[HN Gopher] Photo calorie app Cal AI was built by two teenagers
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Photo calorie app Cal AI was built by two teenagers
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 66 points
Date : 2025-04-03 01:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| moshun wrote:
| Hot | Not Hot Dog
| PaulHoule wrote:
| (1) That is the paradigm of classification, don't knock it, and
|
| (2) I did some work on a pre-product startup that wanted to
| build something like this about 10 years ago, when visual
| recognition was much less developed.
| viccis wrote:
| This is the guy who's been whining on X about not getting into
| elite colleges despite his essay being radioactively bad, right?
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| "Even if there's a 1% chance I continue my rate of success,
| wouldn't they want to take the risk of being able to use my
| name in the future?"
|
| lol
| namaria wrote:
| "60% of the time it works every time!"
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Not enough virtue signaled?
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/05/us/stanford-application-black...
| owenpalmer wrote:
| He's given a TEDx talk so I should listen to him, right?
| cocacola1 wrote:
| Apparently he ended up going to Yale instead.
| jquery wrote:
| That guy walked the talk. It would be virtue signaling if any
| of us did it, but not him.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| Yes, same guy. He wrote a list of all his accomplishments,
| whining about his college rejections. Painfully pretentious
| individual.
| jquery wrote:
| I fed his college essay into ChatGPT and it absolutely
| roasted him.
| viccis wrote:
| Given all the em dashes in his essay, that's probably LLM
| on LLM violence lol
| pseudo0 wrote:
| He should have just written #BLACKLIVESMATTER 100 times,
| because that's apparently all it takes to get into Stanford.
| Honestly though college essays are a bit of a joke, reviewing
| hundreds of them sounds like torture. The lack of rigor is
| probably the point though, since it gives the admissions
| process flexibility to ensure that legacy students get in and
| they meet their DEI targets.
| djohnston wrote:
| The Supreme Court said it's illegal so presumably they've
| knocked that off now.
| acchow wrote:
| > The concept is simple: Take a picture of the food you are about
| to consume, and let the app log calories and macros for you.
|
| > The result is an app that the creators say is 90% accurate,
| which appears to be good enough for many dieters.
|
| It absolutely cannot be "90% accurate". But I'm sure it seems
| "90% plausible" to its millions of users.
|
| Incredible that a product like this can exist. Do people just
| will the fiction into reality?
|
| Incredibly, these are the types of app ideas you'd hear from non-
| tech "entrepreneurs" in 2012 looking for a co-founder. The
| problem being, the engineers knew it was impossible. You could
| fake it I guess by asking Google to search for "similar photos"
| and getting a plausible calorie count half the time. But the
| users wouldn't believe it.
|
| We're now at the phase where any impossible idea can be fully
| marketable by slapping "AI" in the name. ChatGPT feels so magical
| that we now believe unicorns really do exist.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| _" In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the
| easy and the virtually impossible."_
|
| It seems we're at a point where this obligatory xkcd [1] is no
| longer true.
|
| 1. https://xkcd.com/1425/
| exe34 wrote:
| Anything's possible if you're willing to fake it!
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| It took a bit more than 5 years and a (single) research team,
| though.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The bird thing was at least _possible_, though, to a
| reasonable level of accuracy. What they're claiming to do
| here is completely impossible; there is simply no way of even
| vaguely accurately determining the calorie content of food
| based on a picture of the food.
| underyx wrote:
| Even the nutritional labels printed on packaging are only
| around 90% accurate. It's all downhill from there.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Just read the Google Play reviews, the app still has a long way
| to go to be usable.
|
| But it's still a great idea.
|
| Also, they should calculate both the calories and power
| requirements for each meal analyzed. What I mean is, it should
| says something like: this burger has 800 kcal and the analysis
| consumed 1kw of datacenter power. ;)
| Incipient wrote:
| >But it's still a great idea.
|
| Define "great".
|
| It has $2m revenue, so it's clearly a great idea (at this
| stage?) financially and 'people love it' (30% retention)
|
| Technically it's a garbage idea, and I'd say they could get
| class-actioned without good T&Cs. It's literally impossible
| to determine the sugar and fat content of a meal.
|
| I'd never make it for the latter reason, however you clearly
| need to believe in the former to make it big haha.
| spzb wrote:
| 30% retention means that 70% of people who have paid for it
| didn't consider it valuable enough to pay for.
|
| The $2m figure is unverified but, even if it was, turnover
| is meaningless without knowing their expenses. If they're
| burning through PS2.1m in LLM compute and marketing then
| they're losing money.
|
| Plus, the guy seems like a dick so I'm taking his story
| with an enormous pinch of salt.
| imgabe wrote:
| kw is an instantaneous measurement. Energy usage would be kWh
| (kilowatt-hours). Considering it would take a tiny fraction
| of a server's compute for less than a second this would be
| very small.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Right, speed vs distance. Still, I'd love to know the
| numbers.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > But it's still a great idea.
|
| No, it isn't, because it can never work. It is, in general,
| impossible to determine the calorie content of food by
| looking at a picture of it.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Truth is so overrated these days.
| EGreg wrote:
| With AI being weaponized by anyone who wants to make a
| profit, what do you expect?
| djohnston wrote:
| It doesn't take AI, just a profit motive. Remember when
| Russia HACKED THE ELECTION!?!
| megadata wrote:
| Exactly! The are so many alternatives, why do we have to
| place THE truth so highly?
| globular-toast wrote:
| The obvious problem with this is how can it tell how large your
| meal is or how much butter you put in? I can see it working for
| fast/junk food, though.
|
| When I learnt machine learning one of the things was continually
| training the model. Like your spam filter. You show it what is
| spam and eventually it learns. Is this stuff continually trained
| on the user's BMI? That's the only way to tell if a diet is
| working. Or is it just making absolute claims based on universal
| training data?
| nomilk wrote:
| Not sure if it made it to hn, but the founder recently got
| rejected from a number of top universities, despite clear talent:
|
| https://x.com/zach_yadegari/status/1906859987105636667
|
| https://x.com/zach_yadegari/status/1906888487292559531
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Surely this sort of thing happens all the time? Not to excuse
| it, but I really don't think any of those rejections was
| intended to be the personal attack he thinks it is.
| yapyap wrote:
| clear talent?
| xnx wrote:
| > $30M ARR biz
|
| Unlikely
| dividuum wrote:
| Probably pointed the Biz AI app at himself to get that
| estimate.
| closetkantian wrote:
| I'm a college admissions consultant, and this doesn't surprise
| me at all. People don't realize how competitive the landscape
| has become. His test scores and GPA are average at the schools
| he applied to. Really you'd need to know how many APs he took
| and his AP scores to understand how colleges will treat his
| academic record.
|
| To me, his college list indicates that he was mostly prestige
| hunting. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but
| colleges can tell when a student wants to attend based just on
| branding. It comes across as if he wants to use college as a
| resume booster rather than as a place to grow.
|
| The essay reads as a list of accomplishments, with little self-
| reflection. (Side note: referencing Steve Jobs is way
| overdone.)
|
| Long story short, college admissions is not a VC pitch. If I
| had been this guy's advisor, I would have recommended he write
| an essay about something not related to Cal AI. Colleges will
| already know about the app from his activities list (and resume
| and, presumably, recommendation letters). There's a huge missed
| opportunity for him to write about something else.
|
| The essays that worked for my students this year were often
| about more mundane topics that gave insight into their
| character. One of my favorites was from a student who started
| giving free haircuts to classmates. The essay implicitly shows
| that he's thoughtful and well-liked--someone you'd definitely
| want in your college community.
| blitzar wrote:
| > huge missed opportunity for him to write about something
| else
|
| When you are locked in and have the grindset there is nothing
| else.
| closetkantian wrote:
| If he absolutely insisted on writing about Cal AI, I would
| have recommended that he write more about why he was
| inspired to build it and the human impact. Instead, he just
| rattled off metrics that admissions officers will likely
| know from other places in his app.
| blitzar wrote:
| Talking about grindsets, ARR, DAU and getting up at
| 4:30am may be seen as good content for a twitter thread,
| but most grown adults cringe when they read copy and
| pasted fortune cookie wisdom memes.
|
| I would agree, talking about actual human stuff related
| to an actually interesting topic was a wasted oportunity.
| Nobody actually cares what the numbers on the app are,
| least of all admissions officers.
| Jensson wrote:
| > His test scores and GPA are average at the schools he
| applied to.
|
| Average is quite a bit above the floor though, so that just
| makes it sound like he should have been accepted.
| blitzar wrote:
| For ever 100 applicants 3 seats are available. If you are
| "average" amongst the pool of applicants there are 46
| better people than you that won't get in either.
| pizzly wrote:
| Having elite universities scale up the number of seats
| available can be done. Grow the pie instead of having the
| current scarcity mindset. This would actually solve much
| of the current problems. There is no reason you cannot
| have the same or better quality of education with more
| students per university. The only reason this problem
| exists is that by limiting the number of seats you create
| artificial scarcity and thus higher value.
| djohnston wrote:
| Interesting context, thanks for sharing. It sounds like
| college admissions are broken in the same way SWE interviews
| are broken.
| Meekro wrote:
| There was an HN story some years ago about the guy who
| created homebrew -- a Mac app used by a plurality of Google
| employees -- being rejected from a job at Google. This
| seems to follow that pattern: it's not enough that you
| achieve great things and talk/write about your achievement,
| you have to stroke the egos of people who could have never
| accomplished what you did, but still have the power to
| judge you because the bureaucracy has given them that
| power.
| Meekro wrote:
| If the $30M ARR number is true, it's not hard to understand
| why he wants to talk about it as much as possible. Maybe if
| you come from family money, you can hear that kind of figure
| and yawn -- but as someone who came from poverty, I can tell
| you that this is like if the kid built a rocket out of spare
| parts in his garage and visited the moon. There's no words
| for how stunning this is, and everything else in his life
| must seem trivial by comparison.
|
| I can't understand why the admissions officers would rather
| read an essay about a kid who volunteered at an animal
| shelter or something. Anyone can do that.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| It has been trendy in Silicon Valley recently to use
| inappropriate accounting methods to measure ARR.
|
| Joe, a regular guy: Makes $120k at his desk job
|
| Joe, the businessman: Made $20k in 32 days, $228k ARR
|
| Joe, who launched 5 months into development and did 60k in
| the first 2 weeks: $1.5M ARR
|
| In all three of these examples, Joe's financial outcome is
| the same. This business does not have any longevity, and
| all of its revenue is from converting paid advertising of
| various kinds. It's still impressive, but is most likely a
| >10x exaggeration on even the lifetime revenue he makes
| from this. Which is of course circular, because the reason
| he's doing all this is to make a business out of monetising
| the audience of people who want to make money.
|
| All of this is clever social climbing, but is clever social
| climbing the thing that should be rewarded by colleges?
| bfeynman wrote:
| um - I would. Colleges don't want to get panned for hiring
| a scam artist which is exactly what this is. Unlike VC
| where that skill is slightly revered.
|
| The app is fake - at best its puffery, and the essay was
| littered with grammatical errors.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| American system of admissions to me seems so weird. Is it
| only there that unis accept mostly on extra things and not
| grades/test scores itself?
|
| I'm Polish, here the only thing that matters is your final
| test scores, and nothing else. And I think it's same in the
| most of Europe and Asia too, right?
|
| My impression is that American unis care way more about
| social aspect and so on, which I don't understand (but I
| guess it's a fine way of looking at things, too.)
| tekla wrote:
| It's because a good majority of these schools have
| thousands of applicants who might as well be perfect across
| the board grade and test scores wise, so its either they
| flip a coin, or choose some other standard.
|
| The tests need to be harder, but people would complain.
|
| I didn't study for the ACT at all (literally went in
| without knowing anything about it) and got a 35. It's a
| trivial exam.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| What a douchey thing to say. You know the average score
| is like 20 right? Its definitely not trivial
| tekla wrote:
| The average for the SAT is 1050
| https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/scores/what-scores-
| mean/wh...
|
| I got a 1040 on the SAT in the 5th grade. The average
| score is useless for gauging how hard these exams are.
|
| Bragging how you got a 34 on the ACT or 1450+ on the SAT
| for an elite college is like bragging about clubbing a
| seal
| punpunia wrote:
| What you're saying doesn't make any sense, do you just
| enjoy bragging? Hardness of a task only makes sense in
| the context of who is doing the task. The fact that you
| scored highly means it was not a hard test for you
| compared to the average test taker. I could not determine
| this without the average score.
| tekla wrote:
| The fact that the average score for Harvard and similar
| for other elite colleges for the ACT is 34-35 means that
| the national average is worthless for the purposes of
| elite colleges. Majority of people who would even bother
| to apply for them are basically perfect across the board
| grades wise, so its worthless to brag about it.
|
| Bar making exams harder, the only other way is subjective
| methods. I detest subjective methods, but making exams
| harder is very unpopular
| nilkn wrote:
| They're not bragging. They're pointing out that the
| ceiling is dramatically too low, which has caused elite
| universities to spend decades creating more and more
| elaborate and more and more detached and meaningless
| gatekeeping mechanisms. The national average does not
| matter in the context of the nation's most competitive
| schools.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| Parent already discussed this but at tier-one schools
| almost everyone (except legacy/athletic of course) has
| saturated the test score metric. Most applying have a max
| SAT or ACT. Most have a 4.0+ GPA. A 34 ACT score is in the
| bottom 40% of MIT applicants as far as I can tell.
|
| The only thing that distinguishes applicants is the soft
| social stuff.
|
| Japan and South Korea kind of fixed this problem with cram
| schools and ridiculously overtuned college admission exams.
| But e.g. KAIST isn't really comparable to MIT.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| So is this the case of final exams being too easy and
| unis having to adjust around that?
|
| Or is it that way because of some other factors? I was
| thinking how much of this is because of historical
| factors; I assume in times before standarised exams it
| would be a very convinient way of finding new students.
| But then, I don't know how it was historically in
| Europe/Asia.
| Meekro wrote:
| The problem with the SAT is that too many people can score
| above 1500. In the 1500-1600 range, you might have only
| made 1-2 mistakes on the entire test -- it's more luck than
| skill at that point. You could maybe improve things by
| having a harder test for the elite schools, but the Asian
| model is not ideal either. I live in Japan, where many kids
| will spend their evenings in cram school (after a day of
| regular school) to prepare for the absurdly competitive
| college entrance exams. As I recall, South Korea actually
| restricts air travel on the day of their entrance exams so
| some kids won't be disadvantaged by being distracted by the
| noise of the overflight.
|
| It's true that this model is more _fair_ , and that's good,
| but it still feels _wrong_. There are way too many
| professions where you 're de-facto locked out if you didn't
| get the right credentials at the right age, regardless of
| your practical skills. That results in us putting teenagers
| through these absurd trials for no real reason.
| blitzar wrote:
| People are so much more than the single number abstracted
| from 6 hours of exams.
| pizzly wrote:
| Each university could provide a custom entry exam to
| ensure the test is unique and difficult enough to not be
| gamed as easily
| nilkn wrote:
| Just because it doesn't surprise you doesn't mean it's okay.
| You have to acknowledge that as an admissions consultant
| you're part of a small gatekeeping community bubble. Even
| though I attended one of these schools, I can recognize that
| universities have been rapidly losing their credibility, and
| this is only going to accelerate that trend. And by the way,
| this person is probably more accomplished than I am, even
| though I am now quite a bit older and my essay was apparently
| good enough to tick off the checkboxes.
|
| The question you need to be asking is how the university
| system made an enemy out of someone who is clearly one of the
| most talented members of his age cohort in the nation. That's
| a failure no matter how hard you try to explain or justify
| the status quo. It's time for some real accountability and
| soul searching from the system, not excuses. Trying to nit
| pick the essay and pointing out how he should have done X or
| Y instead is completely missing the point.
| ksynwa wrote:
| His new statement:
| https://x.com/zach_yadegari/status/1907511557149569190
| davidcbc wrote:
| Ahhh this makes sense, another mediocre guy blaming
| minorities for his own failures
| skyyler wrote:
| >The student that runs fake clubs and stacks extracurriculars
| is admitted over the student that runs a real business.
|
| Yeah. That's how it works. When you do community building and
| participate in activities in addition to "the grind", people
| like you more.
|
| This doesn't just apply to academia.
| davidcbc wrote:
| Clear talent at making bullshit apps that can't possibly work
| the way he claims maybe
| xnx wrote:
| Everything about this kid sends strong signals that one would
| not want him at their school, workplace, or social environment.
| cratermoon wrote:
| What are his talents?
| enum wrote:
| I think the average American today, including the average
| admissions officer, has a negative view of technology. So, an
| application that is unequivocally optimistic about technology
| is unlikely to be well received. I think that that is what
| happened here. We also have no visibility into letters of
| recommendation, which are likely a big factor.
| bfeynman wrote:
| This is an incredibly poor take - curious as to how you just
| completely made up that ridiculous claim? Ironic as well that
| you think letters of recommendation matter for college
| admissions when they are perfunctory for probably > 95% of
| them. Maybe you shouldn't espouse your opinions on this.
| enum wrote:
| Things like this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-
| policy/2025/04/survey-americans...
|
| I'm also quite sure letters matter for undergraduate
| admissions. They certainly do at the graduate level.
| bfeynman wrote:
| undergrad and graduate school are completely
| different...?
| actuallyalys wrote:
| I mean, maybe he deserved to get into more universities, but he
| did get into solid universities, even if they're not at the
| very top. The application pool is very competitive at top
| universities, and I'm not sure business success should be an
| automatic in.
| nomilk wrote:
| Seems contradictory that there's a market for this since it
| requires the same individual to simultaneously be concerned about
| precisely measuring calories yet willing to pay for a method of
| doing so that's (probably) wildly inaccurate.
| yapyap wrote:
| two teenagers and a whole lot of LLMs
| lysecret wrote:
| I understand the scepticism here. For sure this app isn't 90%
| accurate in any traditional sense.
|
| One note, as someone who also built a calorie tracking app with
| ai as well as lost a good amount of weight with it: accuracy for
| calorie tracking doesn't matter. You can honestly just detect if
| it's a meal and return 600 cals. For most people the simple fact
| that they become aware of what they eat and think about their
| food in an ongoing basis will lead them to loose Weight. Sticking
| to it is the hard part.
| osener wrote:
| It matters a lot if you have specific macro goals. If you don't
| want to lose muscle, it is important to eat high protein
| especially during a cut. And keeping fat and/or carbs low while
| doing this is quite difficult without accurate data.
| maccard wrote:
| This app isn't for those people. Most people don't have macro
| goals.
| krisoft wrote:
| > You can honestly just detect if it's a meal and return 600
| cals.
|
| That's ridiculous. What signal would that provide to the user?
| Let's say someone who is eating double the portions they should
| be eating. How will this hypothetical app help them figure that
| out?
|
| > For most people the simple fact that they become aware of
| what they eat and think about their food in an ongoing basis
| will lead them to loose Weight.
|
| And you think people will " become aware of what they eat" by
| shooting a picture of their food with an app which always say
| "600 cal"? I don't think you thought this through.
| hhh wrote:
| The app sucks, there's no reason to use it when myfitnesspal is
| just leagues better. You can poison it and it will just follow
| the instructions as well.
| terhechte wrote:
| A friend of mine build a similar app last year
| (https://joineat.app) and it didn't go anywhere (even though it
| is objectively the nicer app). So there's a lot of luck involved
| here as well (or maybe he was too early).
| vwolf wrote:
| For your friends app, I had to go into the app store and then
| expand the description to view the key features, where it is
| mentioned that it uses AI similarly as Cal AI. Just based off
| the initial images of Eat compared to Cal AI, then it's much
| more clear what Cal AI does compared to yours (besides
| plastering AI everywhere).
|
| Another thing I noticed is that I saw a random guy on instagram
| with a rather big following being sponsored by Cal AI. Maybe
| your friend was unsuccessful in getting his app out there?
| Although I agree that luck will always play a role, but if the
| public don't understand what your app immediately does and they
| believe AI to be pure magic, then sprinkling that everywhere
| will get something like Cal AI flying.
|
| I still think it is shit from a technical perspective in terms
| of the validity of amount of calories from a single image and
| nothing else. But it seems like that's not what people want,
| inherently because they are lazy. Actually counting calories is
| much harder long term. If regular people now think that this is
| magically replacing this process by just snapping a picture of
| their processed meal, then I can see why it's successful.
| Although quite depressing...
| soulofmischief wrote:
| The worst thing you can do for a bad product is good
| advertising.
| Strongbad536 wrote:
| they did distribution well.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| My reasoning for evaluating the relevancy of this app:
|
| 1. If the food being scanned has a nutrition label, I don't need
| this app.
|
| 2. If there's no nutrition label, the app can't possibly
| extrapolate the nutritional information. It can't estimate
| portion size or the ingredients in the recipe.
|
| 3. If the app can't extrapolate nutritional information, I don't
| need this app.
|
| 4. I don't need this app.
| kh_hk wrote:
| Recently I have started running dish descriptions through
| deepseek-r1:8b to give a rough estimate on calories and it is
| sufficient, at least for my cooking. Of course this will
| hallucinate on complex cases, and arguably simple dishes are
| easy to count. Still, counting by hand is tedious compared.
|
| I am happy with a rough number on a dish, I do not need
| precision to know if I am not eating enough calories. Note
| there are errors on the result and reasoning, but still this
| dish should be around the ballpark of 500 cal. I figure running
| this through a larger model might be more accurate. I wondered
| if maybe I wanted to create an app for that, but I am happy not
| to.
|
| Yes, simple descriptions could be parsed with NLP, and yes,
| calories could be inferred with a database.
| >>> Calorie count of a dish that has: rice, broccoli, two
| pieces of turkey, and a fri ... ed egg. Assume this is
| a normal portion, for instance, there are 80g of rice.. Re
| ... turn the result in a json structure <think>
| Alright, so I need to figure out the calorie count for a dish
| that includes rice, broccoli, two pieces of turkey, and
| a fried egg. The user mentioned it's a normal portion,
| like 80g of rice. Hmm, okay, let me break this down step by
| step. First, I should find out how many
| calories are in each ingredient separately. Let's start
| with the rice. Rice is a common staple, so I think 80g of
| cooked rice has about 130 calories. I've seen that
| number before, but I should double-check to make sure
| it's accurate. Next up is broccoli. Broccoli
| is pretty low in calories, right? A portion of around
| 100g should be about 25-30 calories. Wait, maybe a bit more if
| it's raw or cooked differently, but I think for this
| purpose, 35 calories is reasonable. Then there
| are two pieces of turkey. Turkey can vary based on the cut and
| whether it's cooked. Let's assume these are regular chicken
| breast slices, each around 50g. Each slice would have
| about 110 calories, so two pieces would be around 220
| calories. But I should make sure that I'm not confusing turkey
| with another type of meat. Turkey does tend to be a bit
| higher in calories than chicken sometimes, but 110 per
| slice seems right. Lastly, the fried egg. A
| single fried egg is usually about 140-150 calories
| depending on how it's made. Since there's just one egg, that's
| around 140 calories. I think that's correct because
| yolks add a good number of calories due to fat content.
| Now, adding all these up: rice (130) + broccoli (35) + turkey
| (220) + egg (140). Let me sum them: 130 plus 35 is 165,
| plus 220 makes 385, and then plus 140 gives 525. So the
| total would be around 525 calories. Wait a
| second, maybe I should consider if there are any other
| ingredients or whether portions were different. For
| instance, sometimes turkey portions can be larger or
| smaller depending on the meal. But since it's specified as two
| pieces, each at about 50g, that seems okay.
| Also, considering preparation methods: fried egg might have
| more calories if it's done in a certain way, but I
| think one fried egg is standard. Broccoli's calorie
| count could vary slightly, but for simplicity, the 35 seems
| fine. Is there any chance I'm missing
| something? Maybe adding spices or sauces, but unless
| specified, I shouldn't assume that. So the total should be
| around 525 calories in a normal portion as described.
| </think> ```json {
| "calories": { "rice": 130, "broccoli":
| 35, "turkey": 220, "fried egg": 140,
| "total": 525 } } ```
| moconnor wrote:
| I don't see why you believe 2 would be true. I expect a strong
| correlation between the visual appearance of food and its
| caloric content etc.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _I expect a strong correlation between the visual
| appearance of food and its caloric content_
|
| This doesn't pass even simple scrutiny. There are so many
| caloric ingredients that aren't visible in food. You can't
| tell just by looking whether a rice dish contains half a
| stick of butter.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Or if it's diet coke or regular coke. Yes, it's drinks, not
| food, but the same concept applies.
|
| They claim 90% accuracy, whatever that means, but I have my
| doubts regarding it's usefulness.
| banqjls wrote:
| This is completely wrong. For example, you can increase the
| amount of oil or butter in a recipe, doubling or tripling its
| calorie count, and you would never be able to tell from a
| picture.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I imagine it just autofills the information and then you
| can edit it to make it more accurate
|
| You'd have to be kind of stupid to expect it to actually be
| 100% accurate for all meals
| anothermoron wrote:
| Therefore...
|
| 4. I don't need this app.
| arghwhat wrote:
| The point of the app is to figure out the calories of a
| meal automatically by taking a photo.
|
| Without knowing the amount of sugar, butter, oil, etc. is
| used in a dish, one cannot know if a dish is worth 250
| kilocalories or 750 kilocalories.
|
| If I need to manually fill in details of ingredients and
| amounts to get to the calories to be have an error margin
| of less than 100%, then the app is not useful and is at
| best misleading.
| rsynnott wrote:
| ... So if you already know the answer you can correct it?
| I mean, what possible use is that?
| tekla wrote:
| How does an app know that this piece of chicken cordon bleu
| is actually filled with more bacon and cheese than chicken?
| djtango wrote:
| Most restaurants smuggle obscene amounts of butter and sugar
| into dishes to make them more delicious so you'll come back.
| It's not unreasonable to assume that every subcomponent of a
| recipe might have sugar added individually.
|
| In packaged foods, there is a whole science of masking the
| sugar and fat content to make it more addictive without
| triggering your inbuilt satiety mechanisms [1]. This is what
| today's engagement optimisers did for money in the 50/60s.
|
| You could argue that these "innovations" were precisely to
| subvert the intuition that visual appearance of food (and
| other natural sensors) can be relied on to assess their
| nutritional properties.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)#:~:tex
| t=T...
| staringback wrote:
| > Most restaurants smuggle obscene amounts of butter
|
| God I wish that was true. Butter is far too expensive to do
| that, so restaurants will use the cheapest alternative
| (usually soybean oil with butter flavoring) instead.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| There is absolutely, unequivocally, 0 chance this can be
| accurate within any kind of reasonable bounds. I'm guessing
| you haven't done much calorie tracking if you think this
| could possibly be true.
|
| I can make two dishes that look identical and have +/- 50%
| caloric content, easily.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| 1 tbsp of animal fat has about 900 calories.
|
| 1 tbsp of olive oil has 135 calories.
|
| How would the app know which fat the food was cooked in?
| banqjls wrote:
| That's not true. They have the same amount of calories
| roughly. It's physically impossible for animal fat to have
| that many calories. Tallow has 900 calories per 100 grams
| while olive oil has 884. They are almost pure fat and pure
| fat has 9 calories per gram.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _1 tbsp of animal fat has about 900 calories._
|
| This is extremely false. Please verify your sources better
| (and apply a skosh of critical thinking).
|
| > _1 tbsp of olive oil has 135 calories._
|
| This is false too, but at least it's in the right ballpark.
| davidcbc wrote:
| > This is extremely false. Please verify your sources
| better
|
| Sorry! I was using Cal AI
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Ok, that made me laugh.
| xnx wrote:
| Try telling a picture of diet coke from regular coke apart.
| jwhiles wrote:
| It's not about being right, it's about appearing to be right
| blitzar wrote:
| > It's not about being right, it's about appearing to be
| right
|
| What you need is a LLM.
| fph wrote:
| Isn't this basically what they used, a multimodal AI?
| briankelly wrote:
| I think the key insight here is that actually counting
| calories is not needed by the app's demographic. Possibly
| just getting them to pay attention to what they are eating is
| enough for them to see progress or at least feel like they
| are doing something.
| improbableinf wrote:
| "You can count calories and sugar content of the meal using just
| a camera"
|
| "You can have a full self driving car with just a few cameras"
|
| In a way both things are very much similar and the real accuracy
| is more of a fiction than reality.
| weregiraffe wrote:
| Self driving car is far more plausible, we drive cars with
| visual input alone. But a camera can't chemically analyse the
| insides of your dish.
| improbableinf wrote:
| That's exactly the point. We drive cars with visual input
| alone and have so many crashes, injuries and deaths every
| day.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> we drive cars with visual input alone._
|
| That's unlikely. Try driving in a snowstorm, where visual
| inputs become effectively useless, and you quickly realize
| how much the motion inputs are factored in as well.
| ilikeatari wrote:
| I legitimately drove full month with near zero interventions in
| FSD. The second statement is achievable in my opinion. Most
| people have not experienced hw4 with latest releases.
| financetechbro wrote:
| FSD with just cameras for input breaks down in times of low
| visibility (fog, smoke, heavy rain). That's a straightforward
| fact
| ilikeatari wrote:
| That's an interesting comment, but I have driven in heavy
| rain, and it worked just fine. Can you share how you
| arrived at your conclusion? I mean there is a limit to
| where the obstruction is so intense that even human cannot
| drive I get that but its actually performing fine for me in
| heavy rain that is still drivable for a human.
| paxys wrote:
| They are very different problems. You can attach every kind of
| sensor to the phone and get HD images, lidar scan, 3D model,
| heat signature and whatever other signal you want, but you
| still won't be able to figure out calories in a piece of food
| without breaking it apart at a molecular level. There's just
| too much hidden information. What sensor will tell you how many
| tablespoons of oil the chef used to fry onions for the sauce?
| Heck the chef himself probably won't be able to tell you.
| deepnotderp wrote:
| Hyperspectral camera?
| cedws wrote:
| >But he looked around. "We were surrounded by people that were in
| their late 20s or 30s all day. And I realized that if I didn't go
| to college, this is what life would be like."
|
| Lol, I can relate. I started working in an office when I was 16,
| now 24, and regretting wasting my youth grinding when I could
| have been having fun in a period of your life you only get to
| experience once.
|
| Don't grow up too fast kids. Make stupid decisions and ride out
| your youth as long as you can afford to.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| >>But he looked around. "We were surrounded by people that were
| in their late 20s or 30s all day. And I realized that if I
| didn't go to college, this is what life would be like."
|
| Its just a marketing stunt. They complain about not getting
| into Harvard but he could literally rent a penthouse in
| Cambridge, hang out on the campus throw big parties and get 90%
| of the experience while supposedly running a 30M ARR company.
| Absolutely no benefit to actually enrolling except ego.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| You're 24? Don't take this the wrong way but you have loads of
| time to do "youth shit."
|
| As you get older, people expect you to be more competent in
| life and work. If you leave work for two years to bike around
| the world, it'll be a fabulous adventure and will in the grand
| scheme of things have little consequence down the road. Try
| that when you have a kid!
| sureglymop wrote:
| You're just defining your own fate here if you think 24 is so
| much older and different than 16. But also, perhaps your
| situation now would be different without the grind you went
| through? Instead of regretting anything I think you could just
| try to enjoy your youth now.
| nsoonhui wrote:
| The comments from HNers in this case are interesting.
|
| Usually if a teenage hacker builds something, the HNers would
| respond with enthusiasm, but then, this is a guy who builds
| *something* and *actually* makes a good business out of it, at
| the same time maintains his high school life, and all we have is
| skepticism and discouragement.
| spzb wrote:
| It's almost as if people are reading the article and critically
| evaluating the product.
| rsynnott wrote:
| It is _not_ a good business; the thing does not, and cannot,
| work.
| azan_ wrote:
| It's good business, just bad product.
| jashmatthews wrote:
| While technologically cool the app is bullshit. 90% accurate
| isn't accurate enough for the job and it's effectively making
| shit up.
|
| Are you eating a 10% calorie deficit or a 10% calorie surplus?
| Cal AI can't tell you.
|
| Not possible to know accurately enough from a picture.
| Potentially ever.
| bberenberg wrote:
| My understanding is that even nutrition packaging is often off
| by up to 30%. Sorry, no source, just what I've heard a number
| of times. If I want to diet I typically build this in and it
| works well. If they're actually off by 10% that's not terrible.
|
| But I tried one of these apps years ago and it went a step
| further than photos. It used the front facing camera on iPhones
| to build a 3d model of the food and measure its volume as well.
| Even that was off by more up to 50% not 10%.
|
| The interesting thing I found, and it's obvious when you read
| it but not when you're trying to diet, is if you don't layer
| food on top of itself or other food, you (and a camera based
| calorie counter) will have a much better understanding of how
| much you're eating. Bowls / mounds of food will deceive you.
| tekla wrote:
| There is no way its off that much.
|
| Standard for cutting is about 500 calories deficit, for 1lbs
| lost a week. Lets say 2500 calories daily standard. That's
| 20%. If food packaging was off by 30%, food nutrition
| planning would be worthless, but we know it isn't because we
| see fairly consistent results from weightlifters (assuming
| they're actually weighing their food and not eyeballing/using
| a PoS app like this)
| yorwba wrote:
| NIST says "in general NIST's measurements are accurate to
| within 2% to 5% for nutrient elements (such as sodium,
| calcium and potassium), macronutrients (fats, proteins and
| carbohydrates), amino acids and fatty acids. Its measurements
| are accurate to within 5% to 10% for water-soluble vitamins
| (such as vitamin C) and 10% to 15% for fat-soluble vitamins
| (such as vitamin D)." https://www.nist.gov/how-do-you-
| measure-it/how-do-you-know-y...
|
| Maybe there's something where they're off by 30%, but how
| many people even track how much vitamin D they get from food?
| krisoft wrote:
| Had a friend who came to me with the same idea. In challenge of
| the idea I sent a picture of some chopped cucumbers and tomatoes,
| and an other picture with the same chopped vegetables drizzled
| with a copious amount of olive oil. I asked if they can tell
| which one is which. The difference was hundreds of calories and
| you could not tell which one is which (least of all how much oil
| there is on the one with the oil.)
|
| That of course feels like a "weird" edge case, but it illustrates
| the general problem that butter/oil/sugars can pack a lot of
| calories and have no or almost no visual signature.
| robotnixon wrote:
| That just sounds like the difference between a salad with and
| without dressing on it. Maybe not so weird.
| everyone wrote:
| The 1st issue I'd think of would be scale.. eg. identical
| looking plate of food in EU vs USA. The images might look
| identical but the USA one would be scaled up and contain much
| more calories. Everything that could be in the image for scale
| reference would also be scaled up along with the food.
| tracker1 wrote:
| This is where something like a fork on the plate/bowl might
| help.
| heymijo wrote:
| You're right, but I think the general public is largely
| ignorant about calories and nutrition. Even basics like 4 cals
| per gram of protein and carbohydrate, 7 for alcohol, 9 for
| fats. Or even what a carbohydrate really is versus a "sugar",
| which people talk about as bad.
|
| There's a sweet spot for an app that is inaccurate with a
| market that wants it but doesn't understand how inaccurate it
| is.
|
| Kind of like how I could vibe code an app, get it to "work",
| think it's great and be ignorant of the many ways it will break
| or isn't working that a knowledgeable developer could.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The general public's understanding of food is still stuck in
| 1990s "destroy all fats (and completely ignore the sugar we
| replaced it with)" diet culture.
|
| The fact that people still believe in reducing fat _as it 's
| own goal_ (instead of being an easy way to reduce calorie
| content) is a testament to how bad the public is at
| identifying fact from fiction.
|
| Then you have shit like the influencer foods, "Feastables"
| and "Hydration beverage" Prime, which is just flat soda. It's
| pathetic.
|
| Or think of all the dude bros who insist on dry scooping cup
| fulls of protein+caffeine powder, and going home to gorge
| themselves on two pounds of chicken breast, and yet doing
| absurdly normal amounts of weightlifting or exercise that
| requires no modifications to their already protein overloaded
| American diet.
|
| Diet culture is what is fucking American health. People read
| fucking tabloids that bad-faith regurgitate poorly done
| "science", funded by the council for selling more food, and
| insist that since "Woman's Health" says that scientists say
| chocolate both kills and saves you, scientists are dumb and
| know nothing, even though THE ACTUAL SCIENCE NEVER CONCLUDED
| ANYTHING, because the scientific paper was just an
| observational study!
| tracker1 wrote:
| Related is the fear some have of Saturated Fats and Meat.
| So many people don't even realize that the body does need
| some Saturated Fats, or that fats are often a mix of them
| and vary by the species, breed and how they're fed.
|
| It doesn't help in how far some foods have been bred in the
| past century and a half in particular. Or how different
| people with different genetics may react to certain foods.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Everyone keeps using this example, but you have the exact same
| problem calorie counting any food that might be lathered in
| fat. It's why people underestimate their calorie intake by
| 30%+.
|
| You could level the same criticism at Cronometer and
| MacroFactor when you try to log food you received at a
| restaurant. Yet those apps are still useful (and I think
| requisite) for knowing what you're eating. And you should
| probably 1.5x the calorie estimation when you eat out.
|
| What's interesting is whether this app can accurately estimate
| food at all. If it can, then that's a huge win and you can add
| your own buffer zone for oils like you already have to do when
| you count calories. ...Or chill on the butter and restaurant
| food when you're supposedly trying to lose weight.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Everyone keeps using this example, but you have the exact
| same problem calorie counting any food that might be lathered
| in fat.
|
| Not really. In practice you need to know the ingredients to
| estimate the caloric value. Either because you prepared the
| meal, or because someone who wrote the recipe of it
| calculated and wrote it on the packaging/menu.
|
| > If it can, then that's a huge win
|
| But that's the point of the example. That it can't. If it
| could, that would be good. But it can't do it, and not
| because the app is deficient in some way, but because the
| necessary information is not available in the image.
|
| > Or chill on the butter and restaurant food when you're
| supposedly trying to lose weight.
|
| Yes of course. And that is one of the things you learn when
| you do calorie counting. The practice drives home that
| message, and many others. But you are not going to learn that
| if the app hides the signal from you.
| davidcbc wrote:
| > What's interesting is whether this app can accurately
| estimate food at all.
|
| Spoiler: It can't. It is physically impossible to determine
| calories from pictures of food.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| That's not a weird edge case at all. Adding oil to food is one
| of the most common ways to add calories (intentionally or not).
|
| A salad wouldn't even be the hardest case to detect, since raw
| vegetables don't soak up as much oil as other kinds of food.
| ralfd wrote:
| > In challenge of the idea
|
| This was technically correct but missed out on a viral app and
| millions of revenue?
| Beijinger wrote:
| I considered another app with a buddy but we never build it. A
| food diary for people with medical problems.
|
| Take a picture of everything you eat and correlate it with
| symptoms. Have AI figure out what may be a trigger.
|
| (I have a super rare food disease that took years to figure out
| and made my life unbearable).
| lurkingllama wrote:
| Anyone who has participated in calorie-tracking for an extended
| period of time can tell you that the visual appearance of food
| can be highly misleading to the number of calories in it.
|
| I'm all for making it easier for people to lose weight but this
| app may honestly have the reverse effect. If the app estimates
| calories too low (and therefore the individual eats more), many
| people will get frustrated with the lack of progress and give up.
| If the app estimates too high, the individual will lose weight,
| but diet fatigue and other negative side effects of being at a
| >500 calorie deficit may make the diet too difficult to maintain.
| mapt wrote:
| A lot of the testimonial photos for this show the AI literally
| deciphering the text Nutrition Information label.
|
| Any other interpretive situation based solely on a camera has
| so many inherent flaws as to render this almost useless.
| staringback wrote:
| The nutritional information label that lists the calories in
| the food? What is the point of that?
| mapt wrote:
| Steelmanning this: You take your phone out and snap a
| picture and it gets added to a running total without typing
| into a tiny keyboard or doing any math. You consult your
| total next time you're thinking of eating.
|
| Critiquing: You still need to figure out serving sizes -
| it's going to need to ask how many servings. Nutrition
| labels also aren't available for any number of things.
| ge96 wrote:
| I think even if you have volume factored in like
| photogrammetry/lidar, the inside of the food could be
| something else too like a chunk of meat inside potatoes
| _bin_ wrote:
| I actually went over this recently with someone who wanted to
| build something similar. The conclusion was this is a very
| difficult problem to solve, probably intractable to some
| extent. You can't see the complete composition of the food with
| a standard camera. E.g. I make a salad which is maybe 300
| calories. Then I sprinkle some croutons and bacon on top, which
| will mostly be in the middle. Then I put dressing on it, which
| is hard to estimate. That dressing hides the bacon and croutons
| and, since it contains a lot of oil, could seriously skew the
| measurement one way or the other. Now I mix it all around and
| the AI can't tell how much dressing was used at all.
|
| I pick this example because I've seen specifically this cause
| problems for people trying to lose weight. They think their
| eating a salad, not realizing they've thrown an extra 500
| calories on top.
|
| Another case: I sit down to breakfast, having made myself eggs
| and toast. One of if not the largest contributor to my calorie
| intake will be the amount of butter on my toast. If I use four
| pats that will probably exceed my calorie intake from eggs. If
| I use one, not as much. I sincerely doubt it's realistic to
| tell the difference with any sort of precision.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Flashback to "Real Men of Genious" ads ... "Here's to you,
| Mister Giant Taco Salad Inventor."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXWq2AVlrsY
| tracker1 wrote:
| Anecdote of one... about 8 years ago I put a lot of effort into
| losing weight... when I was eatng a 1500 calorie/day diet, I
| wasn't losing weight... per a nutritionist friend who looked at
| what I was eating suggested closer to 2800 (6'1" tall, 370# at
| the time) and when I did, I started losing weight. Note this
| was combined with crossfit 3-4 days a week both on the lower
| and higher calorie intake.
|
| If you have a really dysregulated metabolism, your body can
| definitely work against you when consuming too little.
| siva7 wrote:
| Am i right in assuming this is app is just an openai prompt
| wrapped as a app?
| acc_297 wrote:
| If so then what a colossal waste of our planetary carbon
| budget. I don't know what the backend on this app is (maybe it
| was done properly i really hope so) but surely there is a
| solution which maintains or surpasses the accuracy of an LLM
| and uses <1% of the compute resources.
|
| Like a small vision model combined with the size/measurements
| data from the AR sensors modern phones come with and an open
| source caloric values database should achieve the 90% accuracy
| they are claiming.
|
| Ronald Wright writes about "progress traps" in A Short History
| of Progress. It's been awhile since I read that but I think
| about it more and more these days with AI products on the rise.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| No, this is a completely unsolvable problem with just a
| camera.
|
| You cannot differentiate a high calorie meal from a low
| calorie meal on sight alone.
|
| The waste is selling a lie, enabled by AI bullshit artists
| and the public's seeming inability to understand that the US
| has no legal (or market most of the time) requirements to be
| truthful, upfront, or honest in marketing.
|
| Like people just take this shit at face value and I don't
| understand how you can live in the US for more than a few
| years and not recognize that marketing is just lies, like not
| even smart or clever lies.
| jake_morrison wrote:
| I thought about doing this years ago, but without AI, the only
| way was to have people do the analysis. I thought this was bad
| karma, as I would end up paying people in Bangladesh to look at
| the stuff that Americans eat.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| A lot of what Americans eat is kinda grim? I couldn't eat the
| sausage at the hotel breakfast in Little Rock this morning
| because it tasted like new vinyl smells.
|
| Wrt Bangladesh... I imagine the job might be a little harder
| during Ramadan.
| goodasgold444 wrote:
| I'll bite - I'm an early adopter, and paying user, I paid for the
| year, but won't renew. For what it's worth, the app UI is dead
| simple and it makes it easier to track macros. I'll adjust the
| inputs to what I know I'm eating, and I rarely depend on the "AI
| camera" I usually just use the UPC barcode scanner. I'm mainly
| focused on protein intake and making sure I hit those goals. It
| does a decent job with simple foods, which is healthier for me to
| eat. I'll break each ingredient down, combine them into meals,
| then save them. Rinse and repeat for tracking. It's better than a
| spreadsheet, and I get to see the photos of what I'm eating.
|
| That being said, I'm not going to renew next year. But there is
| something to this product that is not the "AI" but the simplicity
| vs. MyFitnessPal which has a ton of features I don't really need.
|
| The critiques are good, but for me, the simplicity of the app is
| the most attractive part for me.
| volkk wrote:
| so why are you not renewing?
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| Yeah I didn't get either the reason for not renewing
| tjpnz wrote:
| Been keeping a food diary for several months now. I did have to
| spend a bit of time at the beginning working out the calorie
| content of the food I eat. But after that it's mostly just copy +
| paste - turned out I was far more of a creature of habit than I
| thought.
|
| If you want to derive any benefit from doing this you should
| really be trying to get your numbers correct from the start. I
| wouldn't leave that to a LLM.
| bilater wrote:
| Many people will analyze this from a tech perspective. I urge you
| not to. This isn't about whether the technology is good or bad.
| The real reason they succeeded is their mastery of marketing,
| particularly TikTok and influencer marketing. Understanding
| distribution is far more important than knowing how to build
| something, and this is truer now than ever before. I know it
| stings but its the truth.
| balls187 wrote:
| I didn't analyze this for either: rahter what is what is the
| typical outcome for young humans who achieve a high degree of
| success/fame before their prefrontal cortex is fully formed.
|
| As we understand more about brain development in kids, I think
| and under studied aspect are kids who got access to a lot more
| money than normal typical kids have, and the results such
| wealth brings.
| echelon wrote:
| > I think and under studied aspect are kids who got access to
| a lot more money than normal typical kids have, and the
| results such wealth brings.
|
| As opposed to the kids born on planets without atmospheric
| oxygen, of course. Those kids don't stand a chance.
|
| There's always some advantage others have. Money, good looks,
| distribution, connections, right place right time.
|
| "Wealth inequality" isn't going to disappear overnight, and
| lamenting about it won't get us closer to success.
|
| We're all dropped into the Darwinian gradient landscape. Some
| of us have better starting positions. While we sit and wait
| for policy decisions to make things easier, our job remains
| to find gradients that aren't too steep, aren't over-explored
| by the masses, and that give us some modicum of joy to spend
| our lives upon.
|
| The minnows and gazelles have it much worse than us. Praying
| mantises, anglerfish, and the hosts for the parasitoid wasps
| are practically living in a daily Kafkaesque horror.
| Meanwhile we're in our own dopamine drip Disneyland with
| near-infinite degrees of freedom and plenty of years on the
| clock (for most of us).
|
| Seneca said some good things about this.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I think you missed the part about "[achieving] a high
| degree of success", in particular the achievement. They are
| referring to young people who make a successful business
| rather than those who are born to parents who made a
| successful business.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The point of looking at this from a technical perspective
| though is that the underlying tech doesn't actually work, and
| it's just a smoke and mirrors game built on marketing.
|
| Like Theranos. And Nikola. And Fyre Festival. Etc.
|
| Age is irrelevant, unless we're trying to tell youngsters that
| fraud is an acceptable means to get ahead in life. But then
| again given our current political environment maybe that _is_
| what we 're trying to tell the next generation.
|
| EDIT: the app now also just reads nutrition labels as a
| backstop. Nutrition labels _already_ include the calorie data,
| so the app isn 't doing anything there.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| > But then again given our current political environment
| maybe that is what we're trying to tell the next generation.
|
| There's no trying.
|
| The US has played "Just grift your way to money" as a
| standard means of operating since at least the dotcom boom. A
| reason so many young and poorly educated people jump at
| obvious MLM type scams and other scams is because they feel
| that _everything_ is a scam, so surely they can get in on it
| too, right?
|
| And everything IS a scam. Coke doubled in price in the past 5
| years. I promise you their costs did not double. Their costs
| are Labor (highly automated), water (they almost always have
| sweetheart deals for dirt cheap water, cheaper than you pay),
| and one of the most subsidized commodities available, HFCS,
| or alternatively, a sprinkle of dirt cheap chemicals for
| their diet sodas.
|
| People feel that, even when they don't understand or even
| recognize it.
|
| People recognize that the US has been a scammy free for all
| for decades now. Everyone for themselves, fuck you, got mine.
|
| We are on like the third generation raised this way. The
| people who took "Greed is good" to heart had kids, and raised
| them with it as a core principle.
|
| Jordan Belfort, the guy who Wolf Of Wall Street is based on
| and spent time in prison for scamming his clients in
| basically the same way modern crypto pump and dumps work, now
| sells out auditoriums as a _motivational speaker_ for fucks
| sake.
|
| The kids LOOK UP TO SCAMMERS
| yqiang wrote:
| I'm working on an app in this area [1], and I've spent a lot of
| time exploring how to responsibly use AI for food tracking.
|
| My conclusion is that while AI is excellent for augmenting your
| tracking experience, it's not yet reliable enough to be the sole
| tracking method. Consistency is key to successful food tracking,
| and AI can certainly help users avoid the common issue of missing
| a meal and losing momentum. However, inaccuracies, like
| consistently being off by 100-200 calories per day, can
| significantly impact results, especially for those on lower-
| calorie diets (like 1,200-1,500 calories/day, which is common for
| many women due to their physical size).
|
| With FitBee I landed on communicating to the user that these are
| estimates and you probably shouldn't use it as your primary
| method of tracking calories.
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fitbee-calorie-macro-
| counter/i...
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I propose a browser plugin to display calories on all social
| media food selfie posts.
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