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

anyhumanever.com

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

#261

Post by SamBam »

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…

And yet the bubonic plague did indeed exist and kill people between large outbreaks.

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

#262

Post by jvuygbbkuurx »

no_multitudes wrote: post #172
Kaytaro wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

That is exactly what is thought provoking. Usually we only learn glimpses of history, not a full distribution about it.

For example my draw died as a newborn (allegedly 50% died before 5), which made me think how many humans never really got to experience life.

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

#263

Post by rustystump »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #237
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-…

Worst part is that it's often not clear at the first glance was it something carefully crafted or steamrolled by LLM.

Idk I find it almost painful how obvious it is to the point of borderline embarrassment.

It is like when MUI/bootstrap/tailwind came out and made it increasingly easier for no design chop folks to press a button and get a decent design going. It is like watching a kid in a candy shop when systems engineers can vibe up a webapp without having to touch html/css/js.

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

#265

Post by backlava12 »

jahnu wrote: post #227

Absolute trash. No more worthwhile than the AI slop inaccurate copies of actually well made educational videos on YouTube. Why do we accept this crap?

And the majority of the comments are eating it up. Hackernews is cooked.

Welcome to the future I guess.

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

#266

Post by j16sdiz »

Exoristos wrote: post #174
lr4444lr wrote: post #151

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. Co…

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.

It is fascinating that both of these are equality true in the ancient world:

1. Most of the population never leave their city or town of birth.

2. Some people went on multi-year pilgrim, voyage, or trading route. Even multiple time in their life.

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

#267

Post by abustamam »

jvuygbbkuurx wrote: post #262
no_multitudes wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is exactly what is thought provoking. Usually we only learn glimpses of history, not a full distribution about it. For example my draw died as a newborn (allegedly 50% died before 5), which made me think how many humans never really got to experience life.

Yeah I think this is it. I played a few times and at one point I was a woman and the average number of children women had was 6 or 7 primarily because most children died pretty early at that time.

Was the story or stats true? I dunno. But it makes sense, and I poked around some of the sources and it was just fun to play with.

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

#268

Post by abustamam »

jorisboris wrote: post #100

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.

Yeah same, I drew a girl from the Nile Valley in 1100, and I redrew her life a few times and got my daughter's name and my nieces name. "Daughter" died at child birth and "Niece" died of dysentery at age 4... real niece is turning 4 soon.

I quit the app after that.

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

#269

Post by jemmyw »

> The household he was born into lived on roughly $3.04 a day per person in today's money

Go back not even that far and money comparisons like this make no sense. A family subsistence farming doesn't have the same kind of relationship we do with money. Also they couldn't really go down the shops. Existence was in the edge for everyone, even the wealthy.

The other problem I see is that it's seems to pick a random time before a random location. So this will favour the times when there were far fewer people. No way around this, you either end up picking mostly near modern times because that's when the bulk of the people lived, or people further back in time who are pretty disconnected from our modern society.

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