Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

anyhumanever.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 321 posts

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#31

Post by WillAdams »

lbriner wrote: post #9

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 t…

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_.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#32

Post by Planktonne »

garyrob wrote: post #10

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). https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-b...

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.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#33

Post by wat10000 »

glenstein wrote: post #18
john_strinlai wrote: post #7

> 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.

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 3…

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.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#36

Post by personjerry »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #19
bentt wrote: post #14

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 hugg…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#37

Post by spullara »

scottmcmac wrote: post #25

"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...

All babies were exclusively breastfed in 3064 BCE.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#40

Post by bpodgursky »

> 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.

Post reply on HN