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 then use very light colors (white, yellow, light orange, light green) for features/lines.
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 tab grows until it swallows all 62 GB of RAM + swap and the kernel kills it."
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.
I did. Yep. Tried to source everything to credit original creators and make this as transparent as possible.
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.
Very interesting and watchable. Do you differentiate between wars and "conflicts"? There's so many of the latter and everyone seems to avoid the term "war".
"Conflict" seemed like the broader useful definition. Especially in modern times, defining it as just "wars" felt like it'd leave too much out; and I really wanted to map conflict to show how impactful it's been on societies and cultures.
I guess the (war?) elephant in the room is that written history as something that attempts to record a somewht balanced, comprehensive account of an event is a modern, western, anomaly.
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 validity of the information on this site
The website cites "Wikipedia: Russo-Ukrainian War; Ukrainian Ministry data" as its source, but the figures in the overview (600,000+ Ukrainian military deaths, 100,000+ Russian) aren't close to anything in either source [1].
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].
I recently figured that Spain went on a war for 700 years, just to carry on in the Arauco war for another 300 years, thus, literally being at war for 1000 years.
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.
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).
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 67.7 ms ] threadRobinson Projection would be much more accurate.
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 then use very light colors (white, yellow, light orange, light green) for features/lines.
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 tab grows until it swallows all 62 GB of RAM + swap and the kernel kills it."
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.
> 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 validity of the information on this site
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...
[3] https://portal-kombat.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War
But to be fair, this is really cool.