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

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

#211

Post by no_multitudes » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #202

no_multitudes wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 That answer might not be published and might vary between datasets, but it would exist.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 chec…

Which source was that?

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

#212

Post by Xirdus » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

golem14 wrote: post #189

janalsncm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"random" != "uniformly random", if you want to be pedantic.

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.

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

#213

Post by 999900000999 » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 10:53 PM UTC

no_multitudes wrote: post #145

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-…

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

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

#214

Post by morpheos137 » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 10:54 PM UTC

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.

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

#215

Post by mywittyname » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 10:57 PM UTC

I died of dysentery shortly after birth. So basically, Oregon Trail - Ancient Edition.

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

#216

Post by morpheos137 » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 10:58 PM UTC

no_multitudes wrote: post #145

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-…

"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 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.

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

#217

Post by dvt » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 11:01 PM UTC

no_multitudes wrote: post #200

Lerc wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#218

Post by sobellian » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 11:01 PM UTC

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?

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

#219

Post by keeda » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 11:02 PM UTC

no_multitudes wrote: post #173

tedggh wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ Claude accurately remembered the first source when it was stolen during the training process” I see…

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? [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-1...

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.

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

#220

Post by morpheos137 » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 11:04 PM UTC

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 point 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.