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Comments (251)

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  no_multitudes
  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.
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  magneticnorth
  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.
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  jonorsi
  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.
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  pavel_lishin
  This could be pretty great for a play through of Thousand Year Old Vampire, a pretty terrific journaling game: 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.
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  jorisboris
  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.
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  lr4444lr
  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.
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  bentt
  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)
• mateioo7
  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/[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlT3UhC7NwQ
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  xiaoyu2006
  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.
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  scottmcmac
  "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...
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  john_strinlai
  >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.
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  doginasuit
  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.
• ungovernableCat
  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.
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  glenstein
  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.
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  user1338
  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.
• estetlinus
  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%).
• Waterluvian
  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.
• tintor
  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."
• spullara
  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.
• ma2kx
  Nice, but would be even nicer if we saw such ideas in games.
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  nickdirienzo
  This is really neat. It would be interesting to talk with the character generated.
• minimaxa
  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.
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  lbriner
  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.
• ghastmaster
  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.
• imglorp
  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.
• mywittyname
  I died of dysentery shortly after birth. So basically, Oregon Trail - Ancient Edition.
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  _air
  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).
• joshdavham
  Thanks for making this! This was super fascinating and the type of thing I love seeing on HN!
• janalsncm
  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.
• nico
  It seems like the server might be overwhelmedVery cool projectI was wondering if the generated people “fill up a spot” and temporarily change the stats for generating new lives. Eg, if the app already generated 10M stories, is it still using the same initial distribution for the new ones, or is generation conditioned on the stats of the already generated?The random life I got: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...
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  beardyw
  Hug of death I think.Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.
• sobellian
  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?
• digitallogic
  > LIFE EXPECTANCY AT BIRTHGiven the huge infant mortality rates until very recently in human history, this is often pretty misleading. Life expectancy at say, 2yo, is far greater.
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  btbuildem
  I drew one that died as a newborn, 960BCE, then another that lived a long long life! https://anyhumanever.com/life/2139137610-1449878292-21360978...
• eterevsky
  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.
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  drhagen
  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".
• jimmyjazz14
  Really puts the marvels of modern life into perspective, most people did not live long or happy lives for much of human history.
• chronolitus
  Oh nice! If you liked it, you might like:yourlifeunderrome.com
• azkalam
  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.
• trnvll
  "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
• lovasoa
  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
• sph
  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.
• zeristor
  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
• backlava12
  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.
• grich7642
  "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.
• Lerc
  Just my luck.503CE, dead at six months from smallpox.
• mallory854
  This is awesome. I love seeing how humans have evolved into what we are today.
• Buttons840
  I drew a man who lived to 80 in 47,000 BCE. Beat that!
• asdf333
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• BeetleB
  Leading cause of death: dysentryHad to laugh.
• jrootabega
  I feel sorry for the person who draws their exact real-life stats, but dying this year.
• visiondude
  “He was born and died at 1 of dysentery.“ - lucky me
• spongebobism
  > You have drawn a boy, born in the Russian Plain in 3843 BCE.He probably spoke something close to proto-Indo-European
• aetherspawn
  > He was born, lost his father at 5, and died at 7 of malnutrition.Yikes
• BobbyTables2
  I died of dysentery shortly after being born.Makes Oregon Trail seem easy…
• gfiorav
  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!
• aronowb14
  I drew a woman from 500 BCE in the ganges... but lived to 75?
• guybedo
  we are probably living inside a more advanced version of this game right now.Somebody, somewhere, somewhen rolled the dice and here we are.
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  jahnu
  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?
• skizm
  Died at 2 of dysentery. What is this, the Oregon trail?
• anyhumanever
  Creator here (proof https://anyhumanever.com/verify).I noticed the traffic and am dropping by. A few quick answers after scanning through comments:Q: Vibecoded? A: Mostly, not completely. I've been programming for 30+ years, and like a lot of people have gotten to the point where I seldom need to look at code anymore. Even so, this took around 4-6 weeks (part time) to get mostly right. A lot of the effort was in 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.
• iJohnDoe
  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.
• lIl-IIIl
  I had this idea for forever. Thank you for making it!
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  pictureofabear
  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.
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  WarmWash
  Has anyone managed to roll a life later than ~600CE?
• mcmcmc
  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.
• isoprophlex
  Everyone keeps dying way too young :(
• aghilmort
  damn, well doneog/goat demo of synthetic data genonly nit is 'draw' button often below the fold
• noir_lord
  > She was born and died at 2 of bubonic plague.Yeah that does accurately sum up the 15th century.Still slop coded bollocks though.
• morpheos137
  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.
• mallory854
  boy, born in the Guinea Coast in 211,966 BCE. Died from an accident at age 40.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0
  Very cool. Reads like a Dwarf Fortress history. For those that don't play, every creature in the game has a life story.
• holoduke
  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.
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  pkilgore
  This site is pure slop?
• byako
  rolled a random human and got... myself?? statistically wild. turns out i'm just a guy. weirdly humbling
• smarf
  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
• IDidntMakeIt
  I died at age 2 of Typhoid Fever.Modern take on Oregon Trail vibes I like it
• boutell
  Very moving and a little hard.
• bpodgursky
  > 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.
• bitwize
  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.
• anduril22
  This is super cool
• morpheos137
  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.
• raver1975
  "You have died of dysentery."
• hnmuuatsno
  [dead]
• WaitButHow
  [dead]
• ajjahs
  [dead]
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  heyitsmedotjayb
  [flagged]
• richhwang
  Love it!
• backlava12
  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.
• lbreakjai
  "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.
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  garyrob
  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-b...