Show HN: A living Vancouver. Connor is walking dogs at the SPCA this morning https://ift.tt/jfiBIqx

Show HN: A living Vancouver. Connor is walking dogs at the SPCA this morning I've spent most of my career in marketing, which for the last few years has meant building consumer personas for campaigns. I wanted to see if I could make these real, living in real neighborhoods, had real weather, real budgets, real Saturday lunches. I always wanted to build a world, not a segment. This is that. 140 people so far, split across Vancouver (100), San Francisco (20), and Tokyo (20). Each one is about 1,000 lines of profile — family, finances, daily schedule, health, worldview, media diet, the channels you'd actually reach them through and the ones that will explicitly never work on them. Demographics are census-grounded income, age, ethnicity, household composition follow normal distributions against StatsCan, ACS, and Japanese e-Stat data, so the panel is roughly representative of the city instead of representative of whatever's overrepresented in an LLM's training corpus. The specific details come from real stories. They live in real local time on a live map. Right now it's Saturday 11:32 AM in Vancouver. Connor Hughes, a 31-year-old software developer at Clio in Gastown, is on his SPCA volunteer shift, he walks shelter dogs at the Boundary Road location every other Saturday morning. Hassan Khoury is in the morning lunch rush with Tony at his Lebanese café — it's his busiest day of the week. Ahmad Noori is pulling Saturday overtime on a construction site. Jordan Whitehorse is on mid-shift at East Cafe on Hastings. Every day is unique, no two days repeat. A 3 AM job fetches live data: weather from Open-Meteo, grocery CPI from StatsCan food vectors, Metro Vancouver transit delays from Google Routes API against specific corridors, Vancouver gas prices, sunrise and sunset. Each persona has a modifier file that reacts to all of it. When Vancouver gas hits $1.85/L, Jaspreet the long-haul trucker's Coquihalla run to Calgary stops feeling worth it, his margins are thin, his mood takes a hit. When food CPI spikes, Gurinder at the Amazon warehouse stops buying the $9 Subway and brings roti from home. A health flare rolls probabilistically each morning which maybe nothing, maybe Tanya's six month old had a rough night, maybe Frank's back is acting up. The days stack up and get remembered. Every persona has a journal, today's entry in a markdown file, a week of them compressed into a "dream" of ~30 lines that keeps the shape without the texture, a month compressed into ~15 lines. It's their journal. I'm not writing it; the simulation is. Click any persona to open their detail, or hit "Talk to [name]" to have a conversation and they run on Claude Haiku with their full profile and recent diary entries as context. Not a product, not a startup, just a thing I've been quietly working on. They feel, in a way I didn't expect, like my fully grown kids. Happy to answer questions. https://brasilia-phi.vercel.app April 12, 2026 at 12:12AM