Posted by PaulHoule 3 days ago
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.
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.
Wait, ARE people eating that? Have I been out of the game too long?
Any other interpretive situation based solely on a camera has so many inherent flaws as to render this almost useless.
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.
If you have a really dysregulated metabolism, your body can definitely work against you when consuming too little.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Spoiler: It can't. It is physically impossible to determine calories from pictures of food.
This was technically correct but missed out on a viral app and millions of revenue?
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.
What you need is a LLM.
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
}
}
```Some people have values and morals that they live by.
You'd have to be kind of stupid to expect it to actually be 100% accurate for all meals
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.
4. I don't need this app.
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)#:~:text=T...
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.
I can make two dishes that look identical and have +/- 50% caloric content, easily.
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.
They claim 90% accuracy, whatever that means, but I have my doubts regarding it's usefulness.
1 tbsp of olive oil has 135 calories.
How would the app know which fat the food was cooked in?
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.
Sorry! I was using Cal AI
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.
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.
I'm not lamenting wealth inequality, nor discussing other advantages (real or perceived).
I think that achieving success and wealth (e.g. not simply being born with it) has an impact on the development of a human brain, based in large part the behavior of rich/famous/successful young adults, AND what their personalities ultimately become once the have fully formed brains (~27 years old).
Specific to these teenagers, how will effectively becoming "rich" and successful at such a young age change the final formation of their brains, and ultimately shape their behavior?
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.
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
“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.
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.
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.
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!
I made a new friend at a hackathon recently. Since you're here on hacker news you could try attending events such as programming meetups, hackathons, tech workshops, conventions etc. It's easier to bond when there are mutual interests.
Otherwise try joining some sports related club, e.g. a local gymnastics or football club or even just a jogging group.
It is different but there are people who want to hang out, even if in the context of doing some other activity.
But a lot of people sit around and have zero social hobbies and claim it’s hard to meet people in adulthood.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...