Very similar to: https://random-lives.github.io/random-lives/
Random Lives seems like it was much less vibe coded and did a better job.
Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
311–320 of 323 posts
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#312This 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.
I hope people make more and more such apps by vibe coding or AI assistance. Something that does not make a lot of financial sense, but just blows the mind by its imagination
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#313Earlier 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…
There's a bigger problem I hope you become aware as you read more here. First, very smart people are not smart about everything. Second, nearly nobody is smart when it comes to understanding the limits of human understanding. We're bad at epistemology and probability and data collection. Primarily rural settlements from thousands of years ago did not keep accurate birth, death, and marriage records of everyone who wa…
I never assumed the data on how people lived ten thousand years ago was 100% accurate. Of course it's not. I had assumed it came from real research and the citation links were accurate.
When you see a picture of a dinosaur (in an educational context, not in the Flintstones), the implied assumption is that the picture is based on an educated guess of what we currently think the dinosaurs looked like. And if the picture is accompanied by a citation, that citation should contain the information used to produce the picture.
I don't think a human would have made these mistakes, because in the process of actually typing out the data most people would stop and think about where they were pulling the data from. And if they didn't—if they literally just pulled numbers out of thin air because they felt right—I would think poorly of that too!
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think this AI writing was guided anything other than some rudimentary prompt though. It also makes tons of obvious mistakes like saying the person died at 27 then was married at 29 or something.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#315Creator here (proof https://anyhumanever.com/verify ). I noticed the traffic and am dropping by. A few quick answers after scanning through comments: Q: Vibecoded? A: Mostly, not completely. I've been programming for 30+ years, and like a lot of people have gotten to the point where I seldom need to look at code anymore. Even so, this took around 4-6 weeks (part time) to get mostly right. A lot of the effort was in a…
Honestly man, the world is now a worse place that this exists. You never should have made it. The data is just made up nonsense and the linked sources are bogus but its presented as some factual and thoughtful thing. I would be so incredibly ashamed to be associated with this.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#316I 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 girl - 500 BCE New Guinea. Typical marriage age - 19, 93% adults ever married.
19 seems a bit high for those times. It's known that in Ancient Greece the typical marriage age for women was 15. That was the case even 200 years ago, at least in Eastern European countries, AFAIK. I doubt that ancient tribespeople would care about modern day standards if even the African tribes of today don't care, but the AI does care apparently. I think it tries to be politically correct and avoid outputting something that would be against the cultural norms of the modern times.
The second issue is the marriage itself. Were people living hunter-gatherer lifestyle largely monogamous? If you consider all the people that have ever lived and thousands of cultures, it's weird to include marriage as a category, as if it was something universal and inherent to human biology. It should be: "typical age women became mothers".
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#317I 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 girl - 500 BCE New Guinea. Typical marriage age - 19, 93% adults ever married. 19 seems a bit high for those times. It's known that in Ancient Greece the typical marriage age for women was 15. That was the case even 200 years ago, at least in Eastern European countries, AFAIK. I doubt that ancient tribespeople would care about modern day standards if even the African tribes of today don't care, but the AI doe…
I found that in many cases, the citations are for early 20th century marriage demographics in the same area. For example, for marriage rates in India in the 1200s it cited a paper about Indian marriage rates from the 1920s-1970s (and even then, the cited age range doesn't match what's in the paper! The AI just remembered the name of a paper about marriage in India and then hallucinated what was in it.)
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
True! But if I roll the dice 50 times, I would expect bubonic plague deaths to correlate with major outbreaks. Instead they're just random.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#319I 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 w…
I had the exact same description, like verbatim minus coffee and sugar for someone born in 1809.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#320I was a Japanese boy who died at 5 month because of diarrhea.