcity won't be distributed evenly. It will mostly make a few people very very rich.
I don't know how you can think that AI or "Physical AI" will solve any of that without a really huge shift in our locals and worldwide politics. It will probably cause a massive economical crisis before anything else of importance.
> James was in frequent conflicts with other members of his village at late night, while having a belly full of barley juice.
For example my draw died as a newborn (allegedly 50% died before 5), which made me think how many humans never really got to experience life.
Was the story or stats true? I dunno. But it makes sense, and I poked around some of the sources and it was just fun to play with.
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." -- Bill Gates, in The Road Ahead.
The reason there are two Gs is that the first one is assimilated from a D. The etymological structure of the word is ex-ad-gero,¹ "from-toward-carry".
This happens for everything. Compare accelerate [ad-celero] / accommodate [ad-con-modus] / impossible [in-pot-s-ibilis] / intelligent [inter-leg-ents].
(Note that a doubled consonant in Latin is pronounced differently from a single one, as is still true today in Italian. English draws no distinction, which makes the etymological spellings likely to confuse English speakers.)
¹ This was already the form of the word in Latin. It looks malformed to me; I can't explain why exaggero is a first conjugation verb (with passive participle exaggerata) rather than simply being a prefixed form of its root (ag)gero, in which case the participle would have been exaggesta. Gero and aggero are both third conjugation verbs...
I see…
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-1...
Anthropomorphizing makes for poor analogies, but it's kinda the same way your acquisition of background knowledge of the Tang dynasty from whatever source material you used is not considered stealing or pirating either.
Theft involves removing from the source, Copyright violation is distributing copies without a legal right to do so. Training is fair use.
The judge found that it constituted copyright violation. Purchasing the books would cover their responsibilities with regards to training. The claim that they are destroying books to hold copyright is incorrect. The judge cited precedent that said instances of not destroying the originals were also fair use, his claim about destruction was to say even if this precedent were not considered fair use, the destruction that was already occurring (because it is easier to scan loose pages), invalidated one of the arguments against it.
The ruling was on training took the form
If A is ok then B is ok, but even if A were not ok, B might still be ok.
This is not an error I would expect a human to make if they were interested enough in demography to make a website about it. For example, the wikipedia page on this topic[1] does a reasonable job of distinguishing that plagues did not occur every year and that they varied in lethality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_plague_pandemic#Italian...
I get that some people just hate AI, but of all things, this is a pretty fun & educational use of it.
How do I know the methods described in the source were correctly used here? I don't, but I also wouldn't know that based on whether or not a human wrote the webapp. I'd know that by checking the method applied on the backend matches that of the source. If it does, it doesn't matter if it was generated by using every 17th letter of the dictionary - it'd either align or not.
Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and modeling population processes. Blackwell Publishers.
In GP's case I believe they are correct the Hajnal source is not relevant to the Yangtze Basin but reading the first page should have made it clear the facts could be simultaneously true regardless where the percentages came from or if they were accurate.
Again, there are plenty of problems with the site. That it was clear these facts can't all be true simultaneously was just not one of them.
One experienced developer with extensive anthropology experience, probably a PhD, working with Claude Code and Claude Cowork, full time over a two month period. Or somebody with limited dev experience over four months.
Anyway, sad that all the first comments were complaints… what a wonderful project!
The distribution of human lives versus years lived by humans will skew earlier, because infant mortality was absurd for the first two tranches, with something like 50% of people dying before the age of five, so it will be more like 40-40-20 over those time periods.
before 8000 BCE: ~9.0 billion births, 8% 8000 BCE–1650 CE: ~85.4 billion, 73% after 1650: ~22.6 billion, 19%
Looks also different to OPs website
I think most players would understand that in-game choices will not reflect the choices people actually made historically. Having not played Civilization, I'm not sure whether I would consider it to be educational -- I think it would depend on whether playing the game provides insight into real historical events.
For example, I would consider a sufficiently detailed LARP of a historical event to be educational[1] -- the actual choices and outcomes do not match what happened historically, but they can teach participants a great deal about the motives and limitations of real historical actors.
This website, on the other hand, seems to consist of 90% AI hallucinations and 10% data that was actually extracted from a real source[2]. Since these types of data are thoroughly mixed together, I think this website is about as educational as just making up something to believe about the past.
[1] https://college.uchicago.edu/news/academic-stories/history-c...
I believe we agree we haven't seen a valid citation for "the source in which 'x' came from in 'x%'" for this stat on the site. I hope the two of us also agree this is not the point I was disagreeing with.
Where I'm currently lost is why a demography textbook, which was a different citation in the same section, must be unable to explain dead newborns need not be counted in such a statistic on the basis the textbook was not also the source of the specific percentages displayed? That'd be like saying a statistics textbook can't explain how the median can be less than the mean on the basis it wasn't also the source for the numbers displayed.
I do think the cleanest and most fascinating interpretation is what the title says "One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived" which clearly is about random people and has nothing to do with the year.
But I think experientially, the preferred feeling for a user is a random deep dive into the circumstantiality of different eras and different geographies than our own, rather than a true-to-life re-rolling that would constantly turn up 20th and 21st century outcomes. So the spirit of it is probably closer to the random year idea, but it's literally not random year, but maybe randomly something else, like eras however designated.
Yes, many births would be within the last 200 years but it’s still very different to be a man born in the year 1950 in New York vs a woman in 1950 in rural China.
I’ve reflected in the past about how lucky I am to have been born where I was, when I was, and be given the abilities that I have. Sure there are plenty of people that were luckier, but also a lot who were less lucky, most of whom are dead.
It's clear to me that an even bigger HC crowd would howl "Oh, how boring, look at him choosing pretty much only still alive people" if he had done the 'uniformly random" selection. C'mon!
Both of those are protected by law. Learning from a Disney movie and creating your own thing is not, and should not be, disallowed.
(As for whether it's a good thing, I'm conflicted. It's cool to see more stuff like this, but if it crowds out the more intense passion projects, we lose something too.)
To elucidate for this particular example, before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.
Now that the barrier is much lower, the creator didn't mind spinning up and providing it with no monetization (e.g. no ads).
Yes, this was exactly what I meant in OP.
It's, of course, not even loading right now, which gets at the other problem with this "economics" framing. The biggest expense in running an actually popular website isn't creating and publishing the first version. It's paying for the infrastructure to serve a meaningful proportion of the entire world. This is clearly not a static site. It's presumably doing some computation on the server side to draw from all these hundreds of different probability distributions that works well enough for a few dozen simultaneous requests but not thousands. There might even be some kind of perverse anti-economics going on here where thought devoted upfront to efficiency and architecture might have made this far more scalable, but the "publish the first thing that passes a basic sanity check" vibe-slop ethos doesn't usually get you that.
Yeah it is imperfect and was maybe not ready for the HN front page hug. But I say, bravo to the person or team!
Do you see the problem here?
I majored in history. I'd say the data is misleading. I drew a boy "In the Ganges Plain, 1411 BCE". According to the summed up data he had a 54% risk of dying of neonatal tetanus, sepsis or dysentery. Which isn't wrong as such, but it would probably have been better to sum it up with all the other diseases, parasites and infections that would be needed to reach the 54%. Like resporatory infections... "Other causes" is listed at 14%, I assume that malnutrition is part of this, but malnutrition would be the leading cause in the 4-8 year age group, and less so in others.
The life stories themselves are over dramatic. Which isn't weird, considering you don't have a lot of source material dealing with the "boring" lives. Like if you think of Scandinavia in the VIKING ages you'll find a lot of research and data on the people who went viking. In reality 95% of the populations were farmers who didn't even see the coast in their lifetimes. Unless the AI is specifically tuned to value the few sources on everyday farmin in Scandinavia higher than the ones published on viking culture in general... Well.. I think you get it.
That being said. Many people probably don't know that you could have 18 children at only see one of them grow to the age of 20 a few hundred years ago. So the data is accurate enough to be educational in my opinion.
I do think the "typical marriage age" might be suffering from AI safe-guards. For most times I've tried it seems to land oddly close to 18. Which is unfortunately much higher than reality.
And IMO, a website that's 95% stats by volume very clearly is about stats. If the goal is teaching anything, it's teaching stats. It literally does animations showing the random process, and explicitly says how likely each outcome is, even sorts by likelihood in some places.
Again, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with that if the website itself didn't explicitly say that recent births are more likely than non-recent births.
Personally, the one 1990s person I've got was far more interesting than the dozen of 5th-15th century children that all died of one sickness or another before the age of 2. If anything, it's the dying of dysentery that should be non-uniformly random.
Maybe not Eritrea or Kosovo?