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.
When I lived in Europe people were even more aware of the seasons of fruits and vegetables.
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.
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
It's techbro ejaculate. 10 minutes of euphoria for slop to come out in the end to spread to unsuspecting victims.
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!)
I see…
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-1...
Anthropomorphizing makes for poor analogies, but it's kinda the same way your acquisition of background knowledge of the Tang dynasty from whatever source material you used is not considered stealing or pirating either.
Theft involves removing from the source, Copyright violation is distributing copies without a legal right to do so. Training is fair use.
The judge found that it constituted copyright violation. Purchasing the books would cover their responsibilities with regards to training. The claim that they are destroying books to hold copyright is incorrect. The judge cited precedent that said instances of not destroying the originals were also fair use, his claim about destruction was to say even if this precedent were not considered fair use, the destruction that was already occurring (because it is easier to scan loose pages), invalidated one of the arguments against it.
The ruling was on training took the form
If A is ok then B is ok, but even if A were not ok, B might still be ok.
Both of those are protected by law. Learning from a Disney movie and creating your own thing is not, and should not be, disallowed.
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.
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
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 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?
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.
I thought it provided an interesting tool for people to put things into perspective.
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...
I get that some people just hate AI, but of all things, this is a pretty fun & educational use of it.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and modeling population processes. Blackwell Publishers.
In GP's case I believe they are correct the Hajnal source is not relevant to the Yangtze Basin but reading the first page should have made it clear the facts could be simultaneously true regardless where the percentages came from or if they were accurate.
Again, there are plenty of problems with the site. That it was clear these facts can't all be true simultaneously was just not one of them.
I believe we agree we haven't seen a valid citation for "the source in which 'x' came from in 'x%'" for this stat on the site. I hope the two of us also agree this is not the point I was disagreeing with.
Where I'm currently lost is why a demography textbook, which was a different citation in the same section, must be unable to explain dead newborns need not be counted in such a statistic on the basis the textbook was not also the source of the specific percentages displayed? That'd be like saying a statistics textbook can't explain how the median can be less than the mean on the basis it wasn't also the source for the numbers displayed.