2025-11-209:52356142geacron.com
by year, since 3000 BC. Universal History datasets. Relevant Universal History vector information.
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Total plug but this year I scraped 400,000 wikipedia pages with Gemini to create landnotes.org, an atlas where you can ask "what happened in Japan in 1923":
https://landnotes.org/?location=xnd284b0-6&date=1923&strictD...
https://github.com/Zulko/landnotes
My plan has been to overlay historical map borders on top of it, like the Geacron one from this post, but they all seem to be protected by copyright - and understandably so, given the amount of work involved.
very cool. Made something with a similar idea, but using timelines instead of maps. I wonder if the two could be combined in some way https://timeline-of-everything.milst.dev/
Nice, how does your timeline work under the hood? Does it read from wikipedia? What could be interesting in your project is to be able to compare timelines. See for instance this website specifically for comparing composer works (with timelines pre-extracted from wikipedia):
https://zulko.github.io/composer-timelines/?selectedComposer...
By milst 2025-11-214:50 under the hood messages are sent to Tambo which knows how to use the timeline component (sort of like an LLM tool) and can fill the component's props with whatever data it decides. The actual data at this point is completely generated by the LLM (which seems to be ok for historical data on popular topics.) I should add a tool to allow tambo to fetch data from wikipedia before trying to generate timeline data.
Comparing timelines is an awesome idea, understanding when certain events happened in relation to others is really interesting. Maybe even overlaid in different colors or something instead of separate timelines.
Here's the repo btw: https://github.com/MichaelMilstead/timeline-of-everything
By llbbdd 2025-11-2016:58 This is very very cool! I went right to the month and year of my birth; kind of the same vibe as finding a newspaper published on the day you were born but all over the world. Thanks for sharing!
By zulko 2025-11-235:07 It does, why?
By annodomini2019 2025-11-2020:201 reply Wow, this is actually so cool. Fantastic idea, I would LOVE something like this in Wikipedia. Nicely done!
Yeah it would be nice if Wikipedia would host it, but it would probably require some more serious ground work so the project fits in the wikipedia ecosystem. Could be a pipeline Wikipedia -> Wikidata -> Atlas.
There are many projects that could be done with with wikipedia and LLMs, for instance "equalizing" all languages by translating all pages into all other languages where they are missing. Or, more surgically, finding which facts are reported in some languages of a page but not others, and adding these facts to all languages.
For now, it seems that wikipedia doesn't want to use generative AI to produce wikipedia pages, and that's understandable, but there may be a point where model quality will be too good to ignore.
By annodomini2019 2025-11-2119:00 Understandable for not using it to write net-new content from outside sources, but agreed that at some point the translation becomes good enough to bridge all language gaps, where it's simply an obvious call that a translation of the more fully written English article is better than relying on a local writer.
By pu_pe 2025-11-2012:36 This looks pretty cool actually, nice job!
Cool project. Seems like your link to "wiki-dump-extractor" is broken.
By zulko 2025-11-212:25 Thank you for reporting this!
Cool project, but seems to be abandoned. At one point I was a subscriber to their premium version, but then started getting spam to the (unique) email address I used for the subscription. I emailed them to warn that their account database might be compromised but never heard back from them (this was back in '22).
Also, back then, their map tiles loading had a very high failure rate when loading, so I wrote a custom caching proxy to make it tolerable (which had built-in retry and also cached any successful response for a very long time).
By jimmydddd 2025-11-2018:34 What is it supposed to do? When I click on a country, I get a pop up with a flag and a link to Wikipedia?
I always wanted something like a "History of human progress" which when zoomed out shows me something like this:
And then I can zoom in on particular areas of time and see smaller milestones.-2000000 Stone tools -1000000 Using fire -6000 Metal tools -6000 Agriculture -4000 Writing 1550 Printing 1888 Telephones 1888 Cars 1903 Planes 1941 Penicillin 1941 First computer 1982 Homecomputers 1983 Mobile phones 1990 The internet 2001 Wikipedia 2004 Facebook 2007 IPhone 2022 ChatGPTBy epaga 2025-11-2012:36 I actually made something quite similar to this with a few friends as an app 14 years ago using Wikipedia data. We called it LineTime, it was a fun little project! (Wow, I even found our video from back then...and man, that really was a LONG time ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW__WZ6pxJ8)
Facebook was not ”human progress”. Future historians will point to its founding as a pivotal point of regression of democracy and humanity.
In a grand view removed 1000 years from now the introduction of digital communication and their network effects must have been pivotal though even if it was in a negative way (which very well may be). I just doubt that would then be a point about Facebook specifically as this is just a tiny slice of that era, I think.
By FridayoLeary 2025-11-2013:321 reply We are a tiny slice of history. A thousand years from now we may be hazily recalled as the period that slavery was abolished (edit: sadly enough we probably won't be) , electricity and computers were invented, 3 of the world wars occured, and the first great population explosion and cultural implosion took place. Most electronic information will be lost so our century will be known as the electronic dark ages. All of this will be studied by the advanced artificial intelligence entities and the sentient cockroaches, the last surviving carbon life forms on earth.
By hermitcrab 2025-11-2112:25 3 world wars?
By prox 2025-11-2012:50 MySpace was much earlier, as well as a few other forerunners
It's the reverse of the Cloaca Maxima, the Roman empire sewage system. Facebook is where unprocessed sewage is fed back to the people, straight into their hands.
By standardUser 2025-11-2016:401 reply You could say the same about fossil fuels, moreso perhaps, but we don't, because that would be pedantic.
Well, there’s no need to be pedantic about that particular point, because nobody put fossil fuels on the list of human progress.
By BurningFrog 2025-11-2017:511 reply I've seen estimates that world population would be billions fewer without fossil fuels.
They have big costs, but also big benefits.
By onraglanroad 2025-11-2019:12 I've seen estimates that the curvature of the world is zero. I'm not obliged to believe every estimate I read.
By Gravityloss 2025-11-2014:171 reply The invention of radio brought us in short order the Volksempfänger or the German people's receiver, and its consequences...
Radio is a technology. Facebook is an application of technology. The internet would be a better comparison which arguably has overwhelming positive impact.
By Gravityloss 2025-11-2014:49 Radio and internet have both had positive and negative effects. One can also say they are only neutral platforms, and people have then created positive and negative things with them. Same can be said about Facebook or Reddit too IMO. At what point does the morality start, complex question.
By tshaddox 2025-11-2014:38 Then surely the same complaint could be made about some particular radio stations.
I put Facebook up there to point towards the beginning of social media.
By Jolter 2025-11-2011:49 Social media was "progress" in the same sense that atomic weapons were.
They certainly have their proponents, and they certainly led to measurable effects on society, so I agree their inventions were important. But "progress"?
I think if social media is WW1, then the launch of Facebook will be considered as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Not in itself sufficient, but a point that really got some important balls rolling.
By hnbad 2025-11-2012:09 That wouldn't be the foundation of Facebook, that would be Facebook introducing the algorithmic timeline. Remember that Facebook explicitly considered it a success because it increased "engagement" while the vast majority of its users reacted negatively to it and when commenting on it indicated that it made them feel worse, that it negatively transformed the kind of social interactions they had on the platform and that it was detrimental to their mental health (because previously Facebook had been centered on 1-to-1 and many-to-1 interactions between peers and now was about 1-to-many interactions with an audience - something I guess Google tried to mitigate in its own social media experiment somewhat unsuccessfully by letting you group your "friends" into "circles").
The revolutionary change that made Facebook uniquely successful wasn't being a social media platform, it was forcing its users (who were so far treating it as a way to keep in touch with acquaintances, old friends and distant family) to compete for each other's attention and offering corporations the opportunity to join that competition - all the while retaining the messaging that the platform is about "social" interactions between peers. And of course mining the everliving #### out of their users' data while non-consensually tracking them across the entire web without their knowledge.
But the "attention is the currency in the marketplace of ideas" concept they launched pretty much defined all "social media" companies from that point on, which is why we nowadays often forget the term used to be much more appropriate in the past (although often constrained to a crowd of very technical nerds).
Oh, and of course they very successfully killed much of the tradition of the Open Web by encouraging a walled garden approach even when it required them to actively defraud their advertisers by lying about the performance of video content. But I think the trophy for launching that extinction event belongs to Apple when they pivoted away from the original web-first concept for the iPhone to the proprietary App Store.
Yes, but I think it makes a nice view to point to some first popular instance of something. Otherwise everything becomes fuzzy. For example, there was AI in the 60s. But ChatGPT was the first that achieved mass adoption.
By psychoslave 2025-11-2018:33 There were printers before Gutenberg, but printing Chinese ideograms was a totally different challenge. Yet the list mention printing, not Gutenberg.
By MandieD 2025-11-2211:44 Gutenberg was active around 1450, not 1550, and that’s important, because Luther nailing those 95 “theses” (complaints) to the door of that church in 1517 wouldn’t have had nearly the impact it did had there not already been a network of moveable type presses throughout Central Europe for a few decades.
Like this? https://history-timeline.site/
By mg 2025-11-217:39 For now it seems to be just a list.
If it had a "significance" attached to each event and a slider one can use to set the significance threshold, then it would be what I mean.
This misses the overview. It has lots and lots of technologies all at the same size. And no way to zoom out.
By MrsPeaches 2025-11-2012:50 It's not ideal, but you can look at the bottom bar and get a sense of density of innovation over a certain time period.
I know it was just an example, but out of curiosity, why 1982 for home computers? Commodore 64?
Not sure why it was listed as '82, but if it was the C64, it makes sense. It's the most sold personal computer ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
Nuance around this fact would be completely lost in 100 years, let alone 1000 from now.
By Jolter 2025-11-2017:25 I’d probably put 1978, but it doesn’t really make much difference if you say it was the TRS-80, Apple II or the c64. The thing happened about then.
By paulirish 2025-11-2012:59 Makes me think of the Histomap, designed in 1931. It's an attractive design for history over a timeseries: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/...
In 1942 he did one for Evolution which is closer to your pitch (log scale Y axis, etc): https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2...
By milst 2025-11-2017:49 started something like this, but without the "zoom" https://timeline-of-everything.milst.dev/
By lawlessone 2025-11-2018:31 seems very 20th and 21st century biased lol.
