11 comments

  • suid 1 hour ago
    Grumble about the graphics choices: dark-grey-on-black-with-other-dark-colors is a terrible color scheme, that renders the borders nearly invisible.

    There's a reason print maps have a standard set of colors, with very light blue for oceans, white for land backgrounds, and a variety of dark colors for features. The "modern white-on-black web aesthetic" only really works for text- and figure-heavy pages, where you must then use very light colors (white, yellow, light orange, light green) for features/lines.

  • WesleyLivesay 1 hour ago
    Cool visuals, as with everything like this where the creator probably just churned open datasets through LLMs there are many inaccuracies particularly around borders.

    An interesting effort though, and at least this one has a decent page about sourcing.

    • Kotlopou 6 minutes ago
      I swear I've seen this exact UI in several other submissions recently. Is it the default produced by Claude if you don't specify anything?
  • 4ndrewl 40 minutes ago
    I guess the (war?) elephant in the room is that written history as something that attempts to record a somewht balanced, comprehensive account of an event is a modern, western, anomaly.
  • FerretFred 42 minutes ago
    Very interesting and watchable. Do you differentiate between wars and "conflicts"? There's so many of the latter and everyone seems to avoid the term "war".
  • marcinignac 2 hours ago
    Mercator police: please do not use projection that makes Greenland 14x bigger than reality and e.g. Russia 2x. See here https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mercator-map-true-size-of-c...

    Robinson Projection would be much more accurate.

    • OsrsNeedsf2P 1 hour ago
      The irony of this link not providing any static visual alternative to projection
  • andrewmutz 1 hour ago
    Interestingly, this website reliably crashes my firefox on linux while consuming 55GB of memory.

    Claude's TLDR of what's causing the problem (may or may not be accurate): "That animation loop is almost certainly leaking memory: each time-step it draws new border geometry (GeoJSON/vector shapes) but doesn't free the old frames, so RAM climbs without bound. When you interact — especially auto-playing the timeline — the tab grows until it swallows all 62 GB of RAM + swap and the kernel kills it."

    • hofrogs 12 minutes ago
      This page crashed my browser too. Opened the comments to see this, guess it's not a me issue.
    • vova_hn2 1 hour ago
      I can confirm, my firefox on linux crashes immediately as well.

      Curiously, the website works just fine in chrome on android.

      Blink monopoly strikes again, I guess.

  • danielvaughn 1 hour ago
    This is really neat. Also, the 19th century was far more conflict-prone than I thought.
    • mschuster91 1 hour ago
      > Also, the 19th century was far more conflict-prone than I thought.

      Let me guess, you're American? For the US, once Northern America was settled, the US established and the conflicts with Natives and the Brits resolved, all you had was the Civil War...

      But here in Europe, up until 1945, it was constant warfare. And that not just the large wars between entire countries that some czars or emperors drew up, there were also countless unnamed skirmishes and dealings between all the countless fiefdoms.

  • iamanllm 2 hours ago
    I love this. Did you make it? Why?
  • jeffrallen 1 hour ago
    War is a racket.
  • alansaber 2 hours ago
    This is cool.
  • phishin 1 hour ago
    Why it matters.