> He was born, lost his father at 5, and died at 7 of malnutrition.
Yikes
Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
201–210 of 323 posts
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 That answer might not be published and might vary between datasets, but it would exist.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…
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.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 copyr…
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.
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.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mo…
In other words, the Flat Birth Theory. We can call them flat birthers
Off with the Flat Birthers, I'm a Reverse Birther!
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
You could definitely call it stark, but the comment I replied to suggested that it would be well over 50%.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#207I 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-…
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Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#208I 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...
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...
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#209This 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 a…
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
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Notice the log scale on the year axis. There is far more probability mass during older years because of that.
Log scale should only affect how the years are displayed on the chart, not how they are sampled.