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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.

Ahh, sorry mate. Yeah I'm a fan of dark mode stuff. I deliberately tried to dial everything on the map back so empire borders would pop more.
FF just crashed immediately. Twice. Which kinda surprised me in a good way, because usually when it struggles for memory it just hangs there for a couple of minutes until it gets killed by the OS. Cannot remember it being killed that easily by another website.
I loaded this in a new tab on FireFox and continued to scroll HN. I was so confused on why my computer froze.
Cheers on finding this bug; I hadn't tested in FF. Will fix!
Using FF on iPhone, did not have any problems.
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.

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?
I did. Yep. Tried to source everything to credit original creators and make this as transparent as possible.

Getting borders exactly right has been pretty crazy to wrangle. Just doing it with LLMs hasn't proven a good route so I've been hand-correcting things slowly but surely. Long road to go.

cool visuals but the result is totally random
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."

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.

This page crashed my browser too. Opened the comments to see this, guess it's not a me issue.
Same for me (FF 152, Fedora Linux). Fired a bug report, just in case: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2054268
No issues on FF on Linux here. No crashes or memory leaks as far as I can see.
Crashes my Firefox on Android too
That moment when you go from stop 7 to stop 8 in Exhibit, from Grand Duchy of Moscow to Russian Empire...
Love this. Acurate display of humanity and what it does when things run out. Would be cool if ithad a ethnicity map showing a cultures get transported elsewhere or vanish (e.g. the minority purges over the last hundred years in the middle east).
Oh man, that sounds like a great add... and I've no idea where I could get the data sources for that. If you have any pointers lemme know.
Hi: I made this. RIP my Vercel hobbyist tier hosting plan for somehow hitting the front page of Hacker News, but thanks to the OP for posting. A couple things after reading this thread:

1. Appreciate all the comments on how to make this better! This was a passion project to try to fulfill a dream project of mine I've had for well over a decade, and it's far from done. Any of your suggestions on how to improve it (the implementation, the data accuracy, etc.) are things I'll work to improve.

2. If you want to know more about its origins, you can read here: https://www.jtroll.com/writing/introducing-war-atlas.html

3. Yep, this was a Claude project. I'm not an engineer, so using an LLM was a necessary part of the process and it was a lot of fun.

4. I'm painfully aware that when one tries to encapsulate "every single conflict in human history," some data sets become incomplete or incorrect. The problem with this being a passion project in nights & weekends between being a parent and having a job is it's never done and frankly never peer reviewed; so your comments are very useful! Like I said, keep suggestions coming and I'll work on improvements.

The gravity of attempting to map the history of human conflict is heavy, but I hope everyone who took a moment to scrub the timeline here came away with some new insight. It was eye-opening and inspiring to make, and to try to respect that gravity. Cheers, all.

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.
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.)

Wikipedia has a known bias of having mostly the historical events present that western world has written down. This map seems almost balanced, how come it used a better or at least perhaps fairer datasource?
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".
"Conflict" seemed like the broader useful definition. Especially in modern times, defining it as just "wars" felt like it'd leave too much out; and I really wanted to map conflict to show how impactful it's been on societies and cultures.
It missed the Toledo War:

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

But to be fair, this is really cool.

Will add!
Amazing! I just wish there was a way to eliminate the text boxes.
I did add a hidden feature to do this: just press "t" on your keyboard to hide all overlays!
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.
*every = some of them
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.

The irony of this link not providing any static visual alternative to projection
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.

Wow this is really neat. I just did a really fast refresher on the history of (conflict in) Europe by scrolling through!
There are some very important wars missing. For example, I see nothing about Spain's Civil War (1936-1939)
I love this. Did you make it? Why?
This is really neat. Also, the 19th century was far more conflict-prone than I thought.
> 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.

There are a couple of war peaks, wonder what the correlation is (why war went down)
This is a fascinating resource. Wow. Thanks to the OP for posting this.
War is a racket.
This is cool.
Why it matters.
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