The basic premise of the site, that these lives are “taken at random from real data” is a lie. They are fictional extrapolations from a dataset of questionable provenance twisted into a narrative format by an LLM. These are not humans. They’re not even data points. It’s vibey bullshit.
Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
191–200 of 322 posts
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#192I 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 got a man in India 1000 years ago who died at 92. Impressive yet rather unlikely.
Unlikely, but not implausible.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#193I 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-…
James was born on the British Isles, near Boulogne-sur-Mer, in 2009 CE.
James's table is mostly oat and barley bread, pork and dairy, and cabbage and peas, with apples in season, and coffee and sugar as well. He is literate.
Odd for a gen-z person in Britain. I doubt he’d eat a lot of cabbage, and I have no idea when the “season” for apples is as they are always in the supermarket and there aren’t any orchards near where I live.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#194We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed. No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling. I loved it and feel inspired from it. (It looks like it's getting a lot of traffic and might get hugg…
I also think this shows what the changed economics do: it allows anyone to fill the web with convincing looking nonsense.
The person who built this did not have to put in months to build a cool web app. But they also did not have to put in months of research, gathering representative pictures. And they didn't. Instead they let a software create a well presented nonsense story about a boy from Anatolia in 200 BCE called Mehmet wearing a parka.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#196I died of dysentery shortly after being born.
Makes Oregon Trail seem easy…
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#197I found it very unrealistic that my girl from 2000bc somewhere in china decided to divorce after 3 years of marriage when she was 23.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#198I 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...
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.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#199> LIFE EXPECTANCY AT BIRTH
Given the huge infant mortality rates until very recently in human history, this is often pretty misleading. Life expectancy at say, 2yo, is far greater.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#200Earlier 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.
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 reasonable job of distinguishing that plagues did not occur every year and that they varied in lethality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_plague_pandemic#Italian...