221–230 of 327 posts
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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...
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.
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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.
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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.
I think our core disagreement is that I do not consider teaching falsehoods to be educational. My antipathy towards LLM outputs that haven't been fact-checked is mostly downstream of things like that.
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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…
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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.
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.
You really need to stretch quite a bit to find similarities between this post and this short story.
And since you incorrectly assumed that I didn't read it, I'll give you more unsolicited feedback. Yes the writing is horrendous, but the idea itself is not novel or thought provoking. The general idea has been done many times in the classics like Dick, Asimov, Chiang and others. And the twist at the end ("Oh my god! They couldn't see things in the future because there is no future!!!!!") is immediately predictable when they can't get samples in the future.
That being said, keep writing and enjoying yourself but 1) try to dial down on the AI assist, it really makes for a poor experience for the reader, 2) don't get on your high horse when someone points it out.
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...
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I think our core disagreement is that I do not consider teaching falsehoods to be educational. My antipathy towards LLM outputs that haven't been fact-checked is mostly downstream of things like that.
This website doesn't "teach" anything. It's a fun way to explore and get exposed to history. Kind of like Civilization 6 or something. Do you think CIV6 "teaches falsehoods" because you can build the Pyramids as the French?
I think most players would understand that in-game choices will not reflect the choices people actually made historically. Having not played Civilization, I'm not sure whether I would consider it to be educational -- I think it would depend on whether playing the game provides insight into real historical events.
For example, I would consider a sufficiently detailed LARP of a historical event to be educational[1] -- the actual choices and outcomes do not match what happened historically, but they can teach participants a great deal about the motives and limitations of real historical actors.
This website, on the other hand, seems to consist of 90% AI hallucinations and 10% data that was actually extracted from a real source[2]. Since these types of data are thoroughly mixed together, I think this website is about as educational as just making up something to believe about the past.
[1] https://college.uchicago.edu/news/academic-stories/history-c...