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...
And yet the bubonic plague did indeed exist and kill people between large outbreaks.
This is such a weird nitpick, it's clear the website deals in averages and assumptions. It's meant to be an interesting window into possible lives intermixed with historical happenings at, or around, those times.
I get that some people just hate AI, but of all things, this is a pretty fun & educational use of it.
I think our core disagreement is that I do not consider teaching falsehoods to be educational. My antipathy towards LLM outputs that haven't been fact-checked is mostly downstream of things like that.
This website doesn't "teach" anything. It's a fun way to explore and get exposed to history. Kind of like Civilization 6 or something. Do you think CIV6 "teaches falsehoods" because you can build the Pyramids as the French?
I haven't played Civilization. Generally I would not consider something educational if it contains mostly false information. Perhaps clearly demarcated parts of it with true information could be considered educational -- for example, looking at screenshots I don't see anything immediately objectionable in the civiliopedia "historical context" sections.
I think most players would understand that in-game choices will not reflect the choices people actually made historically. Having not played Civilization, I'm not sure whether I would consider it to be educational -- I think it would depend on whether playing the game provides insight into real historical events.
For example, I would consider a sufficiently detailed LARP of a historical event to be educational[1] -- the actual choices and outcomes do not match what happened historically, but they can teach participants a great deal about the motives and limitations of real historical actors.
This website, on the other hand, seems to consist of 90% AI hallucinations and 10% data that was actually extracted from a real source[2]. Since these types of data are thoroughly mixed together, I think this website is about as educational as just making up something to believe about the past.
[1] https://college.uchicago.edu/news/academic-stories/history-c...
[2] https://anyhumanever.com/sources
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.