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no_multitudes 3 hours ago [-]
I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously.
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.
999900000999 12 minutes ago [-]
That’s basically what I’m thinking.
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
hdgvhicv 1 hours ago [-]
James was born on the British Isles, near Boulogne-sur-Mer, in 2009 CE.
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.
davedx 3 hours ago [-]
I draw a man in China in 1819, and it said he "died of the war in Oman" without any explanation of how that could have happened. What a load of crap
knappa 3 hours ago [-]
The first part likely is just an artifact of an unwritten common assumption. That is, it's probably 96% of women, who lived to adulthood, who were ever married.
no_multitudes 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe, but I doubt it. The vast majority of the sources, including the two listed for this claim, are listed as "attributed", meaning "A model (Opus or Fable) claims that this is what the cited source says. In my spot checks, I've found these claims to be accurate; still, since it's just a model claiming that author x says y, there's a nonzero chance that it's a hallucination."[1]
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!)
“ Claude accurately remembered the first source when it was stolen during the training process”
I see…
no_multitudes 2 hours ago [-]
I don't follow what your point is here. If you're not aware, Anthropic pirated many books via libgen and similar tools for use during the training process[1]. Maybe you are not aware of this, or do not consider it theft?
Key distinction though: Anthropic can be said to have "stolen" or pirated those books when they downloaded them illegally, but not when they trained Claude, because that same lawsuit found that training is fair use.
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.
Lerc 2 hours ago [-]
Did the original owners of the books no longer have them in their possession afterwards?
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.
hdgvhicv 1 hours ago [-]
Excellent. I will thus take a copy of the latest Disney movie and train myself on it while claiming fair use as a defence to the accusation of copyright infringement.
Lerc 38 minutes ago [-]
You can do that legally as long as you do not confuse people that what you create might be an actual Disney product, or that you try to represent it as actually created by Disney.
Both of those are protected by law. Learning from a Disney movie and creating your own thing is not, and should not be, disallowed.
bdamm 3 hours ago [-]
This is the true reason for watermarking by LLMs. So they don't get mad LLM disease by digesting their own product.
Kaytaro 2 hours ago [-]
Even if this wasn't vibe coded it would be impossible to fact check billions of possible lives. I think thought provoking toys like this are a great use of AI, assuming no one takes them seriously.
no_multitudes 2 hours ago [-]
I am not sure why it is thought-provoking for a website to lie to you? There is plenty of real history and demography to read about.
paimapi 2 hours ago [-]
you can't fact check real individual lives but you can draw up a probabilistic representation
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
morpheos137 7 minutes ago [-]
"I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously." Umm yeah they can be true. Dead people are not counted. The straightforward interpretation is 96% of women living to 18 years or greater are marry at some point in life. However the app has bigger problems, namely it does not seem to select from the distribution correctly, pre 1500 lives seem to be vastly over represented.
zamadatix 2 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of problems with the site but that some stats like marriage do not count dead newborns as unwed instead of invalid for the stat is not really one of them.
no_multitudes 2 hours ago [-]
What age of death discounts someone as counting towards the marriage percentage? If a human made the website, there would be an answer to this question. That answer might not be published and might vary between datasets, but it would exist.
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.
zamadatix 40 minutes ago [-]
No anthropomorphization was required, I just looked at one of the sources on that section of the page and saw the statistic did not involve the number of newborns and so figured myself those facts could indeed be simultaneously true.
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.
no_multitudes 14 minutes ago [-]
Which source was that?
assumed_throwaw 2 hours ago [-]
I am genuinely puzzled as to why this kind of vibe-coded site are so popular on HN.
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?
Lerc 2 hours ago [-]
Can you offer any evidence that it is any less accurate than a page hand crafted by a human?
I thought it provided an interesting tool for people to put things into perspective.
no_multitudes 55 minutes ago [-]
Well for one example, if you select a person born on the Italian peninsula in the 1400s and they die of bubonic plague, their year of death is not correlated to years when there were large bubonic plague outbreaks on the Italian peninsula.
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.
This is such a weird nitpick, it's clear the website deals in averages and assumptions. It's meant to be an interesting window into possible lives intermixed with historical happenings at, or around, those times.
I get that some people just hate AI, but of all things, this is a pretty fun & educational use of it.
cvhc 38 minutes ago [-]
I don't think a hand-crafted app necessarily estimates things more accurately, but a sensible pre-LLM developer would probably not list so many dubious citations to trick people into believing it's accurate.
teiferer 1 hours ago [-]
I got a man in India 1000 years ago who died at 92. Impressive yet rather unlikely.
tptacek 1 hours ago [-]
Unlikely, but not implausible.
rkagerer 2 hours ago [-]
This is exactly the kind of reckless inaccuracy I've come to expect from AI.
34 minutes ago [-]
magneticnorth 7 hours ago [-]
This is neat, but I don't think it's actually drawing the year from the correct probability distribution - "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct, but in 5 "random" choices, only one was from anywhere near modern day.
zhoBEENG 6 hours ago [-]
I did a statistical analysis and you are correct. The issue seems to be that crude birth rates from around 500CE and earlier are overestimated significantly. The bad source seems to be Kaneda & Haub, "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?", where they assume a flat crude birth rate of 80 for all BCE dates. The probability distribution is just a function of pop and CBR, so it results in significantly decreasing modern birth probabilities.
fxd 5 hours ago [-]
In other words, the Flat Birth Theory.
We can call them flat birthers
song_synth 38 minutes ago [-]
Off with the Flat Birthers, I'm a Reverse Birther!
I think it's working as intended. The year is simply a randomly chosen year not related to the density of births in that year. It would be a boring tool if it actually chose "random year based on random birth" because almost every choice would be from 1900 onward...
janalsncm 3 hours ago [-]
That’s not what it says on the tin though. “Drawn at random from everyone who has ever lived” means years will not be uniformly distributed.
butlike 3 hours ago [-]
This is a case where I think they should change the wording as opposed to the functionality. I like that it's a random year regardless of population density.
glenstein 2 hours ago [-]
But as other have noted it's almost certainly not just a random year.
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.
janalsncm 1 hours ago [-]
If the implementation was correct it wouldn’t be hard to let the user choose either option.
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.
janalsncm 3 hours ago [-]
That would certainly be easier at this point, but I like the “random human life” idea more.
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.
golem14 1 hours ago [-]
"random" != "uniformly random", if you want to be pedantic.
Xirdus 13 minutes ago [-]
But "is far more likely to fall near the present" = "is far more likely to fall near the present". The author makes the claim about probability distribution themselves, then does the opposite.
mrtnmcc 3 hours ago [-]
Notice the log scale on the year axis. There is far more probability mass during older years because of that.
janalsncm 28 minutes ago [-]
Log scale should only affect how the years are displayed on the chart, not how they are sampled.
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
The site covers a 300,000 year span, so a randomly chosen year would average ~150,000 BCE, which definitely isn't happening.
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.
eks391 2 hours ago [-]
1900 to 2026 is 127 years (inclusive), so 0.04% of the year range available, yet it only has 11% of all births. That's certainly a skew, although I suppose subjective whether or not that's stark. At a >3x order of magnitude, it's certainly significant though.
wat10000 36 minutes ago [-]
You could definitely call it stark, but the comment I replied to suggested that it would be well over 50%.
WA 5 hours ago [-]
There are more statistical issues. I drew a person from 1984, living in Germany and recalculated their life several times. In almost all cases, their mother died while they were in their thirties, often both parents. This is simply far from reality.
stickfigure 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Supermancho 6 hours ago [-]
> "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct,
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.
yummypaint 6 hours ago [-]
The x-axis being log scale by default visually exadurates the effect if you are thinking about it in terms of area under the curve. This confused me also.
throwawayk7h 5 hours ago [-]
They should have scaled the probability curve by the derivative of log(time).
aand16 4 hours ago [-]
Why?
magneticnorth 6 hours ago [-]
This is a good point, it's not as far off as it seems from a quick glance.
logicallee 4 hours ago [-]
>exadurates
this word is usually spelled exaggerate (yes, with two g's.)
thaumasiotes 2 hours ago [-]
> yes, with two g's
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...
1 hours ago [-]
mannykannot 7 hours ago [-]
I guess you are right, but it makes it more interesting if the picks are not almost all from the recent past. On the other hand, I would also guess that spreading the picks evenly across the time range might result in many being from times with little data to differentiate them.
benatkin 5 hours ago [-]
It makes the premise of the entire site flawed, though. And it defeats the purpose of the convenient button provided to redraw a year. That is what should allow you to find a pick that might be more interesting, rather than messing up the randomness promised by the site and the HN title.
satvikpendem 4 hours ago [-]
That's sort of boring though, we generally know what it's like to live near the modern day already.
troyvit 4 hours ago [-]
I think it'd be cool to compare a modern day life in rural Ethiopia to what I'm used to.
Tenoke 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, this is exactly what I expected (showing the anthropic principle in action), so I am disappointed they are not sampling correctly.
wat10000 6 hours ago [-]
How near is near? With ~100 billion people having ever lived, the odds of a randomly selected life falling within the past couple of centuries are not all that high.
riazrizvi 6 hours ago [-]
Okay step away from the waving hands and read the source material.
wat10000 6 hours ago [-]
Could you be a little more specific? https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-... puts the halfway point at over 2,000 years ago, so you'd expect less than 50% probability of getting a random year that's not BCE. "A random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is true in relative terms; the timeline on the web site goes back 300,000 years and you're very likely to get something in the past few thousand years, which is pretty near to the present when compared to a third of a million years. The random years it gives me fit into that pretty well, so I guessed that the person I replied to might be using a narrower definition of "anywhere near modern day" than that. Hence why I asked. If I missed something, could you kindly point out what I missed, instead of whatever this is?
saalweachter 4 hours ago [-]
The stat I keep in my back pocket is that you can roughly divide the total time lived by humans (the integral of population over time) into three tranches, with one third of human experience being before the dawn of agriculture, and one third being after 1600. (Related fun fact: WWII was about 1% of human experience, based on the back of the envelope that ~50% of the world experienced "being at war" for nearly a decade.)
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.
5 hours ago [-]
sobellian 3 minutes ago [-]
It seems that this conflates the leading causes of death in $BIRTH_YEAR with the leading causes of death for someone born in $BIRTH_YEAR?
morpheos137 32 seconds ago [-]
This site is a fantastic demonstration of what crap AI is when operated by nit wits. Notably the drawing is not in line with the actual population distribution over time. Pre 1500 years are vastly over represented. If the pint is draw a random year without regard to population distribution then the site is pretty pathetic. I would be embarrassed to post this on HN.
user1338 2 hours ago [-]
This is what I got:
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.
boodleboodle 30 minutes ago [-]
I think this app conflates ingredients with actual food. From the listed food the person probably eats 된장찌개 but the ingredients are listed one by one
ntSean 2 hours ago [-]
It doesn’t say his favorite food is anything? Have you misread this and decided to take offense?
jonorsi 3 hours ago [-]
This is at both times super cool as a project at what AI can do, while also being extremely dubious and misleading about how accurate any of this data is, hallucinated or not.
pavel_lishin 8 hours ago [-]
This could be pretty great for a play through of Thousand Year Old Vampire, a pretty terrific journaling game: https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/
And I suppose other RPGs, too, especially ones that are more story-than-dice driven, and/or set in the "real" world.
gilleain 8 hours ago [-]
This can be great - Tom from the Yogscast has run a few of these, and they can get pretty wild. It's a simple premise but works well.
mywittyname 7 minutes ago [-]
I died of dysentery shortly after birth. So basically, Oregon Trail - Ancient Edition.
lr4444lr 3 hours ago [-]
Her farthest journey was a day's walk, to a nearby market town.
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.
Exoristos 2 hours ago [-]
There were and have always been trading and other exchanges all over the world. The Egtved girl was traveling from north to central Germany, probably for marriage. Now, if we mean most people did not do this, then sure. But there's a persistent idea that ancient cultures were not in contact with each other, and this is largely disproven.
jorisboris 5 hours ago [-]
My daughter is four.
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.
pteraspidomorph 3 hours ago [-]
I drew Vuk,a boy who lived in the 13th century Balkans. He died at 2. His dad was already gone. According to the statistics the life expectancy at birth for him was around 50%. I suspect a lot of our random people would have died early, if they were born before the 19th or 20th century...
blaze33 3 hours ago [-]
Whole years! You'll are so lucky! The reincarnation roulette gave me this: 49 BCE, he lived 1 month, dying of dysentery. I guess I'll stop complaining about my life then...
Exoristos 2 hours ago [-]
He could hardly complain about his, as he didn't have one.
zabriel_goss 3 hours ago [-]
I had a similar sensation. I often think about a friend of mine who mentioned, in passing, a sense of having won the lottery of life for being born in this day and age, in a first-world country
bentt 8 hours ago [-]
We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed. No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.
I loved it and feel inspired from it.
(It looks like it's getting a lot of traffic and might get hugged to death)
pavel_lishin 7 hours ago [-]
> No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.
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.
AnimalMuppet 7 hours ago [-]
In fact, there was a time when the internet was mostly interesting side projects, if you go back far enough (the mid 1990s, say).
bentt 6 hours ago [-]
It’s true. It feels like that age may be revisiting us. Makes me happy to see stuff like this which isn’t upselling something.
BubbleRings 4 hours ago [-]
Yes indeed. What do we know about how this was created and how long it took? Before I look into it, I’m going to guess:
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!
personjerry 7 hours ago [-]
> There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.
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.
pavel_lishin 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's easier - but I'm not sure what that has to do with ads or asking for things beyond attention.
retsibsi 6 hours ago [-]
I think it's just that in the past, you would need X free time, Y motivation level, and Z skill level (partly tradeable for X and Y) to create something like this, and now all of those values are smaller. So it's 'economics' in the straightforward sense, because not everyone could afford to spend X hours on something they weren't going to monetize, and also in the sense of the incentives shaping people's productive/creative activity.
(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.)
personjerry 6 hours ago [-]
I believe that part serves to emphasize the main point.
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).
bentt 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Yes, this was exactly
what I meant in OP.
nonameiguess 4 hours ago [-]
The site was registered a month ago. If it ever actually gets and stays popular, see if it has no ads then. The economics of personal interest sites didn't change in the sense that they're any harder to make now compared to the mid-90s. The economics that changed is the Internet now has billions of users and attention being monetized can make you a lot richer now than then. It's very hard for people to see an opportunity to become a multi-millionaire by clicking a button but then not do it because they'd rather maintain a slightly better experience for their audience.
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.
BubbleRings 3 hours ago [-]
Vibe slop? The structure of the site is quite solid, the UX decisions are spot on, the data looks good to me that knows little about this stuff, and it is entertaining and informative. This was not a one shot, a human out a lot of effort into this.
Yeah it is imperfect and was maybe not ready for the HN front page hug. But I say, bravo to the person or team!
mcmcmc 1 hours ago [-]
> the data looks good to me that knows little about this stuff
Do you see the problem here?
cedilla 1 hours ago [-]
I also think this shows what the changed economics do: it allows anyone to fill the web with convincing looking nonsense.
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.
petilon 6 hours ago [-]
> We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed.
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!
WA 5 hours ago [-]
In 10 years? I predict that healthcare, education, legal services and transporation won't change in a meaningful way at all. People will go to a doctor, kids will attend school and aim to graduate, legal services will still be done by lawyers and decided in court. Transportation will still depend largely on what exists right now or is being built right now. There won't be self-driving cars in every city, only in a few, probably more in the US and China, fewer in Europe, probably close to zero in the rest of the world.
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.
BubbleRings 3 hours ago [-]
I’d guess that education will hardly be recognizable in 10 years. Bad news for number of teachers employed, but AI is going to result in a huge increase in the number of 15-year-olds with a PhD’s level of knowledge and abilities in their heads.
petilon 4 hours ago [-]
> In 10 years? I predict that healthcare, education, legal services and transportation won't change in a meaningful way at all.
"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.
eole666 5 hours ago [-]
We are not in a scarcity world. Or it's deliberated scarcity. We have way enough means to educate, heal, feed and transport everyone. Yet most of the world work full time to produce more and more of meaningless products, and to make the economic curves go up. Also, a huge part of the population is still poor, while the rich people get richer. And on us dooms the perspective of an extreme climate crisis.
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.
GrinningFool 2 hours ago [-]
Both of these things can be true. It's a really good idea that immediately led me to another idea to play with. But it hallucinates so its accuracy can't be trusted.
xiaoyu2006 7 hours ago [-]
I am really happy to live in the modern age. It is quite amazing to think that people are facing cardiovascular disease and cancer instead of random parasites nowadays. Modern medicine is such a miracle.
thoman23 6 hours ago [-]
> instead of random parasites nowadays
Maybe MAHA will bring this back, like they did measles.
elteto 4 hours ago [-]
This will mostly self-correct. Nature really doesn’t give a fuck about ideology.
Just vaccinate yourself and your kids and listen to the advice of real doctors.
saturn8601 4 hours ago [-]
I was thinking along the same lines as I was going person to person in the app. It made me more disgusted at MAGA and MAHA. These guys are living in modern times with access to things that people back then couldn't even possibly dream of. The thing that really drove it home is the life expectancy of the people that came up in the draw. Most died by their 30s and some even before their 30s, most never knew their parents as they died when people were single digits of age, and they were forced to live very simple life with simple foods and conveniences.
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.
Perz1val 6 hours ago [-]
How many random parasites has modern medicine removed from you? Likely you never even had one. It's not just medicine, we also have abundant, safe food, clean water and warm housing
rc5150 6 hours ago [-]
>we also have abundant, safe food, clean water and warm housing
for now
senordevnyc 4 hours ago [-]
Yes! I think it’s really easy for us to take for granted the long list of incredible things we take for granted. Every time I hear someone lament how horrible the world is today, I wonder when they’d rather have been born. Especially as a random human like this.
scottmcmac 7 hours ago [-]
"You have died of Dysentery [on the Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE at 2 months old]"
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...
spullara 7 hours ago [-]
All babies were exclusively breastfed in 3064 BCE.
Sharlin 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it doesn't give totally absurd combinations (like a male dying of birth complications at age 10), but the probabilities are still likely rather rough approximations (eg. sorting cause-of-death distributions to a few bins like "infant", "child", "adult", "elder").
6 hours ago [-]
hliyan 7 hours ago [-]
Strangely, I too, died in the Korean Peninsula at 8 months old, but circa 6000 BCE.
coldtea 7 hours ago [-]
Hmm, I was at the Korean Penisula too. How representatively random is this thing?
ajmurmann 6 hours ago [-]
I died at age 36 of a workplace accident in the Yangtze delta in the year 700
AnnikaL 6 hours ago [-]
I died of malaria at age 1 in the West African Sahel!
bena 7 hours ago [-]
I died at 1 in Mesopotamia in 3966 BCE of dysentery.
mateioo7 3 hours ago [-]
Shameless plug, but related, is the Watsi platform[1] I discovered a few months ago through another HN user. You can read the story of less fortunate but alive people and how much need there is in the world for one another. The founder's talk[2], Chase Adam, which made me a supporter, is a must-see. I guess it's time to rewatch it..
>You have drawn a boy, born in the Korean Peninsula in 3394 BCE
>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.
scottmcmac 7 hours ago [-]
My first run got Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE...
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"
glenstein 7 hours ago [-]
I do wonder if that life expectancy is dragged significantly down by all the ways you can die early on in life, so that it's not so much that 28 years is an old age for the time as it is a function of all things that prevent you from getting to old age.
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.
coldtea 7 hours ago [-]
That's exactly the case. Overall average life expenctancy as adult didn't change much from older times - about 15 years more.
zorked 6 hours ago [-]
The website represents this well. My random person was born in the Neolithic and lived to 68. Not bad.
bena 7 hours ago [-]
That's exactly what happens.
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.
wat10000 7 hours ago [-]
Right, that 42% dying before age 5 means the survivors typically lived well beyond 28. There weren’t a huge number of people living into their 80s, but 28 wouldn’t have been “old man” territory.
7 hours ago [-]
hliyan 7 hours ago [-]
I think the model has an unusual preference for the Korean Peninsula before Christ. A number of commenters, including myself, draw from this area and period.
ungovernableCat 4 hours ago [-]
The life template kinda breaks down if you land in a modern era which makes me think it's probably equally as silly sounding to apply it to a hypothetical life from 10k years ago.
But I guess it's inevitable when you try to paint individual lives through pure statistics.
digitallogic 60 minutes ago [-]
> LIFE EXPECTANCY AT BIRTH
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.
estetlinus 5 hours ago [-]
Very nice idea!
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%).
tintor 5 hours ago [-]
My first draw:
"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."
glenstein 8 hours ago [-]
Now this is fun vibe coding. A fascinating way of reckoning with our cosmic luck. On "only the first roll counts" rules, I rolled a girl who died at 8 months from a respiratory infection in the Indus valley, in 7785 BCE (9,810 years ago).
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.
The_Blade 7 hours ago [-]
on my 6th only the first roll counts roll, i got a boy born near Nairobi in 36,112 BCE that lived to 70
probably like 5% of humanity has his genes now. that was fun vibe coding
retube 8 hours ago [-]
I died within 2 days on my first roll. made it to 8 months on my second
brabel 8 hours ago [-]
I was so lucky! One lived to 35 in the Paris basin a few thousand years ago, the other lived to 25 in China, died in 1945. Both were married and left living children!
morpheos137 10 minutes ago [-]
I am almost certain this is miscoded. I drew about 20 lives and I think 17 of them were before 1500. Meanwhile the vast majority of the integral of population over time is right of 1500.
imglorp 3 hours ago [-]
This reminded me about the US nutters advocating return to the "way things were": they would do well to consider life expectancy. My draw from 1881 Mississippi would max out at 36.
nickdirienzo 6 hours ago [-]
This is really neat. It would be interesting to talk with the character generated.
hajjajajjaa 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
aetherspawn 45 minutes ago [-]
> He was born, lost his father at 5, and died at 7 of malnutrition.
Yikes
spullara 8 hours ago [-]
I think graph being log makes it a little hard to understand that the median birth year was around 2000 years ago. On the graph that is in the flat part but the flat part was a really, really long time.
janalsncm 3 hours ago [-]
I think this would be cool if it actually worked as intended. This simulation doesn’t even draw birth years correctly.
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.
lbriner 8 hours ago [-]
After having my first child (a girl who is now nearly 3 years old) these stats impact me so much more. My first roll was a girl in the Iraniam plateau in the 18 century who had a 33% chance of dying before they reached 5. She managed to live to 70 but experience so much death in her life.
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.
WillAdams 7 hours ago [-]
Visit any older cemetery and look for the tiny headstones and the matching very brief lifespans, or read an older obituary for someone from your great-grandparent's generation or further back, or watch a couple of seasons of _Call the Midwife_.
eterevsky 3 hours ago [-]
I drew "girl, born in the Balkans in 3208 BCE", which I find super remarkable since this fits the place and time for a relatively small population of people who spoke Proto-Indo-European as their native language.
azkalam 2 hours ago [-]
I would like to see a life expectancy number that excludes deaths in childhood.
A frequency distribution of life span for those born in year X would be a helpful visual.
Ooh I like that it creates a URL that you can share that points to a particular generated human. Nice feature devs!
_air 6 hours ago [-]
It's funny to pick a birth year from our era and think of how history will represent us:
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).
xattt 6 hours ago [-]
An “Eastern Woodlands” person born 1989 is recorded to have experienced a “volcanic winter” and “dimmed sky” at age 2 as a result of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo.
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.
trnvll 3 hours ago [-]
"At 79, she died of a respiratory infection. She left 18 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren behind."
What are the odds of 79. Must've been in the very top percentile
asdf333 2 hours ago [-]
i love this. it really shows you someone else's perspective.
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.
nico 7 hours ago [-]
It seems like the server might be overwhelmed
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?
I feel sorry for the person who draws their exact real-life stats, but dying this year.
beardyw 7 hours ago [-]
Hug of death I think.
Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.
karim79 7 hours ago [-]
Works but it's slow to load up.
drhagen 6 hours ago [-]
Before clicking, I said to myself "Indian peasant".
> 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".
magneticnorth 6 hours ago [-]
My first random selection lived to age 68! I felt very lucky, and then that put my modern life into interesting perspective.
lovasoa 5 hours ago [-]
In 429 CE, Devadatta was born on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Hyderabad. His hamlet was home to about 100 people. Among six children, he was the second. Devadatta died of neonatal tetanus or sepsis within days of birth.
Hardcore
jimmyjazz14 7 hours ago [-]
Really puts the marvels of modern life into perspective, most people did not live long or happy lives for much of human history.
chronolitus 7 hours ago [-]
Oh nice! If you liked it, you might like:
yourlifeunderrome.com
zeristor 5 hours ago [-]
Roy: A Life from Ricky and Morty comes to mind.
Extra points if you can take your example life off grid.
Since this website has information about how many children born per woman, and how many survive on average, I would like to see a tool that, given a particular person, can estimate how many people today are their genetic descendant.
spongebobism 3 hours ago [-]
> You have drawn a boy, born in the Russian Plain in 3843 BCE.
He probably spoke something close to proto-Indo-European
aronowb14 3 hours ago [-]
I drew a woman from 500 BCE in the ganges... but lived to 75?
grich7642 7 hours ago [-]
"A girl was born in 1276 BCE, on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Hyderabad... She lived on a labourer's wage"
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.
mallory854 7 hours ago [-]
This is awesome. I love seeing how humans have evolved into what we are today.
6 hours ago [-]
visiondude 5 hours ago [-]
“He was born and died at 1 of dysentery.“ - lucky me
mcmcmc 1 hours ago [-]
The basic premise of the site, that these lives are “taken at random from real data” is a lie. They are fictional extrapolations from a dataset of questionable provenance twisted into a narrative format by an LLM. These are not humans. They’re not even data points. It’s vibey bullshit.
BeetleB 8 hours ago [-]
Leading cause of death: dysentry
Had to laugh.
skizm 3 hours ago [-]
Died at 2 of dysentery. What is this, the Oregon trail?
gfiorav 7 hours ago [-]
Spot checked a life from 1990s in the Iberian peninsula and it cites the population at 72 million people. Off by quite a bit. Pretty cool regardless!
holoduke 1 hours ago [-]
I found it very unrealistic that my girl from 2000bc somewhere in china decided to divorce after 3 years of marriage when she was 23.
guybedo 8 hours ago [-]
we are probably living inside a more advanced version of this game right now.
Somebody, somewhere, somewhen rolled the dice and here we are.
lIl-IIIl 5 hours ago [-]
I had this idea for forever. Thank you for making it!
iJohnDoe 6 hours ago [-]
Most likely died of smallpox...
Great, let's bring back smallpox and measles because the US elected officials are too dumb or genuinely want to destroy the world.
noir_lord 2 hours ago [-]
> She was born and died at 2 of bubonic plague.
Yeah that does accurately sum up the 15th century.
Still slop coded bollocks though.
isoprophlex 6 hours ago [-]
Everyone keeps dying way too young :(
WarmWash 7 hours ago [-]
Has anyone managed to roll a life later than ~600CE?
magneticnorth 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, but I definitely think the probabilities are off - the explanation, which I agree with, states "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present."
But it appears to be drawing much more uniformly from the years than you'd expect given the probability curve (population curve) pictured.
wat10000 6 hours ago [-]
Bear in mind that the population curve defaults to a log scale on the year axis. If you switch it over to linear, that big fat area at the end shrinks to a needle-like spike..
Managed to roll a guy born in 1988 in the eastern US. He hasn’t married yet and he’s still alive.
Insanity 7 hours ago [-]
1980CE, Nile Valley, died at 68 from cardiovascular disease.
beardyw 7 hours ago [-]
You can chose.
aghilmort 5 hours ago [-]
damn, well done
og/goat demo of synthetic data gen
only nit is 'draw' button often below the fold
byako 4 hours ago [-]
rolled a random human and got... myself?? statistically wild. turns out i'm just a guy. weirdly humbling
mallory854 7 hours ago [-]
boy, born in the Guinea Coast in 211,966 BCE. Died from an accident at age 40.
pkilgore 2 hours ago [-]
This site is pure slop?
2OEH8eoCRo0 7 hours ago [-]
Very cool. Reads like a Dwarf Fortress history. For those that don't play, every creature in the game has a life story.
smarf 8 hours ago [-]
an effective way to glean a little slice of understanding of the human experience throughout the ages, though 'every human never' might be more apt a name as its all statistics from the demographics to the generative portrait
IDidntMakeIt 8 hours ago [-]
I died at age 2 of Typhoid Fever.
Modern take on Oregon Trail vibes I like it
boutell 4 hours ago [-]
Very moving and a little hard.
bitwize 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting. It rolls a few dice and presents a snapshot of someone who might plausibly have lived at a random place and time. Mine was a girl who lived on the Deccan Plateau in India, and died at six of tuberculosis.
bpodgursky 7 hours ago [-]
> You have drawn a girl, born in the Levant in 1042 CE.
> 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.
anduril22 6 hours ago [-]
This is super cool
raver1975 5 hours ago [-]
"You have died of dysentery."
hnmuuatsno 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
WaitButHow 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ajjahs 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
heyitsmedotjayb 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
culi 6 hours ago [-]
Herodotus used the term Palaistine in his work The Histories in the 5th century BCE. The earliest written record of the word "Judea" is from extra-biblical writings from 733 BCE.
The most "official" designation was arguably when the Roman's designated Syria Palaestina in 135 CE
I wrote a short story based on a similar scenario. (Caveat, I did it with AI help, but my ideas and many iterations and me doing final editing to get it the way I want).
The reason I did it the way I did is that I believe that Fable writes better prose than I do. I could write it so that people would be less likely to think it's written by AI, but I wouldn't think it's as good.
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...
Planktonne 7 hours ago [-]
Without wishing to be unkind, this reads a lot more as 'one-shot with AI' than 'many iterations'; if you truly did that much editing, you didn't put it where it showed.
You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.
garyrob 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I think the AI probably shows. But in fact it is the result of many iterations.
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.
dudul 1 hours ago [-]
What does the short story have to do with the scenario exactly? Seems completely unrelated.
And OMG, you need to edit the AI slop way way more. This is unreadable.
garyrob 1 hours ago [-]
It involves one life, drawn at random, from human history. I can't imagine how you could miss that if you read it.
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.
lbreakjai 3 hours ago [-]
"You have drawn a boy, born in the Paris Basin in 1970 CE."
Of all human history, it had to pick something off by 20 years and 200km.
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.
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
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.
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!)
[1]https://anyhumanever.com/sources
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.
Both of those are protected by law. Learning from a Disney movie and creating your own thing is not, and should not be, disallowed.
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
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.
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.
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?
I thought it provided an interesting tool for people to put things into perspective.
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.
We can call them flat birthers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsAIhGoKVuo
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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.
And I suppose other RPGs, too, especially ones that are more story-than-dice driven, and/or set in the "real" world.
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.
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 loved it and feel inspired from it.
(It looks like it's getting a lot of traffic and might get hugged to death)
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.
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!
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.
(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?
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.
"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.
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.
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...
[1] https://watsi.org/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlT3UhC7NwQ
>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.
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.
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."
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
Yikes
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.
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.
A frequency distribution of life span for those born in year X would be a helpful visual.
Makes Oregon Trail seem easy…
503CE, dead at six months from smallpox.
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.
What are the odds of 79. Must've been in the very top percentile
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.
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...
Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.
> 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".
Hardcore
yourlifeunderrome.com
Extra points if you can take your example life off grid.
https://youtube.com/shorts/CssbcJ44dos
He probably spoke something close to proto-Indo-European
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.
Had to laugh.
Somebody, somewhere, somewhen rolled the dice and here we are.
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.
But it appears to be drawing much more uniformly from the years than you'd expect given the probability curve (population curve) pictured.
og/goat demo of synthetic data gen
only nit is 'draw' button often below the fold
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.
The most "official" designation was arguably when the Roman's designated Syria Palaestina in 135 CE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine
https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-b...
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...
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.
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.
Of all human history, it had to pick something off by 20 years and 200km.