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.

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

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.

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."

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

But to be fair, this is really cool.

Robinson Projection would be much more accurate.

> 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