20 comments

  • iammjm 1 hour ago
    About Russo Ukrainian war 2022:

    > Estimates: 600,000+ Ukrainian military deaths; 100,000+ Russian deaths; 30,000-40,000 civilian deaths.

    This is VERY wrong. Almost all estimates go for at least 3x higher Russian casualties than Ukrainian. Russia has been attacking for 4+ years just throwing bodies at the problem with Ukrainians defending with technology. Where do these estimates even come from? Makes me question the validity of the information on this site

    • senderista 31 minutes ago
      That is the Western media narrative anyway. The casualty rate for the current mode of offensive warfare with small infantry teams infiltrating under cover of darkness (e.g. Ukraine for the latter part of the 2023 counteroffensive, Russia in its more recent offensive in the Donbas) has been extremely high on both sides. But I'm pretty sure Russia had a favorable kill ratio during their 2022 summer offensive in the Donbas where they just pummeled fortifications with standoff weapons like the Buratino, and many of Ukraine's most experienced troops died in that offensive.

      Anyway, the Western stereotype of "Russian human wave attacks" is mostly wrong. Even when Russia is just throwing bodies into the fray (like the convict troops in Bakhmut), those can't really be described as "human wave" tactics (again, they're small infantry teams infiltrating at night). And Ukraine has thrown lots of hastily mobilized cannon fodder at the front as well: look for videos of protesting TDF soldiers and their relatives on Telegram if you don't believe me.

  • suid 3 hours 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.

  • analog31 8 minutes ago
    It missed the Toledo War:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War

    But to be fair, this is really cool.

  • WesleyLivesay 3 hours 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 1 hour 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?
      • dvaun 1 hour ago
        Yes, definitely. Claude and other models might produce minor differences in design outputs, but overall they apply similar principles. This has been harped on in many threads over the past several months.
    • rebolek 1 hour ago
      cool visuals but the result is totally random
  • pelagicAustral 14 minutes ago
    I recently figured that Spain went on a war for 700 years, just to carry on in the Arauco war for another 300 years, thus, literally being at war for 1000 years.
  • willchis 12 minutes ago
    Wow this is really neat. I just did a really fast refresher on the history of (conflict in) Europe by scrolling through!
  • zahirbmirza 8 minutes ago
    This is a fascinating resource. Wow. Thanks to the OP for posting this.
  • Hnrobert42 15 minutes ago
    Amazing! I just wish there was a way to eliminate the text boxes.
  • konart 1 hour ago
    That moment when you go from stop 7 to stop 8 in Exhibit, from Grand Duchy of Moscow to Russian Empire...
  • 4ndrewl 2 hours 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.
    • yorwba 1 hour ago
      There are a lot of very old written histories recording various battles. For example, the Spring and Autumn Annals have a somewhat detailed account of the Battle of Chengpu and its aftermath: https://ctext.org/chun-qiu-zuo-zhuan/xi-gong#comm18160 This map actually briefly flashes a red dot at 632 BC, but since it's not part of any named war, you could easily miss it.

      The areas where you see fewer wars don't necessarily lack written historical records, it might just be that nobody bothered to translate those records into a machine-readable format yet. (I'd guess this map is based on Wikidata.)

  • ge96 49 minutes ago
    There are a couple of war peaks, wonder what the correlation is (why war went down)
  • andrewmutz 3 hours 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."

    • vova_hn2 2 hours 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.

    • hofrogs 1 hour ago
      This page crashed my browser too. Opened the comments to see this, guess it's not a me issue.
    • cyclotron3k 31 minutes ago
      Crashes my Firefox on Android too
  • marcinignac 3 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.

    • analog31 5 minutes ago
      Maybe that's why Trump wants to take Greenland, and Canada, and looks up to Russia.

      Imagine foreign policy being distorted by the Mercator projection.

    • OsrsNeedsf2P 2 hours ago
      The irony of this link not providing any static visual alternative to projection
  • rebolek 1 hour ago
    *every = some of them
  • FerretFred 2 hours 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".
  • danielvaughn 3 hours ago
    This is really neat. Also, the 19th century was far more conflict-prone than I thought.
    • mschuster91 3 hours 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.

      • sarchertech 2 hours ago
        >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...

        No part of that statement is accurate.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

        • mschuster91 43 minutes ago
          Out of that list, the utter majority is some sort of fights involving Native Americans or some island "expeditions" not involving Northern American territory.
  • iamanllm 3 hours ago
    I love this. Did you make it? Why?
  • alansaber 3 hours ago
    This is cool.
  • jeffrallen 3 hours ago
    War is a racket.
  • phishin 2 hours ago
    Why it matters.