alt Hacker NewsAny Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
"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...
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.
>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.
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..
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."
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%).
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.
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.
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.
Just my luck.
503CE, dead at six months from smallpox.
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.
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.
This is really neat. It would be interesting to talk with the character generated.
I feel sorry for the person who draws their exact real-life stats, but dying this year.
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.
"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
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.
I drew one that died as a newborn, 960BCE, then another that lived a long long life! https://anyhumanever.com/life/2139137610-1449878292-21360978...
"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.
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.
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).
I drew a woman from 500 BCE in the ganges... but lived to 75?
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/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...
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".
Hug of death I think.
Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.
> You have drawn a boy, born in the Russian Plain in 3843 BCE.
He probably spoke something close to proto-Indo-European
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
Roy: A Life from Ricky and Morty comes to mind.
Extra points if you can take your example life off grid.
Really puts the marvels of modern life into perspective, most people did not live long or happy lives for much of human history.
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.
Oh nice! If you liked it, you might like:
yourlifeunderrome.com
Died at 2 of dysentery. What is this, the Oregon trail?
> She was born and died at 2 of bubonic plague.
Yeah that does accurately sum up the 15th century.
Still slop coded bollocks though.
"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.
This site is pure slop?
“He was born and died at 1 of dysentery.“ - lucky me
This is awesome. I love seeing how humans have evolved into what we are today.
Leading cause of death: dysentry
Had to laugh.
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!
I had this idea for forever. Thank you for making it!
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.