Comment by no_multitudes
12 hours 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.
96% of women who survived to marriageable age, were married fixes this. The 44% of women who die young don't marry. Obviously a high percentage of men have to die young too, to maintain rough parity or else there's a woman shortage which might account for high survivor marriage rates: in demand as a wife, due to mortality rate asymmetry.
James was born on the British Isles, near Boulogne-sur-Mer, in 2009 CE.
James's table is mostly oat and barley bread, pork and dairy, and cabbage and peas, with apples in season, and coffee and sugar as well. He is literate.
Odd for a gen-z person in Britain. I doubt he’d eat a lot of cabbage, and I have no idea when the “season” for apples is as they are always in the supermarket and there aren’t any orchards near where I live.
Even in Massachusetts most people I know tend to know the seasons of many fruits and vegetables, and I definitely mostly eat apples in the fall when they're much better.
When I lived in Europe people were even more aware of the seasons of fruits and vegetables.
> James died in 2027 as he jumped to his death from his room in a five-story hotel —his belly full of barley juice.
apple season is fall, if you're wondering.
him eating apples when in season seemed to me at first like an anachronism, but actually, i do that. years ago i got fed up with apples that were whatever, so i decided to only have apples when i could find mcintosh (my favorite apple), and eat loads of them.
I draw a man in China in 1819, and it said he "died of the war in Oman" without any explanation of how that could have happened. What a load of crap
That’s basically what I’m thinking.
Not only is this pointless, it’s outright mis information. Who gains anything from having an llm create an imaginary person ?
I guess for pure entertainment, but this looks like it’s a historical website
The design / UX world has been creating imaginary user personas, paying jobs for people to be the shaman / guru of each persona, for years.
It's all just larping, inserting the bias and assumptions of your team into the spot where knowing your customers should be.
Welcome to the future of widespread information, where the uneducated masses don't understand what context, or the definition of words for that matter, even is.
Youtube is full of this, history slop. Some techbro hyperfixated on this and LLMs gives it life before he's bored and moved on to the next thing to hyperfixate on.
It's techbro ejaculate. 10 minutes of euphoria for slop to come out in the end to spread to unsuspecting victims.
The first part likely is just an artifact of an unwritten common assumption. That is, it's probably 96% of women, who lived to adulthood, who were ever married.
Maybe, but I doubt it. The vast majority of the sources, including the two listed for this claim, are listed as "attributed", meaning "A model (Opus or Fable) claims that this is what the cited source says. In my spot checks, I've found these claims to be accurate; still, since it's just a model claiming that author x says y, there's a nonzero chance that it's a hallucination."[1]
I couldn't track down the first source, but the second source goes over something completely different. Maybe Claude accurately remembered the first source when it was stolen during the training process, but forgive me if I'm skeptical. Feel free to track it down yourself and let me know. Otherwise, I will assume it is an LLM hallucination.
(Also, given my background knowledge of the Tang dynasty, I would be surprised if the average marriage age was as high as 18!)
[1]https://anyhumanever.com/sources
“ Claude accurately remembered the first source when it was stolen during the training process”
I see…
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This is the true reason for watermarking by LLMs. So they don't get mad LLM disease by digesting their own product.
This is exactly the kind of reckless inaccuracy I've come to expect from AI.
I am genuinely puzzled as to why this kind of vibe-coded site are so popular on HN.
I consider the crowd here to be much smarter than I am, which is why I enjoyed the links that were shared and the discussions that followed.
The website is pretty, but the statistics and stories are the main point. Yet we are being fed hallucinated false claims, and somehow, that doesn't seem to be a problem...
I don't understand why it gets so many upvotes. We know Claude can create websites like this brilliantly now. The novel and interesting part is the transformation of the data. But if that part is sloppy, what's the point?
Until I read the comments here, I did not notice the stats were bad. I was just skimming the facts I thought were interesting, not looking for contradictions.
The site itself is a really cool concept! I just wish the information was accurate. Now that I know it's not, I feel cheated.
I suspect a lot of people don't read the comments.
Can you offer any evidence that it is any less accurate than a page hand crafted by a human?
I thought it provided an interesting tool for people to put things into perspective.
Well for one example, if you select a person born on the Italian peninsula in the 1400s and they die of bubonic plague, their year of death is not correlated to years when there were large bubonic plague outbreaks on the Italian peninsula.
This is not an error I would expect a human to make if they were interested enough in demography to make a website about it. For example, the wikipedia page on this topic[1] does a reasonable job of distinguishing that plagues did not occur every year and that they varied in lethality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_plague_pandemic#Italian...
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I don't think a hand-crafted app necessarily estimates things more accurately, but a sensible pre-LLM developer would probably not list so many dubious citations to trick people into believing it's accurate.
Even if this wasn't vibe coded it would be impossible to fact check billions of possible lives. I think thought provoking toys like this are a great use of AI, assuming no one takes them seriously.
I am not sure why it is thought-provoking for a website to lie to you? There is plenty of real history and demography to read about.
That is exactly what is thought provoking. Usually we only learn glimpses of history, not a full distribution about it.
For example my draw died as a newborn (allegedly 50% died before 5), which made me think how many humans never really got to experience life.
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you can't fact check real individual lives but you can draw up a probabilistic representation
that is if your probabilities are actually correct, that the anthropological or archaeological or sociological field for that specific region and demographic is robust (and there is good primary evidence for supporting the claims), and you're not some vibe-coded AI tool that spits out a convincing lie constructed on not even educated guesses, casting shadows on the wall of the Platonic cave where the people who trust slop uncritically are chained to their ignorance for perpetuity
> 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.
Yeah, I got: You have drawn a girl, born in the Yangtze Basin in 1295 CE.
Typical age at marriage: 18 Ever married (of adults): 96% Children per woman: 6.5
Life expectancy at birth: 28 yrs Died before age 5: 39% Died before age 15: 44%
Very similar to your "random" draw, and the facts are suspect. There was a link to the source, but it's behind a paywall.
I got a man in India 1000 years ago who died at 92. Impressive yet rather unlikely.
Unlikely, but not implausible.
The thing about stats is outliers exist. Whether those outliers themselves are interesting is another matter.
Worst part is that it's often not clear at the first glance was it something carefully crafted or steamrolled by LLM.
Idk I find it almost painful how obvious it is to the point of borderline embarrassment.
It is like when MUI/bootstrap/tailwind came out and made it increasingly easier for no design chop folks to press a button and get a decent design going. It is like watching a kid in a candy shop when systems engineers can vibe up a webapp without having to touch html/css/js.
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.
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.
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.
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"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." Umm yeah they can be true. Dead people are not counted. The straightforward interpretation is 96% of women living to 18 years or greater marry at some point in life. However the app has bigger problems, namely it does not seem to select from the distribution correctly, pre 1500 lives seem to be vastly over represented.
Yes, if a human told me this collection of facts I would assume they failed to properly explain their methodology. Given that the LLM is just making up numbers (see the "sources" page, where these are listed as "attributed",) there isn't really a methodology to explain in this case.