Now this is fun vibe coding. I sometimes wonder whether our spectacular cosmic luck to be alive when we A fascinating way of reckoning with our cosmic luck. On "only the first roll counts" rules, I rolled a girl who died at 8 months from a respiratory infection in the Indus valley, in 7785 BCE (9,810 years ago).
I rolled again, of course, but at that point it feels like fishing for a best case scenario. But I at least got someone from the North China Plain in 75 BCE who lived to 74 and had 6 grand children. Married at 19 and stayed married to age 71. Hard to hope for better than that, against these odds at least.
an effective way to glean a little slice of understanding of the human experience throughout the ages, though 'every human never' might be more apt a name as its all statistics from the demographics to the generative portrait
I do wonder if that life expectancy is dragged significantly down by all the ways you can die early on in life, so that it's not so much that 28 years is an old age for the time as it is a function of all things that prevent you from getting to old age.
And so if you went to a town square or market in that time (if it's a time that had such a thing), perhaps it might still be perfectly normal to see people in their 30s, 40s, 50s.
Right, that 42% dying before age 5 means the survivors typically lived well beyond 28. There weren’t a huge number of people living into their 80s, but 28 wouldn’t have been “old man” territory.
The life expectancy of a person who lives to 18 increases dramatically across the board.
You even see this today. If you live to 70, you can expect to live 14 to 17 more years. So to about 84 on the short side and 87 on the long side.
However, make it to 75, your life expectancy is 11 to 14 years. Which is 86 on the short side and 89 on the long side.
Basically, the longer you live, the longer you should live, but eventually the range collapses. And that's because people come in under the average all the time. Some people die at 71. And those people stop getting counted when determining life expectancy at 75.
That is surprisingly similar given how few people seem to have commented so far. Makes me wonder if some part of this is starting from a constant seed or something...
I think the model has an unusual preference for the Korean Peninsula before Christ. A number of commenters, including myself, draw from this area and period.
After having my first child (a girl who is now nearly 3 years old) these stats impact me so much more. My first roll was a girl in the Iraniam plateau in the 18 century who had a 33% chance of dying before they reached 5. She managed to live to 70 but experience so much death in her life.
I can't imagine my daughter dying before she reaches 5, it feels like it would be the worst feeling I could possibly imagine and then some.
Visit any older cemetery and look for the tiny headstones and the matching very brief lifespans, or read an older obituary for someone from your great-grandparent's generation or further back, or watch a couple of seasons of _Call the Midwife_.
I 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).
Without wishing to be unkind, this reads a lot more as 'one-shot with AI' than 'many iterations'; if you truly did that much editing, you didn't put it where it showed.
You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.
Yeah, I think the AI probably shows. But in fact it is the result of many iterations.
But what I was trying to get across are the ideas, not the language. I think it you were to read the whole thing, you'd probably find it interesting. But if not, feel free to let me know.
But my hypothesis is that there are people with skills for ideas that have the potential to be interesting stories, but not necessarily great prose skills; I don't think those necessarily line up in the same person. Up until now, to write a worthwhile short story you had to be among the best at both.
Maybe AI can help change that, and maybe (I hypothesize), that would be for the better. I understand that such a hypothesis would be controversial, but to me, it feels worth exploring.
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.
I read it all, and the central theme seemed to be more about collecting random thoughts/memories rather than "lives", with a final twist about the apocalypse or something like that.
You really need to stretch quite a bit to find similarities between this post and this short story.
And since you incorrectly assumed that I didn't read it, I'll give you more unsolicited feedback. Yes the writing is horrendous, but the idea itself is not novel or thought provoking. The general idea has been done many times in the classics like Dick, Asimov, Chiang and others. And the twist at the end ("Oh my god! They couldn't see things in the future because there is no future!!!!!") is immediately predictable when they can't get samples in the future.
That being said, keep writing and enjoying yourself but 1) try to dial down on the AI assist, it really makes for a poor experience for the reader, 2) don't get on your high horse when someone points it out.
The reason I did it the way I did is that I believe that Fable writes better prose than I do. I could write it so that people would be less likely to think it's written by AI, but I wouldn't think it's as good.
So, I'm happy with it as-is; I think the ideas are good and deserve to be out there. I think it just needs a context where people will be more forgiving about AI prose because they are interested enough in the ideas that are conveyed.
But of course, the challenge with creating such a context is that one person with an AI could spew out 1,000 crap stories a day and submit them all...
Not bad!
Did you ever read Stephen King’s short autobiographical story on how he sold his first few stories? He had to be persistent as could be, just years of writing and submitting to publishers and getting rejected. It is a good read.
We 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 hugged to death)
> 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 don't think I agree. There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.
I'm not sure why AI means that people don't need to support their creations with ads. Sure, it probably took fewer human-hours typing at a keyboard to create this, but for things like this, a labor of love, that's typically not the "expensive" part.
I think it's just that in the past, you would need X free time, Y motivation level, and Z skill level (partly tradeable for X and Y) to create something like this, and now all of those values are smaller. So it's 'economics' in the straightforward sense, because not everyone could afford to spend X hours on something they weren't going to monetize, and also in the sense of the incentives shaping people's productive/creative activity.
(As for whether it's a good thing, I'm conflicted. It's cool to see more stuff like this, but if it crowds out the more intense passion projects, we lose something too.)
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 opportunity to become a multi-millionaire by clicking a button but then not do it because they'd rather maintain a slightly better experience for their audience.
It's, of course, not even loading right now, which gets at the other problem with this "economics" framing. The biggest expense in running an actually popular website isn't creating and publishing the first version. It's paying for the infrastructure to serve a meaningful proportion of the entire world. This is clearly not a static site. It's presumably doing some computation on the server side to draw from all these hundreds of different probability distributions that works well enough for a few dozen simultaneous requests but not thousands. There might even be some kind of perverse anti-economics going on here where thought devoted upfront to efficiency and architecture might have made this far more scalable, but the "publish the first thing that passes a basic sanity check" vibe-slop ethos doesn't usually get you that.
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.
I live in Denmark. So yes. I have seen a map of Scandinavia. People didn't travel. Even here in Denmark which is tiny compared to Norway and Sweden, if you only ever go in a 10-15km radius of your home then you don't see the ocean.
This is true. I concede. However I am not sure that the majority of people were as imobile as you say even in mideveal times there were religious pilgrimages, fairs. Maybe the lowest stratum of non free society lived in a land locked mannor and never saw the sea in Denmark but I wonder if it was the majority of people in a lifetime?
> We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed.
And this is not limited to software development. In just a few years, the economics of delivering healthcare, education, entertainment and legal services are going to change completely. Transportation is changing as we speak. In a decade Physical AI will completely change the economics of manufacturing, food services, elder care, and so on.
The post-scarcity world will be here sooner than we think!
We are not in a scarcity world. Or it's deliberated scarcity. We have way enough means to educate, heal, feed and transport everyone. Yet most of the world work full time to produce more and more of meaningless products, and to make the economic curves go up. Also, a huge part of the population is still poor, while the rich people get richer. And on us dooms the perspective of an extreme climate crisis.
I don't know how you can think that AI or "Physical AI" will solve any of that without a really huge shift in our locals and worldwide politics. It will probably cause a massive economical crisis before anything else of importance.
In 10 years? I predict that healthcare, education, legal services and transporation won't change in a meaningful way at all. People will go to a doctor, kids will attend school and aim to graduate, legal services will still be done by lawyers and decided in court. Transportation will still depend largely on what exists right now or is being built right now. There won't be self-driving cars in every city, only in a few, probably more in the US and China, fewer in Europe, probably close to zero in the rest of the world.
And how do you think will the post-scarcity affect the daily lives of most people? My prediction is that most people even in 30 years will still work for a wage, and probably still around 30-40 hours per week, because these gains of post-scarcity won't be distributed evenly. It will mostly make a few people very very rich.
> In 10 years? I predict that healthcare, education, legal services and transportation won't change in a meaningful way at all.
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." -- Bill Gates, in The Road Ahead.
I’d guess that education will hardly be recognizable in 10 years. Bad news for number of teachers employed, but AI is going to result in a huge increase in the number of 15-year-olds with a PhD’s level of knowledge and abilities in their heads.
Both of these things can be true. It's a really good idea that immediately led me to another idea to play with. But it hallucinates so its accuracy can't be trusted.
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.
Yes, but I definitely think the probabilities are off - the explanation, which I agree with, states "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present."
But it appears to be drawing much more uniformly from the years than you'd expect given the probability curve (population curve) pictured.
Bear in mind that the population curve defaults to a log scale on the year axis. If you switch it over to linear, that big fat area at the end shrinks to a needle-like spike..
"You have died of Dysentery [on the Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE at 2 months old]"
I was actually a bit surprised since it also said I was exclusively breastfed which seems to be fairly protective against diarrhea. I have a feeling this didn't account for all the joint probability distributions...
Yeah, it doesn't give totally absurd combinations (like a male dying of birth complications at age 10), but the probabilities are still likely rather rough approximations (eg. sorting cause-of-death distributions to a few bins like "infant", "child", "adult", "elder").
Babies died of diarrhea anyway. Breastfeeding is not a panacea. If it were, doctors would simply prescribe a flask of breast milk, and mothers would earn money by prolonging lactation for Big Medicine.
I was wondering if the generated people “fill up a spot” and temporarily change the stats for generating new lives. Eg, if the app already generated 10M stories, is it still using the same initial distribution for the new ones, or is generation conditioned on the stats of the already generated?
I am really happy to live in the modern age. It is quite amazing to think that people are facing cardiovascular disease and cancer instead of random parasites nowadays. Modern medicine is such a miracle.
I was thinking along the same lines as I was going person to person in the app. It made me more disgusted at MAGA and MAHA. These guys are living in modern times with access to things that people back then couldn't even possibly dream of. The thing that really drove it home is the life expectancy of the people that came up in the draw. Most died by their 30s and some even before their 30s, most never knew their parents as they died when people were single digits of age, and they were forced to live very simple life with simple foods and conveniences.
So much of what we have has been brought to us thanks to ubiquitous fuel, ubiquitous technology, and institutions that took centuries to form and solidify. All of this built on the backs of people who sacrifiec and sometimes did horrendus things to allow us to be in the places we are. There's just so much hubris and misunderstanding of what they have been given in their lives that they don't appreciate. Pissing all this away is fine to them. Yes, I get it...they didn't get the same quality of life as their parents did(who came of age in an abberation).
What they don't realize is that it could get much worse. Many of them may not even live to see how bad it could get. This is so frustrating, and it just increases my disrespect for them.
How many random parasites has modern medicine removed from you? Likely you never even had one. It's not just medicine, we also have abundant, safe food, clean water and warm housing
Yes! I think it’s really easy for us to take for granted the long list of incredible things we take for granted. Every time I hear someone lament how horrible the world is today, I wonder when they’d rather have been born. Especially as a random human like this.
> You have drawn a girl, born in the Levant in 1042 CE.
> She was born, married at 18, had 4 children, lost her mother at 28, was orphaned at 41, was widowed at 70, and died at 71 of heart failure (degenerative illness), with 3 surviving children and 9 grandchildren.
First try. Honestly I'm going to call this a W under the circumstances.
This is neat, but I don't think it's actually drawing the year from the correct probability distribution - "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct, but in 5 "random" choices, only one was from anywhere near modern day.
How near is near? With ~100 billion people having ever lived, the odds of a randomly selected life falling within the past couple of centuries are not all that high.
Could you be a little more specific? https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-... puts the halfway point at over 2,000 years ago, so you'd expect less than 50% probability of getting a random year that's not BCE. "A random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is true in relative terms; the timeline on the web site goes back 300,000 years and you're very likely to get something in the past few thousand years, which is pretty near to the present when compared to a third of a million years. The random years it gives me fit into that pretty well, so I guessed that the person I replied to might be using a narrower definition of "anywhere near modern day" than that. Hence why I asked. If I missed something, could you kindly point out what I missed, instead of whatever this is?
The stat I keep in my back pocket is that you can roughly divide the total time lived by humans (the integral of population over time) into three tranches, with one third of human experience being before the dawn of agriculture, and one third being after 1600. (Related fun fact: WWII was about 1% of human experience, based on the back of the envelope that ~50% of the world experienced "being at war" for nearly a decade.)
The distribution of human lives versus years lived by humans will skew earlier, because infant mortality was absurd for the first two tranches, with something like 50% of people dying before the age of five, so it will be more like 40-40-20 over those time periods.
I did a statistical analysis and you are correct. The issue seems to be that crude birth rates from around 500CE and earlier are overestimated significantly. The bad source seems to be Kaneda & Haub, "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?", where they assume a flat crude birth rate of 80 for all BCE dates. The probability distribution is just a function of pop and CBR, so it results in significantly decreasing modern birth probabilities.
The x-axis being log scale by default visually exadurates the effect if you are thinking about it in terms of area under the curve. This confused me also.
I think exaggero is a denominative, derived from the noun agger 'pile' (itself a nominalisation of aggero i.e. "what is brought"). As such it took the default first conjugation.
> "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct,
If the selection is from the population at random (as the UI indicates), but it specifically says it's based on a random year (during which humans were present) first as a filter. It's much more likely to select far from the population explosion.
There are more statistical issues. I drew a person from 1984, living in Germany and recalculated their life several times. In almost all cases, their mother died while they were in their thirties, often both parents. This is simply far from reality.
I think it's working as intended. The year is simply a randomly chosen year not related to the density of births in that year. It would be a boring tool if it actually chose "random year based on random birth" because almost every choice would be from 1900 onward...
The site covers a 300,000 year span, so a randomly chosen year would average ~150,000 BCE, which definitely isn't happening.
The skew towards the present isn't as stark as that. World population has exploded in the past couple of centuries, but it hasn't been high for very long. 1900 to present only covers ~11% of all births.
1900 to 2026 is 127 years (inclusive), so 0.04% of the year range available, yet it only has 11% of all births. That's certainly a skew, although I suppose subjective whether or not that's stark. At a >3x order of magnitude, it's certainly significant though.
But "is far more likely to fall near the present" = "is far more likely to fall near the present". The author makes the claim about probability distribution themselves, then does the opposite.
You're right, yet I agree with the website's approach. The goal of this site is to educate users about how people lived, not educate them about stats. IMO. I would have chosen the same algo.
It's clear to me that an even bigger HC crowd would howl "Oh, how boring, look at him choosing pretty much only still alive people" if he had done the 'uniformly random" selection. C'mon!
> The goal of this site is to educate users about how people lived, not educate them about stats. IMO.
And IMO, a website that's 95% stats by volume very clearly is about stats. If the goal is teaching anything, it's teaching stats. It literally does animations showing the random process, and explicitly says how likely each outcome is, even sorts by likelihood in some places.
Again, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with that if the website itself didn't explicitly say that recent births are more likely than non-recent births.
Personally, the one 1990s person I've got was far more interesting than the dozen of 5th-15th century children that all died of one sickness or another before the age of 2. If anything, it's the dying of dysentery that should be non-uniformly random.
Yeah, it feels it might be a bit skewed to produce interesting results. My first attempt, despite a life expectancy of 31 and a 34% chance to reach 40, lived a glorious 65 years.
Then again, my next two attempts died at 4 months and 4 years. But they were both from before 1000 AD. So maybe it's just the year that's skewed. But the fourth reached 65 and was from before 1000 AD. Only 1 in 4 was from after 1000 AD.
"A girl was born in 1276 BCE, on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Hyderabad... She lived on a labourer's wage"
Wage labor didn't exist yet and the cited source is for labor history between 1500CE and the present.
The AI illustration also doesn't make any sense for the period.
This is the genuinely bad kind of slop because it's pretending to be semi-factual.
288 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 39.7 ms ] threadI rolled again, of course, but at that point it feels like fishing for a best case scenario. But I at least got someone from the North China Plain in 75 BCE who lived to 74 and had 6 grand children. Married at 19 and stayed married to age 71. Hard to hope for better than that, against these odds at least.
probably like 5% of humanity has his genes now. that was fun vibe coding
And I suppose other RPGs, too, especially ones that are more story-than-dice driven, and/or set in the "real" world.
Somebody, somewhere, somewhen rolled the dice and here we are.
>Life expectancy at birth: 28 yrs
>Died before age 5: 42%
>Died before age 15: 50%
i knew life expectancy was obviously lower, but those stats were a bit eye opening.
unfortunately, died at 3 from an accident.
And so if you went to a town square or market in that time (if it's a time that had such a thing), perhaps it might still be perfectly normal to see people in their 30s, 40s, 50s.
The life expectancy of a person who lives to 18 increases dramatically across the board.
You even see this today. If you live to 70, you can expect to live 14 to 17 more years. So to about 84 on the short side and 87 on the long side.
However, make it to 75, your life expectancy is 11 to 14 years. Which is 86 on the short side and 89 on the long side.
Basically, the longer you live, the longer you should live, but eventually the range collapses. And that's because people come in under the average all the time. Some people die at 71. And those people stop getting counted when determining life expectancy at 75.
That is surprisingly similar given how few people seem to have commented so far. Makes me wonder if some part of this is starting from a constant seed or something...
"Any Korean Ever"
Modern take on Oregon Trail vibes I like it
I can't imagine my daughter dying before she reaches 5, it feels like it would be the worst feeling I could possibly imagine and then some.
https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-b...
You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.
But what I was trying to get across are the ideas, not the language. I think it you were to read the whole thing, you'd probably find it interesting. But if not, feel free to let me know.
But my hypothesis is that there are people with skills for ideas that have the potential to be interesting stories, but not necessarily great prose skills; I don't think those necessarily line up in the same person. Up until now, to write a worthwhile short story you had to be among the best at both.
Maybe AI can help change that, and maybe (I hypothesize), that would be for the better. I understand that such a hypothesis would be controversial, but to me, it feels worth exploring.
And OMG, you need to edit the AI slop way way more. This is unreadable.
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.
You really need to stretch quite a bit to find similarities between this post and this short story.
And since you incorrectly assumed that I didn't read it, I'll give you more unsolicited feedback. Yes the writing is horrendous, but the idea itself is not novel or thought provoking. The general idea has been done many times in the classics like Dick, Asimov, Chiang and others. And the twist at the end ("Oh my god! They couldn't see things in the future because there is no future!!!!!") is immediately predictable when they can't get samples in the future.
That being said, keep writing and enjoying yourself but 1) try to dial down on the AI assist, it really makes for a poor experience for the reader, 2) don't get on your high horse when someone points it out.
So, I'm happy with it as-is; I think the ideas are good and deserve to be out there. I think it just needs a context where people will be more forgiving about AI prose because they are interested enough in the ideas that are conveyed.
But of course, the challenge with creating such a context is that one person with an AI could spew out 1,000 crap stories a day and submit them all...
Had to laugh.
I loved it and feel inspired from it.
(It looks like it's getting a lot of traffic and might get hugged to death)
I don't think I agree. There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.
I'm not sure why AI means that people don't need to support their creations with ads. Sure, it probably took fewer human-hours typing at a keyboard to create this, but for things like this, a labor of love, that's typically not the "expensive" part.
This is a strawman.
The original point was "the economics ... have changed"
I read this as, it's much easier to spin up a project of this scale even non-monetized, and more people are able and willing to do so.
(As for whether it's a good thing, I'm conflicted. It's cool to see more stuff like this, but if it crowds out the more intense passion projects, we lose something too.)
It's, of course, not even loading right now, which gets at the other problem with this "economics" framing. The biggest expense in running an actually popular website isn't creating and publishing the first version. It's paying for the infrastructure to serve a meaningful proportion of the entire world. This is clearly not a static site. It's presumably doing some computation on the server side to draw from all these hundreds of different probability distributions that works well enough for a few dozen simultaneous requests but not thousands. There might even be some kind of perverse anti-economics going on here where thought devoted upfront to efficiency and architecture might have made this far more scalable, but the "publish the first thing that passes a basic sanity check" vibe-slop ethos doesn't usually get you that.
Yeah it is imperfect and was maybe not ready for the HN front page hug. But I say, bravo to the person or team!
Do you see the problem here?
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.
And this is not limited to software development. In just a few years, the economics of delivering healthcare, education, entertainment and legal services are going to change completely. Transportation is changing as we speak. In a decade Physical AI will completely change the economics of manufacturing, food services, elder care, and so on.
The post-scarcity world will be here sooner than we think!
I don't know how you can think that AI or "Physical AI" will solve any of that without a really huge shift in our locals and worldwide politics. It will probably cause a massive economical crisis before anything else of importance.
And how do you think will the post-scarcity affect the daily lives of most people? My prediction is that most people even in 30 years will still work for a wage, and probably still around 30-40 hours per week, because these gains of post-scarcity won't be distributed evenly. It will mostly make a few people very very rich.
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." -- Bill Gates, in The Road Ahead.
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.
But it appears to be drawing much more uniformly from the years than you'd expect given the probability curve (population curve) pictured.
https://www.alt.org/nethack/topdeaths.html
Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.
I was actually a bit surprised since it also said I was exclusively breastfed which seems to be fairly protective against diarrhea. I have a feeling this didn't account for all the joint probability distributions...
Very cool project
I was wondering if the generated people “fill up a spot” and temporarily change the stats for generating new lives. Eg, if the app already generated 10M stories, is it still using the same initial distribution for the new ones, or is generation conditioned on the stats of the already generated?
The random life I got: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...
Maybe MAHA will bring this back, like they did measles.
So much of what we have has been brought to us thanks to ubiquitous fuel, ubiquitous technology, and institutions that took centuries to form and solidify. All of this built on the backs of people who sacrifiec and sometimes did horrendus things to allow us to be in the places we are. There's just so much hubris and misunderstanding of what they have been given in their lives that they don't appreciate. Pissing all this away is fine to them. Yes, I get it...they didn't get the same quality of life as their parents did(who came of age in an abberation).
What they don't realize is that it could get much worse. Many of them may not even live to see how bad it could get. This is so frustrating, and it just increases my disrespect for them.
Just vaccinate yourself and your kids and listen to the advice of real doctors.
for now
yourlifeunderrome.com
> She was born, married at 18, had 4 children, lost her mother at 28, was orphaned at 41, was widowed at 70, and died at 71 of heart failure (degenerative illness), with 3 surviving children and 9 grandchildren.
First try. Honestly I'm going to call this a W under the circumstances.
The distribution of human lives versus years lived by humans will skew earlier, because infant mortality was absurd for the first two tranches, with something like 50% of people dying before the age of five, so it will be more like 40-40-20 over those time periods.
before 8000 BCE: ~9.0 billion births, 8% 8000 BCE–1650 CE: ~85.4 billion, 73% after 1650: ~22.6 billion, 19%
Looks also different to OPs website
We can call them flat birthers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsAIhGoKVuo
this word is usually spelled exaggerate (yes, with two g's.)
The reason there are two Gs is that the first one is assimilated from a D. The etymological structure of the word is ex-ad-gero, "from-toward-carry".
This happens for everything. Compare accelerate [ad-celero] / accommodate [ad-con-modus] / impossible [in-pot-s-ibilis].
If the selection is from the population at random (as the UI indicates), but it specifically says it's based on a random year (during which humans were present) first as a filter. It's much more likely to select far from the population explosion.
The skew towards the present isn't as stark as that. World population has exploded in the past couple of centuries, but it hasn't been high for very long. 1900 to present only covers ~11% of all births.
It's clear to me that an even bigger HC crowd would howl "Oh, how boring, look at him choosing pretty much only still alive people" if he had done the 'uniformly random" selection. C'mon!
And IMO, a website that's 95% stats by volume very clearly is about stats. If the goal is teaching anything, it's teaching stats. It literally does animations showing the random process, and explicitly says how likely each outcome is, even sorts by likelihood in some places.
Again, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with that if the website itself didn't explicitly say that recent births are more likely than non-recent births.
Personally, the one 1990s person I've got was far more interesting than the dozen of 5th-15th century children that all died of one sickness or another before the age of 2. If anything, it's the dying of dysentery that should be non-uniformly random.
Then again, my next two attempts died at 4 months and 4 years. But they were both from before 1000 AD. So maybe it's just the year that's skewed. But the fourth reached 65 and was from before 1000 AD. Only 1 in 4 was from after 1000 AD.
Wage labor didn't exist yet and the cited source is for labor history between 1500CE and the present. The AI illustration also doesn't make any sense for the period.
This is the genuinely bad kind of slop because it's pretending to be semi-factual.