71–80 of 86 posts
FF just crashed immediately. Twice. Which kinda surprised me in a good way, because usually when it struggles for memory it just hangs there for a couple of minutes until it gets killed by the OS. Cannot remember it being killed that easily by another website.
Using FF on iPhone, did not have any problems.
Interestingly, this website reliably crashes my firefox on linux while consuming 55GB of memory. Claude's TLDR of what's causing the problem (may or may not be accurate): "That animation loop is almost certainly leaking memory: each time-step it draws new border geometry (GeoJSON/vector shapes) but doesn't free the old frames, so RAM climbs without bound. When you interact — especially auto-playing the timeline — the…
About Russo Ukrainian war 2022: > Estimates: 600,000+ Ukrainian military deaths; 100,000+ Russian deaths; 30,000-40,000 civilian deaths. This is VERY wrong. Almost all estimates go for at least 3x higher Russian casualties than Ukrainian. Russia has been attacking for 4+ years just throwing bodies at the problem with Ukrainians defending with technology. Where do these estimates even come from? Makes me question the…
The UI looks like what Claude would generate, and I'd guess the data was scraped and compiled the same way - but it's not clear how it could reference a Wikipedia page and use numbers that contradict it.
Unless russian efforts to flood the internet with English-language news sites pushing the russian narrative into training sets and retrieval [2] are working. There is even a website tracking the known russian networks that flood the internet with news articles [3].
[1] https://waratlas.org/#year=2026&conflict=russo-ukrainian-war...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/21/english-langua...
1. Appreciate all the comments on how to make this better! This was a passion project to try to fulfill a dream project of mine I've had for well over a decade, and it's far from done. Any of your suggestions on how to improve it (the implementation, the data accuracy, etc.) are things I'll work to improve.
2. If you want to know more about its origins, you can read here: https://www.jtroll.com/writing/introducing-war-atlas.html
3. Yep, this was a Claude project. I'm not an engineer, so using an LLM was a necessary part of the process and it was a lot of fun.
4. I'm painfully aware that when one tries to encapsulate "every single conflict in human history," some data sets become incomplete or incorrect. The problem with this being a passion project in nights & weekends between being a parent and having a job is it's never done and frankly never peer reviewed; so your comments are very useful! Like I said, keep suggestions coming and I'll work on improvements.
The gravity of attempting to map the history of human conflict is heavy, but I hope everyone who took a moment to scrub the timeline here came away with some new insight. It was eye-opening and inspiring to make, and to try to respect that gravity. Cheers, all.
Grumble about the graphics choices: dark-grey-on-black-with-other-dark-colors is a terrible color scheme, that renders the borders nearly invisible. There's a reason print maps have a standard set of colors, with very light blue for oceans, white for land backgrounds, and a variety of dark colors for features. The "modern white-on-black web aesthetic" only really works for text- and figure-heavy pages, where you must…
FF just crashed immediately. Twice. Which kinda surprised me in a good way, because usually when it struggles for memory it just hangs there for a couple of minutes until it gets killed by the OS. Cannot remember it being killed that easily by another website.
Cool visuals, as with everything like this where the creator probably just churned open datasets through LLMs there are many inaccuracies particularly around borders. An interesting effort though, and at least this one has a decent page about sourcing.
Getting borders exactly right has been pretty crazy to wrangle. Just doing it with LLMs hasn't proven a good route so I've been hand-correcting things slowly but surely. Long road to go.
Love this. Acurate display of humanity and what it does when things run out. Would be cool if ithad a ethnicity map showing a cultures get transported elsewhere or vanish (e.g. the minority purges over the last hundred years in the middle east).
It missed the Toledo War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War But to be fair, this is really cool.