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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

#271

Post by WelkinFolk »

user1338 wrote: post #180

This 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…

Not everyone from everywhere has had food delivery apps all their lifetimes, even if they're GenZ

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

#273

Post by HlessClaudesman »

999900000999 wrote: post #213
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

The design / UX world has been creating imaginary user personas, paying jobs for people to be the shaman / guru of each persona, for years.

It's all just larping, inserting the bias and assumptions of your team into the spot where knowing your customers should be.

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

#274

Post by hdgvhicv »

Lerc wrote: post #204
hdgvhicv wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What law in what country?

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

#275

Post by Quothling »

BubbleRings wrote: post #132
nonameiguess wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site was registered a month ago. If it ever actually gets and stays popular, see if it has no ads then. The economics of personal interest sites didn't change in the sense that they're any harder to make now compared to the mid-90s. The economics that changed is the Internet now has billions of users and attention being monetized can make you a lot richer now than then. It's very hard for people to see an opportu…

Vibe slop? The structure of the site is quite solid, the UX decisions are spot on, the data looks good to me that knows little about this stuff, and it is entertaining and informative. This was not a one shot, a human out a lot of effort into this. Yeah it is imperfect and was maybe not ready for the HN front page hug. But I say, bravo to the person or team!

> the data looks good to me that knows little about this stuff

I majored in history. I'd say the data is misleading. I drew a boy "In the Ganges Plain, 1411 BCE". According to the summed up data he had a 54% risk of dying of neonatal tetanus, sepsis or dysentery. Which isn't wrong as such, but it would probably have been better to sum it up with all the other diseases, parasites and infections that would be needed to reach the 54%. Like resporatory infections... "Other causes" is listed at 14%, I assume that malnutrition is part of this, but malnutrition would be the leading cause in the 4-8 year age group, and less so in others.

The life stories themselves are over dramatic. Which isn't weird, considering you don't have a lot of source material dealing with the "boring" lives. Like if you think of Scandinavia in the VIKING ages you'll find a lot of research and data on the people who went viking. In reality 95% of the populations were farmers who didn't even see the coast in their lifetimes. Unless the AI is specifically tuned to value the few sources on everyday farmin in Scandinavia higher than the ones published on viking culture in general... Well.. I think you get it.

That being said. Many people probably don't know that you could have 18 children at only see one of them grow to the age of 20 a few hundred years ago. So the data is accurate enough to be educational in my opinion.

I do think the "typical marriage age" might be suffering from AI safe-guards. For most times I've tried it seems to land oddly close to 18. Which is unfortunately much higher than reality.

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

#277

Post by ggm »

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-…

96% of women who survived to marriageable age, were married fixes this. The 44% of women who die young don't marry. Obviously a high percentage of men have to die young too, to maintain rough parity or else there's a woman shortage which might account for high survivor marriage rates: in demand as a wife, due to mortality rate asymmetry.

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

#278

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

If you like the idea but are disappointed by the blatant errors in this vibe-coded website, there was a video game saga called Real Lives which was basically the same idea, except only for contemporary people (but you would still draw an area of the world, etc. from realistic probability distributions), and it was done right. You could make some life decisions (it wasn't purely contemplative) but much of the time you would die as a child of things we don't even know in the first world, like schistosomiasis, and not even be old enough to make any decision. Or you would make one or two, but due to being in an unfavorable environment without opportunities none of the options would improve your life much. Very sobering.

I remember playing Real Lives 2004 (or maybe 2007) and 2010, both good. I think there are later versions but I had heard they had changed philosophy somehow and some people weren't satisfied (they said they went overboard with educational elements on top of the raw life simulation), so I can't vouch for those.

I don't know if 2010 would be easy to play in today's computers. Now I'm curious, I might try for old times' sake.

A version with the whole history of humanity, like what htis website aims to be but fails, would be amazing if it existed.

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

#279

Post by doginasuit »

backlava12 wrote: post #256
doginasuit wrote: post #248

This is brilliant. I think it could stand to be a little more imaginative in their stories. It seems like it should be possible to do that while still conveying an accurate picture. "He made his living as a professional" is simply a wasted opportunity. There shouldn't be anything so vague. If you we're listening to a story, you would feel cheated. Embrace your idea.

Well, its just AI-generated nonsense, so the story is just going to be the same slop you could generate with ChatGPT or whatever.

That's not how I see it. Not all AI writing is slop, it depends on how much human thought has guided it. I would always prefer to read something written by human intelligence, but if ever there were a case for AI writing it would be something like this.
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