10 ms·

Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

662 points by thinkingemote 13d ago

2OEH8eoCRo0 13d ago
Very cool. Reads like a Dwarf Fortress history. For those that don't play, every creature in the game has a life story.
- ButlerianJihad 12d ago
  I was reminded of reading high score lists/YASD from nethack. https://www.alt.org/nethack/topdeaths.html https://www.alt.org/nethack/topdeaths.html
Waterluvian 13d ago
15,370 BCE feels like a lottery roll. I doubt I’ll live long. Edit: oh it’s not weighed by population? I was expecting 99% of rolls to be in recent times.
ensocode 13d ago
I tried drawing my life by entering my birth year and location, and it was surprisingly accurate :-D Which, I suppose, says absolutely nothing about the accuracy of the birth years.
glenstein 13d ago
Now this is fun vibe coding. 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. Edit: Obviously progress isn't inevitable, and at any point in time you can be unlucky. But it does seem like, for most points in history, you would rather be you, in your version of the present, than a randomly rolled person from any prior point of history leading up to your moment. So most of the time, anyone playing this would feel more lucky to be themselves than any of the options they would have to roll for. Maybe if a version of this was offered to people 10,000 years from now they would say "crap, I rolled 2026". Edit 2: I think the death hug might have got it.
- retube 13d ago
  I died within 2 days on my first roll. made it to 8 months on my second
  - brabel 13d ago
    I was so lucky! One lived to 35 in the Paris basin a few thousand years ago, the other lived to 25 in China, died in 1945. Both were married and left living children!
    - retube 7d ago
      an even more interesting version of this is if it covered all life/organisms
- The_Blade 13d ago
  on my 6th only the first roll counts roll, i got a boy born near Nairobi in 36,112 BCE that lived to 70 probably like 5% of humanity has his genes now. that was fun vibe coding
pavel_lishin 13d ago
This could be pretty great for a play through of Thousand Year Old Vampire, a pretty terrific journaling game: https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/ https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/ And I suppose other RPGs, too, especially ones that are more story-than-dice driven, and/or set in the "real" world.
- gilleain 13d ago
  This can be great - Tom from the Yogscast has run a few of these, and they can get pretty wild. It's a simple premise but works well.
guybedo 13d ago
we are probably living inside a more advanced version of this game right now. Somebody, somewhere, somewhen rolled the dice and here we are.
smarf 13d ago
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
john_strinlai 13d ago
>You have drawn a boy, born in the Korean Peninsula in 3394 BCE >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.
- glenstein 13d ago
  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.
  - deleted 13d ago
    [deleted]
  - wat10000 13d ago
    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.
  - bena 13d ago
    That's exactly what happens. 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.
  - coldtea 13d ago
    That's exactly the case. Overall average life expenctancy as adult didn't change much from older times - about 15 years more.
IDidntMakeIt 13d ago
I died at age 2 of Typhoid Fever. Modern take on Oregon Trail vibes I like it
lbriner 13d ago
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.
- WillAdams 13d ago
  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_.
garyrob 13d ago
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). https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-be-born/ https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-b...
- Planktonne 13d ago
  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.
  - garyrob 13d ago
    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.
- dudul 13d ago
  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.
  - garyrob 13d ago
    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.
BeetleB 13d ago
Leading cause of death: dysentry Had to laugh.
bentt 13d ago
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)
- pavel_lishin 13d ago
  > 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.
  - AnimalMuppet 13d ago
    In fact, there was a time when the internet was mostly interesting side projects, if you go back far enough (the mid 1990s, say).
    - bentt 13d ago
      It’s true. It feels like that age may be revisiting us. Makes me happy to see stuff like this which isn’t upselling something.
      - BubbleRings 13d ago
        Yes indeed. What do we know about how this was created and how long it took? Before I look into it, I’m going to guess: One experienced developer with extensive anthropology experience, probably a PhD, working with Claude Code and Claude Cowork, full time over a two month period. Or somebody with limited dev experience over four months. Anyway, sad that all the first comments were complaints… what a wonderful project!
spullara 13d ago
I think graph being log makes it a little hard to understand that the median birth year was around 2000 years ago. On the graph that is in the flat part but the flat part was a really, really long time.
WarmWash 13d ago
Has anyone managed to roll a life later than ~600CE?
- nico 13d ago
  1816 CE: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-1635780274-1059341451#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...
- joshuaissac 13d ago
  I got 1951: https://anyhumanever.com/life/982671145-1647234921-653406957-874617695#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/982671145-1647234921-653406957...
- beardyw 13d ago
  You can chose.
- chrisfosterelli 13d ago
  1956 CE: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1409269740-1599827252-312637596-1164034374#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/1409269740-1599827252-31263759...
- magneticnorth 13d ago
  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.
  - wat10000 13d ago
    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..
- Insanity 13d ago
  1980CE, Nile Valley, died at 68 from cardiovascular disease.
gfiorav 13d ago
Spot checked a life from 1990s in the Iberian peninsula and it cites the population at 72 million people. Off by quite a bit. Pretty cool regardless!
beardyw 13d ago
Hug of death I think. Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.
- karim79 13d ago
  Works but it's slow to load up.
scottmcmac 13d ago
"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...
- spullara 13d ago
  All babies were exclusively breastfed in 3064 BCE.
- bena 13d ago
  I died at 1 in Mesopotamia in 3966 BCE of dysentery.
- hliyan 13d ago
  Strangely, I too, died in the Korean Peninsula at 8 months old, but circa 6000 BCE.
  - coldtea 13d ago
    Hmm, I was at the Korean Penisula too. How representatively random is this thing?
    - AnnikaL 13d ago
      I died of malaria at age 1 in the West African Sahel!
    - ajmurmann 13d ago
      I died at age 36 of a workplace accident in the Yangtze delta in the year 700
- deleted 13d ago
  [deleted]
- Sharlin 13d ago
  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").
nico 13d ago
It seems like the server might be overwhelmed 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/1323665477-1682995380-1635780274-1059341451#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...
jimmyjazz14 13d ago
Really puts the marvels of modern life into perspective, most people did not live long or happy lives for much of human history.
xiaoyu2006 13d ago
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.
- thoman23 13d ago
  > instead of random parasites nowadays Maybe MAHA will bring this back, like they did measles.
  - saturn8601 13d ago
    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.
  - elteto 13d ago
    This will mostly self-correct. Nature really doesn’t give a fuck about ideology. Just vaccinate yourself and your kids and listen to the advice of real doctors.
- Perz1val 13d ago
  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
chronolitus 13d ago
Oh nice! If you liked it, you might like: yourlifeunderrome.com
bpodgursky 13d ago
> 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.
mallory854 13d ago
This is awesome. I love seeing how humans have evolved into what we are today.
- IAmBroom 12d ago
  Evolution doesn't really play into much of this. It's cultural and technological progress - medicine, hygiene, improvements in agriculture...
mallory854 13d ago
boy, born in the Guinea Coast in 211,966 BCE. Died from an accident at age 40.
magneticnorth 13d ago
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.
- mannykannot 13d ago
  I guess you are right, but it makes it more interesting if the picks are not almost all from the recent past. On the other hand, I would also guess that spreading the picks evenly across the time range might result in many being from times with little data to differentiate them.
  - benatkin 13d ago
    It makes the premise of the entire site flawed, though. And it defeats the purpose of the convenient button provided to redraw a year. That is what should allow you to find a pick that might be more interesting, rather than messing up the randomness promised by the site and the HN title.
- wat10000 13d ago
  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.
  - riazrizvi 13d ago
    Okay step away from the waving hands and read the source material.
    - wat10000 13d ago
      Could you be a little more specific? https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/ 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?
grich7642 13d ago
"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.
hnmuuatsno 13d ago
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deleted 13d ago
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drhagen 13d ago
Before clicking, I said to myself "Indian peasant". > You have drawn a girl, born in the Ganges Plain in 1628 CE. > She was born, married at 16, lost her mother at 19, was orphaned at 30, had 8 children, and died at 39 of pneumonic plague, with 6 surviving children. Nailed it. Though in retrospect, I drew really well. It would have been safer to guess "toddler death".
- magneticnorth 13d ago
  My first random selection lived to age 68! I felt very lucky, and then that put my modern life into interesting perspective.
_air 13d ago
It's funny to pick a birth year from our era and think of how history will represent us: Martha was born in the countryside near Short Pump, in 1993 CE. Her village holds about 300 people. She makes her home in a timber-framed detached house. Martha has neither brothers nor sisters. She eats mostly wheat bread and maize, pork and dairy, and potatoes and garden vegetables, with apples in season, and coffee, soft drinks and snack foods too. She knows her letters. Her height is about 171 cm (5 ft 7 in).
- xattt 13d ago
  An “Eastern Woodlands” person born 1989 is recorded to have experienced a “volcanic winter” and “dimmed sky” at age 2 as a result of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. This is an… interesting contextualization. I am wondering how many historical situations are sexed up to be something significant, yet were nothing to write home about in the moment. All it took was a historian with an active imagination to bring it to the forefront.
iJohnDoe 13d ago
Most likely died of smallpox... Great, let's bring back smallpox and measles because the US elected officials are too dumb or genuinely want to destroy the world.
sph 13d ago
Since this website has information about how many children born per woman, and how many survive on average, I would like to see a tool that, given a particular person, can estimate how many people today are their genetic descendant.
isoprophlex 13d ago
Everyone keeps dying way too young :(
nickdirienzo 13d ago
This is really neat. It would be interesting to talk with the character generated.
- hajjajajjaa 13d ago
  [dead]
richhwang 13d ago
Love it!
anduril22 13d ago
This is super cool
heyitsmedotjayb 13d ago
[flagged]
- culi 13d ago
  Herodotus used the term Palaistine in his work The Histories in the 5th century BCE. The earliest written record of the word "Judea" is from extra-biblical writings from 733 BCE. The most "official" designation was arguably when the Roman's designated Syria Palaestina in 135 CE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine
zeristor 13d ago
Roy: A Life from Ricky and Morty comes to mind. Extra points if you can take your example life off grid. https://youtube.com/shorts/CssbcJ44dos https://youtube.com/shorts/CssbcJ44dos
estetlinus 13d ago
Very nice idea! I think some number are of by a magnitude (DIED BEFORE AGE 5: 4%, for Scandinavium in 1990 - according to UN it’s ~0.6%).
aghilmort 13d ago
damn, well done og/goat demo of synthetic data gen only nit is 'draw' button often below the fold
visiondude 13d ago
“He was born and died at 1 of dysentery.“ - lucky me
jorisboris 13d ago
My daughter is four. I drew a boy who lived 11000 years ago in Mexico. His longest travel was a half day walk carried by his family to a nearby foraging ground. He died at 4 from a zoonotic fever. Both parents outlived him. It’s random, it’s ai generated. Makes me appreciate life nevertheless.
- pteraspidomorph 13d ago
  I drew Vuk,a boy who lived in the 13th century Balkans. He died at 2. His dad was already gone. According to the statistics the life expectancy at birth for him was around 50%. I suspect a lot of our random people would have died early, if they were born before the 19th or 20th century...
  - blaze33 13d ago
    Whole years! You'll are so lucky! The reincarnation roulette gave me this: 49 BCE, he lived 1 month, dying of dysentery. I guess I'll stop complaining about my life then...
    - Exoristos 13d ago
      He could hardly complain about his, as he didn't have one.
  - IAmBroom 12d ago
    The Jewish faith traditionally waits to name the baby until a few days or weeks have passed (apparently varying by gender). I suspect this somewhat delayed recognition of the child is meant to gently, if slightly, address the horrifying reality of high infant mortality in pre-modern days.
- zabriel_goss 13d ago
  I had a similar sensation. I often think about a friend of mine who mentioned, in passing, a sense of having won the lottery of life for being born in this day and age, in a first-world country
- 13d ago
lovasoa 13d ago
In 429 CE, Devadatta was born on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Hyderabad. His hamlet was home to about 100 people. Among six children, he was the second. Devadatta died of neonatal tetanus or sepsis within days of birth. Hardcore
raver1975 13d ago
"You have died of dysentery."
tintor 13d ago
My first draw: "He died of dysentery in the first days of life. His body was laid in a stone cist or a great urn beneath a ring of boulders, with iron tools and black-and-red pots."
ajjahs 13d ago
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lIl-IIIl 13d ago
I had this idea for forever. Thank you for making it!
ungovernableCat 13d ago
The life template kinda breaks down if you land in a modern era which makes me think it's probably equally as silly sounding to apply it to a hypothetical life from 10k years ago. But I guess it's inevitable when you try to paint individual lives through pure statistics.
byako 13d ago
rolled a random human and got... myself?? statistically wild. turns out i'm just a guy. weirdly humbling
btbuildem 13d ago
I drew one that died as a newborn, 960BCE, then another that lived a long long life! https://anyhumanever.com/life/2139137610-1449878292-2136097810-226666268#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/2139137610-1449878292-21360978...
- BubbleRings 13d ago
  Ooh I like that it creates a URL that you can share that points to a particular generated human. Nice feature devs!
boutell 13d ago
Very moving and a little hard.
spongebobism 13d ago
> You have drawn a boy, born in the Russian Plain in 3843 BCE. He probably spoke something close to proto-Indo-European
imglorp 13d ago
This reminded me about the US nutters advocating return to the "way things were": they would do well to consider life expectancy. My draw from 1881 Mississippi would max out at 36.
WaitButHow 13d ago
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lbreakjai 13d ago
"You have drawn a boy, born in the Paris Basin in 1970 CE." Of all human history, it had to pick something off by 20 years and 200km.
skizm 13d ago
Died at 2 of dysentery. What is this, the Oregon trail?
mateioo7 13d ago
Shameless plug, but related, is the Watsi platform[1] I discovered a few months ago through another HN user. You can read the story of less fortunate but alive people and how much need there is in the world for one another. The founder's talk[2], Chase Adam, which made me a supporter, is a must-see. I guess it's time to rewatch it.. [1] https://watsi.org/ https://watsi.org/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlT3UhC7NwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlT3UhC7NwQ
no_multitudes 13d ago
I 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-hub. It is a broad theory of human evolution that doesn't appear to mention the Yangtze Basin or China. Another citation is to "[RH109] Model-supplied gap-fill (Claude Fable 5 and Claude Opus 5, 2026-08-05). Bounds and items written to close gaps no dataset we hold covers. Not a published work: see each row's `basis` for its stated reason. (2026)" -- this is an interesting way to describe having an LLM hallucinate something for you. Please stop making vibe-coded websites -- it is not useful to provide incorrect facts. You are polluting the commons with garbage.
- zamadatix 13d ago
  There are plenty of problems with the site but that some stats like marriage do not count dead newborns as unwed instead of invalid for the stat is not really one of them.
  - no_multitudes 13d ago
    What age of death discounts someone as counting towards the marriage percentage? If a human made the website, there would be an answer to this question. That answer might not be published and might vary between datasets, but it would exist. In this case there is no answer, because the percentage is just made up by the LLM. There is no methodology. Your answer is inappropriately anthropomorphizing the LLM by imputing a methodology onto its "data collection" process.
    - zamadatix 13d ago
      No anthropomorphization was required, I just looked at one of the sources on that section of the page and saw the statistic did not involve the number of newborns and so figured myself those facts could indeed be simultaneously true. How do I know the methods described in the source were correctly used here? I don't, but I also wouldn't know that based on whether or not a human wrote the webapp. I'd know that by checking the method applied on the backend matches that of the source. If it does, it doesn't matter if it was generated by using every 17th letter of the dictionary - it'd either align or not.
trnvll 13d ago
"At 79, she died of a respiratory infection. She left 18 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren behind." What are the odds of 79. Must've been in the very top percentile
eterevsky 13d ago
I drew "girl, born in the Balkans in 3208 BCE", which I find super remarkable since this fits the place and time for a relatively small population of people who spoke Proto-Indo-European as their native language.
lr4444lr 13d ago
Her farthest journey was a day's walk, to a nearby market town. I think this is what boggles my mind most about antiquity: the vast majority of people rarely ventured much past where they were born (unless they did a likely once in a lifetime religious pilgrimage which took the better part of a year). Seeing as most other people didn't venture further either, you really got to know the people around you very well. Common life limitations simply precluded much travel. The only foreigners you saw were either invading hordes, or traders who were constantly on the road.
- Exoristos 13d ago
  There were and have always been trading and other exchanges all over the world. The Egtved girl was traveling from north to central Germany, probably for marriage. Now, if we mean most people did not do this, then sure. But there's a persistent idea that ancient cultures were not in contact with each other, and this is largely disproven.
  - j16sdiz 13d ago
    It is fascinating that both of these are equality true in the ancient world: 1. Most of the population never leave their city or town of birth. 2. Some people went on multi-year pilgrim, voyage, or trading route. Even multiple time in their life.
- autumnstwilight 13d ago
  My grandmother told a story about meeting an elderly female relative in Kingston, Tasmania, soon after my grandparents had got their first car. After visiting, they said they were now going back to the city (Hobart), and the old lady said, "Oh, how lovely, I've never been!" My grandmother reported, "And I should have told her 'get in the car then!', because she died not too long after." Kingston is 13 kilometers from Hobart.
- Matumio 13d ago
  I think it's the other way around. Without the cultural norms around impersonal markets, you have to rely on your extended family network or clan for everything, because there is no trust otherwise. This is what keeps you from traveling. If you were trying to trade with a far-away stranger, why should they not just rob you instead? Nobody is around to punish. And for all they know, you were just as likely trying to poison them rather than make a fair trade.
janalsncm 13d ago
I think this would be cool if it actually worked as intended. This simulation doesn’t even draw birth years correctly. The right way would be to bucket people by something like 1 million. Everyone in the bucket has the same sex, birth year range, and location range. Then draw a bucket uniformly and infer the details.
jonorsi 13d ago
This is at both times super cool as a project at what AI can do, while also being extremely dubious and misleading about how accurate any of this data is, hallucinated or not.
- backlava12 13d ago
  I mean it's only cool if it is actually real data that we can draw interesting and meaningful insights from. This is all just made up nonsense.
aronowb14 13d ago
I drew a woman from 500 BCE in the ganges... but lived to 75?
noir_lord 13d ago
> She was born and died at 2 of bubonic plague. Yeah that does accurately sum up the 15th century. Still slop coded bollocks though.
azkalam 13d ago
I would like to see a life expectancy number that excludes deaths in childhood. A frequency distribution of life span for those born in year X would be a helpful visual.
jrootabega 13d ago
I feel sorry for the person who draws their exact real-life stats, but dying this year.
asdf333 13d ago
i love this. it really shows you someone else's perspective. had you drawn a different lot in life things would be very different. imo it is a good example of Rawl's veil of ignorance thought experiment. How would you design the world if you will be randomly dropped into any position anywhere on earth. well done.
bitwize 13d ago
Interesting. It rolls a few dice and presents a snapshot of someone who might plausibly have lived at a random place and time. Mine was a girl who lived on the Deccan Plateau in India, and died at six of tuberculosis.
Lerc 13d ago
Just my luck. 503CE, dead at six months from smallpox.
pkilgore 13d ago
This site is pure slop?
- backlava12 13d ago
  Yeah I'm kinda baffled by all the praise this is getting. It's like I live in a different reality.
user1338 13d ago
This is what I got: Seojun - Seojun is not a real person. But his life story is created from the statistical reality of the Korean Peninsula in 1999 CE. In 1999 CE, Seojun was born in the countryside near Pongch’ŏn-ŭp. His village is home to about 250 people. Among four children, he was the fourth. He eats largely rice, soybean paste and tofu, dried fish and shellfish, and pickled cabbage and radish, with persimmon and jujube in season, and tea as well. He knows how to read and write. Seojun stands about 167 cm tall (5 ft 6 in). --- if it's not obvious why this is problematic and extremely offensive I don't know what I can say to you. You're talking about GenZ who has access to tiktok and food delivery apps as if you're talking about someone from Joseon dynasty from hundreds of years ago. No one's favorite food is rice and soybean paste. He knows how to read and write and sky is blue.
- ntSean 13d ago
  It doesn’t say his favorite food is anything? Have you misread this and decided to take offense?
- boodleboodle 13d ago
  I think this app conflates ingredients with actual food. From the listed food the person probably eats 된장찌개 but the ingredients are listed one by one
- WelkinFolk 13d ago
  Not everyone from everywhere has had food delivery apps all their lifetimes, even if they're GenZ
mcmcmc 13d ago
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.
BobbyTables2 13d ago
I died of dysentery shortly after being born. Makes Oregon Trail seem easy…
holoduke 13d ago
I found it very unrealistic that my girl from 2000bc somewhere in china decided to divorce after 3 years of marriage when she was 23.
digitallogic 13d ago
> 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.
aetherspawn 13d ago
> He was born, lost his father at 5, and died at 7 of malnutrition. Yikes
morpheos137 13d ago
I am almost certain this is miscoded. I drew about 20 lives and I think 17 of them were before 1500. Meanwhile the vast majority of the integral of population over time is right of 1500.
mywittyname 13d ago
I died of dysentery shortly after birth. So basically, Oregon Trail - Ancient Edition.
sobellian 13d ago
It seems that this conflates the leading causes of death in $BIRTH_YEAR with the leading causes of death for someone born in $BIRTH_YEAR?
morpheos137 13d ago
This site is a fantastic demonstration of what crap AI is when operated by nit wits. Notably the drawing is not in line with the actual population distribution over time. Pre 1500 years are vastly over represented. If the point is draw a random year without regard to population distribution then the site is pretty pathetic. I would be embarrassed to post this on HN.
Buttons840 13d ago
I drew a man who lived to 80 in 47,000 BCE. Beat that!
jahnu 13d ago
Absolute trash. No more worthwhile than the AI slop inaccurate copies of actually well made educational videos on YouTube. Why do we accept this crap?
- backlava12 13d ago
  And the majority of the comments are eating it up. Hackernews is cooked. Welcome to the future I guess.
ghastmaster 13d ago
The data will be much clearer in the future, once all of our data has been mined. We create so much personal media and collected data that some point in the future when one entity has loaded that, a crazy real autobiography could be created.
pictureofabear 13d ago
The more details this gives, the less likely it is that the story is true. Since the output is a highly detailed story, the statistical reality of this site is that's complete bullshit.
- Wowfunhappy 13d ago
  The website is quite clear that the stories are made up based on statistical likelihood, so that part didn't bother me at all. It's a cool way to explore the statistics. What bothers me is that the statistics themselves are bad.
minimaxa 13d ago
I think it would be more interesting if you entered your own real data and then the LLM gave you statistics based on that info on where you are on your own life path based on consensus data.
joshdavham 13d ago
Thanks for making this! This was super fascinating and the type of thing I love seeing on HN!
doginasuit 13d ago
This 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.
- backlava12 13d ago
  Well, its just AI-generated nonsense, so the story is just going to be the same slop you could generate with ChatGPT or whatever.
  - doginasuit 13d ago
    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.
    - backlava12 12d ago
      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.
- m_vPoints 12d ago
  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
- roywiggins 12d ago
  A similar site, also LLM-assisted, that does a better and more evocative job of composing stories. https://random-lives.github.io/random-lives/ https://random-lives.github.io/random-lives/
anyhumanever 13d ago
Creator here (proof https://anyhumanever.com/verify 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 assembling the data in a mostly non-hallucinogenic way. More on that below. Q: What's up with the inaccuracies? A: There are definitely inaccuracies. One of this big issues is that the data we have (mostly academic historical sources) only exist at a certain level of granularity, and attempting to "stretch" statistics is fundamentally error-prone. Different data sets overlap and disagree, and there are genuine unknowns. There's also a fundamental issue with using independent probabilities that should be conditional. For instance, x% of people died before 15, and y% in that same population died in an accident. Combining these statistics to get an estimate of children who died by accident involves coming up with a reasonable distribution of accidents by age, which is guesswork for a given historical time/place. In all, I'm shooting for mostly accurate given patchwork statistics, and a lot of filling in blanks in a reasonable way. BTW, in order to test the accuracy of stories, I generated a few hundred random stories and created nit-picking "History teacher" agents to evaluate each for accuracy, then aggregated and addressed issues by frequency. It would have been hard to come anywhere close to that level of scrutiny without AI on tap. It's also why I'm so sure that there are still inaccuracies to be found. I was also able to point Claude at comments here, aggregate issues and fix them (with my ok), which means that the issues reported here should be mostly fixed. Q: Do you cite sources? A: I pushed pretty hard on trying to cite all sources, being as open as possible about where data is coming from. Each element of the story links to its source, and the sources page lists all the sources used, included the lines in each table that come from that source. For me, this was one of the interesting bits of fallout from the project. How should we source well in the age of AI? I wound up making a distinction between actual downloaded data (from a real publisher), vs what AI "claims" is accurate, citing a source, vs what AI claims to be true, and seems reasonable, but Claude can't cite a source, making it smell funny. In the age of AI-flavored truthiness, it's important to push hard on being able to trace all claims down to their primary sources. One more note: the biggest source of inaccuracy is the AI-generated images. Comments run about 2:1 in favor of ditching them, but a lot of people really like the idea of adding humanity to a story by supplying a human face, even if AI-image gen insists on dressing the guy from 1375BCE in a snappy crew-neck tee.
backlava12 13d ago
Nearly 500 upvotes for something that is so very obviously just LLM slop. I think Hackernews is just totally cooked at this point. Whatever discernment the hackernews crowd once had is gone.
backlava12 13d ago
I will say this with all honesty and sincerity to everyone who interacted with this site: If you didn't realize this was just LLM-generated nonsense within the first 45-60 seconds of using it, it's completely and unequivocally over for you. Your lack of discernment will lead to you being jerked around by AI-generated slop for the rest of your life.
ma2kx 13d ago
Nice, but would be even nicer if we saw such ideas in games.
jemmyw 13d ago
> The household he was born into lived on roughly $3.04 a day per person in today's money Go back not even that far and money comparisons like this make no sense. A family subsistence farming doesn't have the same kind of relationship we do with money. Also they couldn't really go down the shops. Existence was in the edge for everyone, even the wealthy. The other problem I see is that it's seems to pick a random time before a random location. So this will favour the times when there were far fewer people. No way around this, you either end up picking mostly near modern times because that's when the bulk of the people lived, or people further back in time who are pretty disconnected from our modern society.
krige 13d ago
The randomness is rather amusing in a dark way. I pulled an Ivan in a central Polish city. This is a bit like placing a Marceau near Berlin.
technick 13d ago
More AI Slop... I drew two different characters. One who got married after dying of dysentery and another who was orphaned at the age of 34.
3371 13d ago
"He was born, lost his father at 13, was orphaned at 20, had 4 children, and died at 90 of a parasitic infection, with 3 surviving children, 10 grandchildren, and 15 great-grandchildren." This 3727 BCE Korean boy died at 90.
Al-Khwarizmi 13d ago
If you like the idea but are disappointed by the blatant errors in this vibe-coded website, there was a video game saga called Real Lives which was basically the same idea, except only for contemporary people (but you would still draw an area of the world, etc. from realistic probability distributions), and it was done right. You could make some life decisions (it wasn't purely contemplative) but much of the time you would die as a child of things we don't even know in the first world, like schistosomiasis, and not even be old enough to make any decision. Or you would make one or two, but due to being in an unfavorable environment without opportunities none of the options would improve your life much. Very sobering. I remember playing Real Lives 2004 (or maybe 2007) and 2010, both good. I think there are later versions but I had heard they had changed philosophy somehow and some people weren't satisfied (they said they went overboard with educational elements on top of the raw life simulation), so I can't vouch for those. I don't know if 2010 would be easy to play in today's computers. Now I'm curious, I might try for old times' sake. A version with the whole history of humanity, like what htis website aims to be but fails, would be amazing if it existed.
LtWorf 13d ago
> Giuseppe eats mostly polenta, pork, beans and cheese, and greens and onions, with grapes, figs, and olives in season, and wine alongside. An italian, born in the 80s, and no mention of pasta in his diet?
namenotrequired 13d ago
Very similar to: https://random-lives.github.io/random-lives/ https://random-lives.github.io/random-lives/
- samth 12d ago
  Random Lives seems like it was much less vibe coded and did a better job.
amelius 13d ago
I think the sampler is broken. It gives me outcomes in the thin tail far too often.
dozerly 13d ago
This is vibe coded slop
mayv 13d ago
Ivan was born in 1922CE in Ukraine. He ate mushrooms for fruit. Six famines and a volcanic eruption happened in his lifetime. He died at 59 from a stroke. It's just going to skip over the fact he would have been a young adult during the Second World War? That event isn't as important as a faraway volcanic eruption to mention? Such useless AI slop. https://anyhumanever.com/life/1025135085-1150629022-1133496282-2068353748#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/1025135085-1150629022-11334962...
- rabarbra 12d ago
  "mushrooms for fruit" - how do you prepare mushrooms to replace fruits??
may_ilands 12d ago
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deleted 12d ago
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donatj 12d ago
The person I pulled is from 42,000 BCE. The map shows a densely populated region in South America. I'm pretty sure that goes against mainstream archeological evidence which says Humans arrived in the Americas 15,000-30,000 years ago.
0xDEAFBEAD 12d ago
If you want the non-vibecoded version of this, try the Real Lives software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Lives_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Lives_(video_game) https://archive.org/details/reallives2007-interactivelifesimulationsoftware2007/PaperFront.PNG https://archive.org/details/reallives2007-interactivelifesim...
MetroWind 12d ago
I was a Japanese boy who died at 5 month because of diarrhea.
softwaredoug 12d ago
Drawing these random unrecorded lives makes me think a lot of Train Dreams a movie/book about a kind of unremarkable, random guy in the Northwest who sits witnessing history, dying with nobody remembering him.
mathieu_aithos 12d ago
Elon Musk said that (without him ;)) world demography gone a decline, as it is in Japan or Italy. If radical right political parties arrive in Europe for exemple, are women gone a make children again? Or are we going to massively clone ourselves to conquer other planets? Or finally let humanity slowing disappear letting robots replacing them definitively ? What do you think?
BLACKCRAB 12d ago
[dead]
LittleBox 11d ago
I drew an east coast girl born in 2006 and married at the agr of 17.

662 points by thinkingemote 13d ago

2OEH8eoCRo0 13d ago

Very cool. Reads like a Dwarf Fortress history. For those that don't play, every creature in the game has a life story.

ButlerianJihad 12d ago
I was reminded of reading high score lists/YASD from nethack. https://www.alt.org/nethack/topdeaths.html https://www.alt.org/nethack/topdeaths.html

Waterluvian 13d ago

15,370 BCE feels like a lottery roll. I doubt I’ll live long. Edit: oh it’s not weighed by population? I was expecting 99% of rolls to be in recent times.

ensocode 13d ago

I tried drawing my life by entering my birth year and location, and it was surprisingly accurate :-D Which, I suppose, says absolutely nothing about the accuracy of the birth years.

glenstein 13d ago

Now this is fun vibe coding. 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. Edit: Obviously progress isn't inevitable, and at any point in time you can be unlucky. But it does seem like, for most points in history, you would rather be you, in your version of the present, than a randomly rolled person from any prior point of history leading up to your moment. So most of the time, anyone playing this would feel more lucky to be themselves than any of the options they would have to roll for. Maybe if a version of this was offered to people 10,000 years from now they would say "crap, I rolled 2026". Edit 2: I think the death hug might have got it.

retube 13d ago
I died within 2 days on my first roll. made it to 8 months on my second
- brabel 13d ago
  I was so lucky! One lived to 35 in the Paris basin a few thousand years ago, the other lived to 25 in China, died in 1945. Both were married and left living children!
  - retube 7d ago
    an even more interesting version of this is if it covered all life/organisms
The_Blade 13d ago
on my 6th only the first roll counts roll, i got a boy born near Nairobi in 36,112 BCE that lived to 70 probably like 5% of humanity has his genes now. that was fun vibe coding

pavel_lishin 13d ago

This could be pretty great for a play through of Thousand Year Old Vampire, a pretty terrific journaling game: https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/ https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/ And I suppose other RPGs, too, especially ones that are more story-than-dice driven, and/or set in the "real" world.

gilleain 13d ago
This can be great - Tom from the Yogscast has run a few of these, and they can get pretty wild. It's a simple premise but works well.

guybedo 13d ago

we are probably living inside a more advanced version of this game right now. Somebody, somewhere, somewhen rolled the dice and here we are.

smarf 13d ago

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

john_strinlai 13d ago

>You have drawn a boy, born in the Korean Peninsula in 3394 BCE >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.

glenstein 13d ago
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.
- deleted 13d ago
  [deleted]
- wat10000 13d ago
  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.
- bena 13d ago
  That's exactly what happens. 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.
- coldtea 13d ago
  That's exactly the case. Overall average life expenctancy as adult didn't change much from older times - about 15 years more.

IDidntMakeIt 13d ago

I died at age 2 of Typhoid Fever. Modern take on Oregon Trail vibes I like it

lbriner 13d ago

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.

WillAdams 13d ago
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_.

garyrob 13d ago

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). https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-be-born/ https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-b...

Planktonne 13d ago
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.
- garyrob 13d ago
  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.
dudul 13d ago
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.
- garyrob 13d ago
  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.

BeetleB 13d ago

Leading cause of death: dysentry Had to laugh.

bentt 13d ago

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)

pavel_lishin 13d ago
> 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.
- AnimalMuppet 13d ago
  In fact, there was a time when the internet was mostly interesting side projects, if you go back far enough (the mid 1990s, say).
  - bentt 13d ago
    It’s true. It feels like that age may be revisiting us. Makes me happy to see stuff like this which isn’t upselling something.
    - BubbleRings 13d ago
      Yes indeed. What do we know about how this was created and how long it took? Before I look into it, I’m going to guess: One experienced developer with extensive anthropology experience, probably a PhD, working with Claude Code and Claude Cowork, full time over a two month period. Or somebody with limited dev experience over four months. Anyway, sad that all the first comments were complaints… what a wonderful project!

spullara 13d ago

I think graph being log makes it a little hard to understand that the median birth year was around 2000 years ago. On the graph that is in the flat part but the flat part was a really, really long time.

WarmWash 13d ago

Has anyone managed to roll a life later than ~600CE?

nico 13d ago
1816 CE: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-1635780274-1059341451#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...
joshuaissac 13d ago
I got 1951: https://anyhumanever.com/life/982671145-1647234921-653406957-874617695#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/982671145-1647234921-653406957...
beardyw 13d ago
You can chose.
chrisfosterelli 13d ago
1956 CE: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1409269740-1599827252-312637596-1164034374#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/1409269740-1599827252-31263759...
magneticnorth 13d ago
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.
- wat10000 13d ago
  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..
Insanity 13d ago
1980CE, Nile Valley, died at 68 from cardiovascular disease.

gfiorav 13d ago

Spot checked a life from 1990s in the Iberian peninsula and it cites the population at 72 million people. Off by quite a bit. Pretty cool regardless!

beardyw 13d ago

Hug of death I think. Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.

karim79 13d ago
Works but it's slow to load up.

scottmcmac 13d ago

"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...

spullara 13d ago
All babies were exclusively breastfed in 3064 BCE.
bena 13d ago
I died at 1 in Mesopotamia in 3966 BCE of dysentery.
hliyan 13d ago
Strangely, I too, died in the Korean Peninsula at 8 months old, but circa 6000 BCE.
- coldtea 13d ago
  Hmm, I was at the Korean Penisula too. How representatively random is this thing?
  - AnnikaL 13d ago
    I died of malaria at age 1 in the West African Sahel!
  - ajmurmann 13d ago
    I died at age 36 of a workplace accident in the Yangtze delta in the year 700
deleted 13d ago
[deleted]
Sharlin 13d ago
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").

nico 13d ago

It seems like the server might be overwhelmed 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/1323665477-1682995380-1635780274-1059341451#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...

jimmyjazz14 13d ago

Really puts the marvels of modern life into perspective, most people did not live long or happy lives for much of human history.

xiaoyu2006 13d ago

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.

thoman23 13d ago
> instead of random parasites nowadays Maybe MAHA will bring this back, like they did measles.
- saturn8601 13d ago
  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.
- elteto 13d ago
  This will mostly self-correct. Nature really doesn’t give a fuck about ideology. Just vaccinate yourself and your kids and listen to the advice of real doctors.
Perz1val 13d ago
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

chronolitus 13d ago

Oh nice! If you liked it, you might like: yourlifeunderrome.com

bpodgursky 13d ago

> 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.

mallory854 13d ago

This is awesome. I love seeing how humans have evolved into what we are today.

IAmBroom 12d ago
Evolution doesn't really play into much of this. It's cultural and technological progress - medicine, hygiene, improvements in agriculture...

mallory854 13d ago

boy, born in the Guinea Coast in 211,966 BCE. Died from an accident at age 40.

magneticnorth 13d ago

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.

mannykannot 13d ago
I guess you are right, but it makes it more interesting if the picks are not almost all from the recent past. On the other hand, I would also guess that spreading the picks evenly across the time range might result in many being from times with little data to differentiate them.
- benatkin 13d ago
  It makes the premise of the entire site flawed, though. And it defeats the purpose of the convenient button provided to redraw a year. That is what should allow you to find a pick that might be more interesting, rather than messing up the randomness promised by the site and the HN title.
wat10000 13d ago
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.
- riazrizvi 13d ago
  Okay step away from the waving hands and read the source material.
  - wat10000 13d ago
    Could you be a little more specific? https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/ 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?

grich7642 13d ago

"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.

hnmuuatsno 13d ago

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deleted 13d ago

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drhagen 13d ago

Before clicking, I said to myself "Indian peasant". > You have drawn a girl, born in the Ganges Plain in 1628 CE. > She was born, married at 16, lost her mother at 19, was orphaned at 30, had 8 children, and died at 39 of pneumonic plague, with 6 surviving children. Nailed it. Though in retrospect, I drew really well. It would have been safer to guess "toddler death".

magneticnorth 13d ago
My first random selection lived to age 68! I felt very lucky, and then that put my modern life into interesting perspective.

_air 13d ago

It's funny to pick a birth year from our era and think of how history will represent us: Martha was born in the countryside near Short Pump, in 1993 CE. Her village holds about 300 people. She makes her home in a timber-framed detached house. Martha has neither brothers nor sisters. She eats mostly wheat bread and maize, pork and dairy, and potatoes and garden vegetables, with apples in season, and coffee, soft drinks and snack foods too. She knows her letters. Her height is about 171 cm (5 ft 7 in).

xattt 13d ago
An “Eastern Woodlands” person born 1989 is recorded to have experienced a “volcanic winter” and “dimmed sky” at age 2 as a result of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. This is an… interesting contextualization. I am wondering how many historical situations are sexed up to be something significant, yet were nothing to write home about in the moment. All it took was a historian with an active imagination to bring it to the forefront.

iJohnDoe 13d ago

Most likely died of smallpox... Great, let's bring back smallpox and measles because the US elected officials are too dumb or genuinely want to destroy the world.

sph 13d ago

Since this website has information about how many children born per woman, and how many survive on average, I would like to see a tool that, given a particular person, can estimate how many people today are their genetic descendant.

isoprophlex 13d ago

Everyone keeps dying way too young :(

nickdirienzo 13d ago

This is really neat. It would be interesting to talk with the character generated.

hajjajajjaa 13d ago
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richhwang 13d ago

Love it!

anduril22 13d ago

This is super cool

heyitsmedotjayb 13d ago

[flagged]

culi 13d ago
Herodotus used the term Palaistine in his work The Histories in the 5th century BCE. The earliest written record of the word "Judea" is from extra-biblical writings from 733 BCE. The most "official" designation was arguably when the Roman's designated Syria Palaestina in 135 CE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine

zeristor 13d ago

Roy: A Life from Ricky and Morty comes to mind. Extra points if you can take your example life off grid. https://youtube.com/shorts/CssbcJ44dos https://youtube.com/shorts/CssbcJ44dos

estetlinus 13d ago

Very nice idea! I think some number are of by a magnitude (DIED BEFORE AGE 5: 4%, for Scandinavium in 1990 - according to UN it’s ~0.6%).

aghilmort 13d ago

damn, well done og/goat demo of synthetic data gen only nit is 'draw' button often below the fold

visiondude 13d ago

“He was born and died at 1 of dysentery.“ - lucky me

jorisboris 13d ago

My daughter is four. I drew a boy who lived 11000 years ago in Mexico. His longest travel was a half day walk carried by his family to a nearby foraging ground. He died at 4 from a zoonotic fever. Both parents outlived him. It’s random, it’s ai generated. Makes me appreciate life nevertheless.

pteraspidomorph 13d ago
I drew Vuk,a boy who lived in the 13th century Balkans. He died at 2. His dad was already gone. According to the statistics the life expectancy at birth for him was around 50%. I suspect a lot of our random people would have died early, if they were born before the 19th or 20th century...
- blaze33 13d ago
  Whole years! You'll are so lucky! The reincarnation roulette gave me this: 49 BCE, he lived 1 month, dying of dysentery. I guess I'll stop complaining about my life then...
  - Exoristos 13d ago
    He could hardly complain about his, as he didn't have one.
- IAmBroom 12d ago
  The Jewish faith traditionally waits to name the baby until a few days or weeks have passed (apparently varying by gender). I suspect this somewhat delayed recognition of the child is meant to gently, if slightly, address the horrifying reality of high infant mortality in pre-modern days.
zabriel_goss 13d ago
I had a similar sensation. I often think about a friend of mine who mentioned, in passing, a sense of having won the lottery of life for being born in this day and age, in a first-world country
13d ago

lovasoa 13d ago

In 429 CE, Devadatta was born on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Hyderabad. His hamlet was home to about 100 people. Among six children, he was the second. Devadatta died of neonatal tetanus or sepsis within days of birth. Hardcore

raver1975 13d ago

"You have died of dysentery."

tintor 13d ago

My first draw: "He died of dysentery in the first days of life. His body was laid in a stone cist or a great urn beneath a ring of boulders, with iron tools and black-and-red pots."

ajjahs 13d ago

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lIl-IIIl 13d ago

I had this idea for forever. Thank you for making it!

ungovernableCat 13d ago

The life template kinda breaks down if you land in a modern era which makes me think it's probably equally as silly sounding to apply it to a hypothetical life from 10k years ago. But I guess it's inevitable when you try to paint individual lives through pure statistics.

byako 13d ago

rolled a random human and got... myself?? statistically wild. turns out i'm just a guy. weirdly humbling

btbuildem 13d ago

I drew one that died as a newborn, 960BCE, then another that lived a long long life! https://anyhumanever.com/life/2139137610-1449878292-2136097810-226666268#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/2139137610-1449878292-21360978...

BubbleRings 13d ago
Ooh I like that it creates a URL that you can share that points to a particular generated human. Nice feature devs!

boutell 13d ago

Very moving and a little hard.

spongebobism 13d ago

> You have drawn a boy, born in the Russian Plain in 3843 BCE. He probably spoke something close to proto-Indo-European

imglorp 13d ago

This reminded me about the US nutters advocating return to the "way things were": they would do well to consider life expectancy. My draw from 1881 Mississippi would max out at 36.

WaitButHow 13d ago

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lbreakjai 13d ago

"You have drawn a boy, born in the Paris Basin in 1970 CE." Of all human history, it had to pick something off by 20 years and 200km.

skizm 13d ago

Died at 2 of dysentery. What is this, the Oregon trail?

mateioo7 13d ago

Shameless plug, but related, is the Watsi platform[1] I discovered a few months ago through another HN user. You can read the story of less fortunate but alive people and how much need there is in the world for one another. The founder's talk[2], Chase Adam, which made me a supporter, is a must-see. I guess it's time to rewatch it.. [1] https://watsi.org/ https://watsi.org/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlT3UhC7NwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlT3UhC7NwQ

no_multitudes 13d ago

I 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-hub. It is a broad theory of human evolution that doesn't appear to mention the Yangtze Basin or China. Another citation is to "[RH109] Model-supplied gap-fill (Claude Fable 5 and Claude Opus 5, 2026-08-05). Bounds and items written to close gaps no dataset we hold covers. Not a published work: see each row's `basis` for its stated reason. (2026)" -- this is an interesting way to describe having an LLM hallucinate something for you. Please stop making vibe-coded websites -- it is not useful to provide incorrect facts. You are polluting the commons with garbage.

zamadatix 13d ago
There are plenty of problems with the site but that some stats like marriage do not count dead newborns as unwed instead of invalid for the stat is not really one of them.
- no_multitudes 13d ago
  What age of death discounts someone as counting towards the marriage percentage? If a human made the website, there would be an answer to this question. That answer might not be published and might vary between datasets, but it would exist. In this case there is no answer, because the percentage is just made up by the LLM. There is no methodology. Your answer is inappropriately anthropomorphizing the LLM by imputing a methodology onto its "data collection" process.
  - zamadatix 13d ago
    No anthropomorphization was required, I just looked at one of the sources on that section of the page and saw the statistic did not involve the number of newborns and so figured myself those facts could indeed be simultaneously true. How do I know the methods described in the source were correctly used here? I don't, but I also wouldn't know that based on whether or not a human wrote the webapp. I'd know that by checking the method applied on the backend matches that of the source. If it does, it doesn't matter if it was generated by using every 17th letter of the dictionary - it'd either align or not.

trnvll 13d ago

"At 79, she died of a respiratory infection. She left 18 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren behind." What are the odds of 79. Must've been in the very top percentile

eterevsky 13d ago

I drew "girl, born in the Balkans in 3208 BCE", which I find super remarkable since this fits the place and time for a relatively small population of people who spoke Proto-Indo-European as their native language.

lr4444lr 13d ago

Her farthest journey was a day's walk, to a nearby market town. I think this is what boggles my mind most about antiquity: the vast majority of people rarely ventured much past where they were born (unless they did a likely once in a lifetime religious pilgrimage which took the better part of a year). Seeing as most other people didn't venture further either, you really got to know the people around you very well. Common life limitations simply precluded much travel. The only foreigners you saw were either invading hordes, or traders who were constantly on the road.

Exoristos 13d ago
There were and have always been trading and other exchanges all over the world. The Egtved girl was traveling from north to central Germany, probably for marriage. Now, if we mean most people did not do this, then sure. But there's a persistent idea that ancient cultures were not in contact with each other, and this is largely disproven.
- j16sdiz 13d ago
  It is fascinating that both of these are equality true in the ancient world: 1. Most of the population never leave their city or town of birth. 2. Some people went on multi-year pilgrim, voyage, or trading route. Even multiple time in their life.
autumnstwilight 13d ago
My grandmother told a story about meeting an elderly female relative in Kingston, Tasmania, soon after my grandparents had got their first car. After visiting, they said they were now going back to the city (Hobart), and the old lady said, "Oh, how lovely, I've never been!" My grandmother reported, "And I should have told her 'get in the car then!', because she died not too long after." Kingston is 13 kilometers from Hobart.
Matumio 13d ago
I think it's the other way around. Without the cultural norms around impersonal markets, you have to rely on your extended family network or clan for everything, because there is no trust otherwise. This is what keeps you from traveling. If you were trying to trade with a far-away stranger, why should they not just rob you instead? Nobody is around to punish. And for all they know, you were just as likely trying to poison them rather than make a fair trade.

janalsncm 13d ago

I think this would be cool if it actually worked as intended. This simulation doesn’t even draw birth years correctly. The right way would be to bucket people by something like 1 million. Everyone in the bucket has the same sex, birth year range, and location range. Then draw a bucket uniformly and infer the details.

jonorsi 13d ago

This is at both times super cool as a project at what AI can do, while also being extremely dubious and misleading about how accurate any of this data is, hallucinated or not.

backlava12 13d ago
I mean it's only cool if it is actually real data that we can draw interesting and meaningful insights from. This is all just made up nonsense.

aronowb14 13d ago

I drew a woman from 500 BCE in the ganges... but lived to 75?

noir_lord 13d ago

> She was born and died at 2 of bubonic plague. Yeah that does accurately sum up the 15th century. Still slop coded bollocks though.

azkalam 13d ago

I would like to see a life expectancy number that excludes deaths in childhood. A frequency distribution of life span for those born in year X would be a helpful visual.

jrootabega 13d ago

I feel sorry for the person who draws their exact real-life stats, but dying this year.

asdf333 13d ago

i love this. it really shows you someone else's perspective. had you drawn a different lot in life things would be very different. imo it is a good example of Rawl's veil of ignorance thought experiment. How would you design the world if you will be randomly dropped into any position anywhere on earth. well done.

bitwize 13d ago

Interesting. It rolls a few dice and presents a snapshot of someone who might plausibly have lived at a random place and time. Mine was a girl who lived on the Deccan Plateau in India, and died at six of tuberculosis.

Lerc 13d ago

Just my luck. 503CE, dead at six months from smallpox.

pkilgore 13d ago

This site is pure slop?

backlava12 13d ago
Yeah I'm kinda baffled by all the praise this is getting. It's like I live in a different reality.

user1338 13d ago

This is what I got: Seojun - Seojun is not a real person. But his life story is created from the statistical reality of the Korean Peninsula in 1999 CE. In 1999 CE, Seojun was born in the countryside near Pongch’ŏn-ŭp. His village is home to about 250 people. Among four children, he was the fourth. He eats largely rice, soybean paste and tofu, dried fish and shellfish, and pickled cabbage and radish, with persimmon and jujube in season, and tea as well. He knows how to read and write. Seojun stands about 167 cm tall (5 ft 6 in). --- if it's not obvious why this is problematic and extremely offensive I don't know what I can say to you. You're talking about GenZ who has access to tiktok and food delivery apps as if you're talking about someone from Joseon dynasty from hundreds of years ago. No one's favorite food is rice and soybean paste. He knows how to read and write and sky is blue.

ntSean 13d ago
It doesn’t say his favorite food is anything? Have you misread this and decided to take offense?
boodleboodle 13d ago
I think this app conflates ingredients with actual food. From the listed food the person probably eats 된장찌개 but the ingredients are listed one by one
WelkinFolk 13d ago
Not everyone from everywhere has had food delivery apps all their lifetimes, even if they're GenZ

mcmcmc 13d ago

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.

BobbyTables2 13d ago

I died of dysentery shortly after being born. Makes Oregon Trail seem easy…

holoduke 13d ago

I found it very unrealistic that my girl from 2000bc somewhere in china decided to divorce after 3 years of marriage when she was 23.

digitallogic 13d ago

> 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.

aetherspawn 13d ago

> He was born, lost his father at 5, and died at 7 of malnutrition. Yikes

morpheos137 13d ago

I am almost certain this is miscoded. I drew about 20 lives and I think 17 of them were before 1500. Meanwhile the vast majority of the integral of population over time is right of 1500.

mywittyname 13d ago

I died of dysentery shortly after birth. So basically, Oregon Trail - Ancient Edition.

sobellian 13d ago

It seems that this conflates the leading causes of death in $BIRTH_YEAR with the leading causes of death for someone born in $BIRTH_YEAR?

morpheos137 13d ago

This site is a fantastic demonstration of what crap AI is when operated by nit wits. Notably the drawing is not in line with the actual population distribution over time. Pre 1500 years are vastly over represented. If the point is draw a random year without regard to population distribution then the site is pretty pathetic. I would be embarrassed to post this on HN.

Buttons840 13d ago

I drew a man who lived to 80 in 47,000 BCE. Beat that!

jahnu 13d ago

Absolute trash. No more worthwhile than the AI slop inaccurate copies of actually well made educational videos on YouTube. Why do we accept this crap?

backlava12 13d ago
And the majority of the comments are eating it up. Hackernews is cooked. Welcome to the future I guess.

ghastmaster 13d ago

The data will be much clearer in the future, once all of our data has been mined. We create so much personal media and collected data that some point in the future when one entity has loaded that, a crazy real autobiography could be created.

pictureofabear 13d ago

The more details this gives, the less likely it is that the story is true. Since the output is a highly detailed story, the statistical reality of this site is that's complete bullshit.

Wowfunhappy 13d ago
The website is quite clear that the stories are made up based on statistical likelihood, so that part didn't bother me at all. It's a cool way to explore the statistics. What bothers me is that the statistics themselves are bad.

minimaxa 13d ago

I think it would be more interesting if you entered your own real data and then the LLM gave you statistics based on that info on where you are on your own life path based on consensus data.

joshdavham 13d ago

Thanks for making this! This was super fascinating and the type of thing I love seeing on HN!

doginasuit 13d ago

This 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.

backlava12 13d ago
Well, its just AI-generated nonsense, so the story is just going to be the same slop you could generate with ChatGPT or whatever.
- doginasuit 13d ago
  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.
  - backlava12 12d ago
    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.
m_vPoints 12d ago
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
roywiggins 12d ago
A similar site, also LLM-assisted, that does a better and more evocative job of composing stories. https://random-lives.github.io/random-lives/ https://random-lives.github.io/random-lives/

anyhumanever 13d ago

Creator here (proof https://anyhumanever.com/verify 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 assembling the data in a mostly non-hallucinogenic way. More on that below. Q: What's up with the inaccuracies? A: There are definitely inaccuracies. One of this big issues is that the data we have (mostly academic historical sources) only exist at a certain level of granularity, and attempting to "stretch" statistics is fundamentally error-prone. Different data sets overlap and disagree, and there are genuine unknowns. There's also a fundamental issue with using independent probabilities that should be conditional. For instance, x% of people died before 15, and y% in that same population died in an accident. Combining these statistics to get an estimate of children who died by accident involves coming up with a reasonable distribution of accidents by age, which is guesswork for a given historical time/place. In all, I'm shooting for mostly accurate given patchwork statistics, and a lot of filling in blanks in a reasonable way. BTW, in order to test the accuracy of stories, I generated a few hundred random stories and created nit-picking "History teacher" agents to evaluate each for accuracy, then aggregated and addressed issues by frequency. It would have been hard to come anywhere close to that level of scrutiny without AI on tap. It's also why I'm so sure that there are still inaccuracies to be found. I was also able to point Claude at comments here, aggregate issues and fix them (with my ok), which means that the issues reported here should be mostly fixed. Q: Do you cite sources? A: I pushed pretty hard on trying to cite all sources, being as open as possible about where data is coming from. Each element of the story links to its source, and the sources page lists all the sources used, included the lines in each table that come from that source. For me, this was one of the interesting bits of fallout from the project. How should we source well in the age of AI? I wound up making a distinction between actual downloaded data (from a real publisher), vs what AI "claims" is accurate, citing a source, vs what AI claims to be true, and seems reasonable, but Claude can't cite a source, making it smell funny. In the age of AI-flavored truthiness, it's important to push hard on being able to trace all claims down to their primary sources. One more note: the biggest source of inaccuracy is the AI-generated images. Comments run about 2:1 in favor of ditching them, but a lot of people really like the idea of adding humanity to a story by supplying a human face, even if AI-image gen insists on dressing the guy from 1375BCE in a snappy crew-neck tee.

backlava12 13d ago

Nearly 500 upvotes for something that is so very obviously just LLM slop. I think Hackernews is just totally cooked at this point. Whatever discernment the hackernews crowd once had is gone.

backlava12 13d ago

I will say this with all honesty and sincerity to everyone who interacted with this site: If you didn't realize this was just LLM-generated nonsense within the first 45-60 seconds of using it, it's completely and unequivocally over for you. Your lack of discernment will lead to you being jerked around by AI-generated slop for the rest of your life.

ma2kx 13d ago

Nice, but would be even nicer if we saw such ideas in games.

jemmyw 13d ago

> The household he was born into lived on roughly $3.04 a day per person in today's money Go back not even that far and money comparisons like this make no sense. A family subsistence farming doesn't have the same kind of relationship we do with money. Also they couldn't really go down the shops. Existence was in the edge for everyone, even the wealthy. The other problem I see is that it's seems to pick a random time before a random location. So this will favour the times when there were far fewer people. No way around this, you either end up picking mostly near modern times because that's when the bulk of the people lived, or people further back in time who are pretty disconnected from our modern society.

krige 13d ago

The randomness is rather amusing in a dark way. I pulled an Ivan in a central Polish city. This is a bit like placing a Marceau near Berlin.

technick 13d ago

More AI Slop... I drew two different characters. One who got married after dying of dysentery and another who was orphaned at the age of 34.

3371 13d ago

"He was born, lost his father at 13, was orphaned at 20, had 4 children, and died at 90 of a parasitic infection, with 3 surviving children, 10 grandchildren, and 15 great-grandchildren." This 3727 BCE Korean boy died at 90.

Al-Khwarizmi 13d ago

If you like the idea but are disappointed by the blatant errors in this vibe-coded website, there was a video game saga called Real Lives which was basically the same idea, except only for contemporary people (but you would still draw an area of the world, etc. from realistic probability distributions), and it was done right. You could make some life decisions (it wasn't purely contemplative) but much of the time you would die as a child of things we don't even know in the first world, like schistosomiasis, and not even be old enough to make any decision. Or you would make one or two, but due to being in an unfavorable environment without opportunities none of the options would improve your life much. Very sobering. I remember playing Real Lives 2004 (or maybe 2007) and 2010, both good. I think there are later versions but I had heard they had changed philosophy somehow and some people weren't satisfied (they said they went overboard with educational elements on top of the raw life simulation), so I can't vouch for those. I don't know if 2010 would be easy to play in today's computers. Now I'm curious, I might try for old times' sake. A version with the whole history of humanity, like what htis website aims to be but fails, would be amazing if it existed.

LtWorf 13d ago

> Giuseppe eats mostly polenta, pork, beans and cheese, and greens and onions, with grapes, figs, and olives in season, and wine alongside. An italian, born in the 80s, and no mention of pasta in his diet?

namenotrequired 13d ago

Very similar to: https://random-lives.github.io/random-lives/ https://random-lives.github.io/random-lives/

samth 12d ago
Random Lives seems like it was much less vibe coded and did a better job.

amelius 13d ago

I think the sampler is broken. It gives me outcomes in the thin tail far too often.

dozerly 13d ago

This is vibe coded slop

mayv 13d ago

Ivan was born in 1922CE in Ukraine. He ate mushrooms for fruit. Six famines and a volcanic eruption happened in his lifetime. He died at 59 from a stroke. It's just going to skip over the fact he would have been a young adult during the Second World War? That event isn't as important as a faraway volcanic eruption to mention? Such useless AI slop. https://anyhumanever.com/life/1025135085-1150629022-1133496282-2068353748#story https://anyhumanever.com/life/1025135085-1150629022-11334962...

rabarbra 12d ago
"mushrooms for fruit" - how do you prepare mushrooms to replace fruits??

may_ilands 12d ago

[flagged]

deleted 12d ago

[deleted]

donatj 12d ago

The person I pulled is from 42,000 BCE. The map shows a densely populated region in South America. I'm pretty sure that goes against mainstream archeological evidence which says Humans arrived in the Americas 15,000-30,000 years ago.

0xDEAFBEAD 12d ago

If you want the non-vibecoded version of this, try the Real Lives software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Lives_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Lives_(video_game) https://archive.org/details/reallives2007-interactivelifesimulationsoftware2007/PaperFront.PNG https://archive.org/details/reallives2007-interactivelifesim...

MetroWind 12d ago

I was a Japanese boy who died at 5 month because of diarrhea.

softwaredoug 12d ago

Drawing these random unrecorded lives makes me think a lot of Train Dreams a movie/book about a kind of unremarkable, random guy in the Northwest who sits witnessing history, dying with nobody remembering him.

mathieu_aithos 12d ago

Elon Musk said that (without him ;)) world demography gone a decline, as it is in Japan or Italy. If radical right political parties arrive in Europe for exemple, are women gone a make children again? Or are we going to massively clone ourselves to conquer other planets? Or finally let humanity slowing disappear letting robots replacing them definitively ? What do you think?

BLACKCRAB 12d ago

[dead]

LittleBox 11d ago

I drew an east coast girl born in 2006 and married at the agr of 17.