Graphical Linear Algebra (graphicallinearalgebra.net)
235 points by hyperbrainer 16h ago 17 comments
eBPF: Connecting with Container Runtimes (h0x0er.github.io)
52 points by forxtrot 12h ago 7 comments
I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected
245 gnabgib 292 6/8/2025, 11:25:41 PM lifehacker.com ↗
We've published in top peer reviewed academic conferences and our algorithm (can't say the same for other apps) IS actually more accurate than people trying to visually estimate portion size, but the truth is both are quite inaccurate.
Most people won't spend the time to track, so photo logging is a faster and easier approximation. If you want more accurate logging you should use the voice logging feature and a kitchen scale (also completely free in our app).
As many mention the goal is to learn, not to tediously track every little thing. Do what's sustainable for you and helps achieve your health and fitness goals.
User: "This (AI product) doesn't work!"
Product Owner: "Well, humans are also bad at that."
That's not the promise of these apps in general! The whole selling point of AI is that they're vastly better - if my eyeball estimate is "pretty inaccurate" and by your own admission the app is "pretty inaccurate" then why the hell would I use your app??
From the very top of the page you linked:
> SnapCalorie is the first app where you can take a picture of any meal and get an accurate calorie count and nutrition in seconds
(emphasis mine)
I've spent the last 10 years of my life researching why this is and how I can help. What I've heard from countless users is that it takes to long to track what they're eating and learn how they can improve.
I've never tried to claim that the selling point of AI is that it's "vastly better", I've just tried to build tools to help people. The voice note feature in our app accompanied by a kitchen scale is the most accurate thing you can do to track nutrition and it actually is much faster than what existed on the market before we launched.
The photo logging feature is more accurate than what most users did before we launched and is by far the fastest way you can track, but yes, it has it's limitations, and unlike our competitors I won't pretend it's perfect. If you're eating out at dinner, and the alternative would be you didn't log the meal, it's a great option.
At the end of the day accuracy actually is not the most important thing if you really care about helping people. Education is what matters. People need to learn which foods and ingredients are the problematic ones and why. Our app accomplishes that better than any solution that existed on the market before we launched.
Ozempic be damned for at least 1/4 on it and or considering it.
Our app is free to use the most accurate model, ChatGPT is paid for the most accurate model and has usage limits.
Our app plots your data on nice charts and has visuals specific to understanding your data over time visually (e.g. how has my sodium intake been changing day over day or what has my average weekly caloric intake been when deducting active calories from fitness trackers).
Our app integrates with Apple Health and soon will integrate with Android Fit so you can export your data to other apps, share with health professionals, etc.
Not to nitpick, but "better" isn't on a single axis. Taking a photo is a better experience than searching and keying in every component, even if the accuracy is identical.
AI tools don't even have to be "vastly" better. They could be, and often are, even worse on several axes, because they often trade quality for ease-of-use.
You may assign a lower weight to the ease-of-use axis (as engineers, we tend to), but then you're likely not the ideal customer for many of today's AI products.
It begins with that i haven't even tried out anything, before logging in - that the google store popup comes up that I should rate the App - on the same screen you even tell users please rate us - HOW?? HOW should i rate something now that i havent even used yet.
Then, like in the 20th century i have to supply an e-mail/password and wait for a OTP instead of just using the Google EcoSystem and let me login with my existing Google Account.
After that, i went through at least 10 pages of bullshit were I have to give my information, weight/height/metabolic rate etc - even adjusting the calorie deficit didnt work outright if it is 0 and you want to put a minus before it it just goes away. You first have to enter a postive > 0 value to be able to ad a Minus.
Mind you, i just want to see what that App is about what can it do - i don't want to enter and click next next for a gazillion informations first after being annoyed by "please rate us".
Then, after completing the "setup" i get a fullscreen overlay to annoy me about PREMIUM membership - AGAIN I HAVE NOT USED ONE SINGLE FUNCTION OF YOUR APP YET.
But not enough, I want to try it out with a photo from my meal today and on the camera lense screen it annoys me again with PREMIUM!!! You can only do 3 Photos a day. Dude your app is so predatory its just trash.
Then i select the photo from the gallery and have to CROP it??? Its a fullscreen picture of just the meal - nothing else and you annoy me with cropping it?
Then, the actual function - while it recognized my meal it was off by the calorie count and weight by a factor of 2. The same picture, for free, google gemini flash recognized correctly too and gave an accurate display of average calories (it approx. 450g). I added the exact weight to gemini afterwards to have the correct estimation and it gave me the real value.
I tried to do the same in your app, instead of 300g i edited the entry and choose 600g. And clicked save. I was puzzled that nothing changed. Then i saw the portion size went from 1 to 0.5 - just by me changing from 300g to 600g. What a stupid user experience. So i had to change the weight AND return back the portion size to 1.
Again, everything your App does apart from massively annoying users, gemini and chatgpt can do better for free.
If the goal is to learn then accurate information is important, although I suppose it's harder to get a VC to fund.
Our app has the fruit and veg counters ABOVE the calorie meter on the dashboard. The reason for this is that maximization mindset (e.g. maximizing fruits and veg) is way healthier than a minimization mindset (e.g. minimizing calories or carbs).
We actually even tried to fully remove calories from the app at some point but we had a vast majority of users churn and decided it would be healthier for people who want calorie tracking to stick with our app by having it present, but requiring them to scroll past the features that promote a healthier mindset to get there. Feedback from users has been amazing that they've slowly started focusing more on fruits and veg.
> SnapCalorie is the first app where you can take a picture of any meal and get an accurate calorie count and nutrition in seconds
This is from your website. It is pure fiction. You admit as much in your first post
If there's something we missed on your food shoot me a DM, I'd love to dig in.
Some of the value also just comes from writing down what you eat, and noting the snacks, dressings, glasses of wine etc that you forget about but all add up.
Ultimately, there is no silver bullet in nutrition.
You can't tell if I cooked my scrambled eggs in the rendered fat from the sausage I cooked just before it, or if I used a teaspoon of olive oil
There's too many sources of calories you just can't see at all. I made jambalaya last night. If I'd sauteed the veggies in a tablespoon of oil or a cup of oil you wouldn't be able to tell.
And why can you assume any of the other things?
I do agree though, it isn't fit for purpose, like much of what's available beyond AI.
> it's completely free to use SnapCalorie, the $79.99 price is a donation to support our research
I just downloaded the app and I don't see any way to use the premium plan without paying 79.99 or 6.67/month. How do I choose not to donate?
Or do you mean it's a required donation? And if that's true, in what sense is the article wrong, given that it says exactly that?
It sounds like if I pay more, I get more access and can use the app more? So the original article was completely correct in characterizing the premium plan as $79.99
It says
> The app was free to download, no trial period necessary. There's a $79.99 per year premium plan, but it's intended to be a donation. The app caps free tier users at three photos per day, while all non-photo methods of logging are unlimited and free for everyone.
Which part of that is not correct?
When you say "you have access to everything as part of the free tier", does that apply to Android as well?
Because what you are saying is not true on Android. After 3 photos I cannot take another, the message says "You used all of your photo logs! As a free tier member you get 3 free Photo logs per day."
You are claiming that this is different on iOS?
AI seems to be going heavy into text/chat and images but voice is really the perfect UI to me. I would be totally fine if I could trigger a "call" from the app and talk to an AI on the phone for 30s and it could log my meal, give me some advice, etc.
With the exception of a few legally blind folks I know, I don't know anyone who openly talks to a machine, nor anyone who does it in private.
https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/papers/Thames...
We've since come up with a much more accurate approach. That said we also try to do some advanced technique to figure out what people were trying to log and not what the amount of food in the photo was. So for example if take a bite out of a bagel, we'll try to say 1 bagel since it's unlikely you wanted to log a bagel less a bite.
Like, oil is insanely caloric and can accidentally add hundreds of calories, but it's nearly impossible to eat too many greens.
Once you learn this, then the tracking is just to keep you honest - your brain knows what to do but it lies to you when it wants to bend the rules and those little cheats add up enough to throw off the whole diet.
Protip: most people underestimate the calories in alcohol
Funny, I feel the other way around. I kept hearing about how much calories there are in alcohol, and then when I started calorie counting I didn't find it so high.
Like 6 shots of gin are ~550kcal and enough to get anyone pretty drunk. Unless one is a regular heavy drinker it's not that hard to once in a while budget calories during the day to be able to get a few shots when going out in the evening.
Obviously staying sober is the healthier option.
You need to also include all the mixers as well and they're usually all sugar
Haha, I'm from almost-eastern-europe, so pretty much all drinkers I know. (Actually "Borovička" is the most popular. It is not gin, but somewhat similar to gin.)
But I mean, when someone is trying to reduce calorie intake, they don't consume whatever they want to. They need to make some concessions. So instead of a fancy cocktail or a bottle of wine, you can drink some vodka (provided getting intoxicated is the goal).
That said, I didn't have to be as careful in my twenties because I did a lot more exercise. And that's because I had more free time and opportunity for sports, fewer energy demands, less money for food, and more incentive to walk or cycle places. So I agree it's probably easier for university students to be slim, but I suspect metabolism is not a primary reason.
A bigger change, generally, from someone in college and someone in their 40s is their activity levels. Even just considering the amount of walking most folks do on a college campus is a huge difference, compared to someone that gets in their car and drives to and from work.
No it's not. Stella is 5.2% in the strongest form (some places sell a weaker version that is 4.6%). Both are roughly standard ABVs. At worst, a 20 oz 'pint' of Stella would be ~1.7 units. In most places in the US, a pint is 16 oz, so it would be ~1.4 units. Two pints at worst is slightly over 3 units total.
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-advice/calculating-alco...
I think most folks think in 'drinks' and not 'units'.
So, back to the original comment: 6 shots at most establishments would be ~10 'units' of alcohol. Or, closer to 3.3 20oz pints of beer. 3.3 20oz beers would be enough to get most folks pretty intoxicated if drank quickly; the difference being that 3.3 20oz beers (66oz total!) is a lot harder to drink very quickly than 6 shots, purely by volume of liquid.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content#By_intak...
I can try to find the studies, but basically, "guess and check" is ridiculously powerful in learning. Is part of what makes flash cards so strong. Just "ask and answer", not so much.
Light beer or wine 150
Regular beer 200
mixed drink 300
Trashy mixed drink 400
Ultimately what worked is what you say, "educating...better decisions" Every diet I tried I concluded the secret sauce was just doing what I already knew - stop eating so much crap and move around more. It was hard yet liberating to get to a point where I wasn't on a diet I was just consciously choosing salads over fries, passing on desert, and not buying junk food so I just don't have it when the compulsion hits. (ADHD meds helped with compulsions, so it wasn't all iron will)
It was like getting sober in a way. I knew, but I also had to want to stop.
They genuinely had no idea, and it changed their lives.
Just so many calories and it's not like I even cared about either that much.
Occasionally (usually as a distraction while trying to make a meal plan for the week) I find myself wondering by what we could do differently with the concept of healthy foods that makes nuances like this easier for people to understand, without getting into fad diet territory. I've never had a brilliant idea here because its fundamentally asking the public to have a nuanced understanding in an industry with tons of historical marketing spin, which is... hard. Really hard. Fad diets and diet plans in general exist because someone telling you exactly what to eat is sometimes more effective than trying to give an understanding about why those choices are made.
The reality is that "healthy" is an individualized goal and different foods are a tool for getting to that destination.
Some foods are delicious but too calorific to be considered.
Some taste OK but turn out to be exceptional value!
Back in November I started tracking calories in the app Cronometer. I lost 35+ lbs down to 151 lbs as of this morning.
Even as a 'relatively healthy' dude, I realized just how bad my perception of calories and macros in food was. So, I totally agree with this.
I think that nearly all of the consumer weight loss industry, of which these silly AI photo apps are a small part, is an attempt to turn a simple but hard process into one that's complicated but easy. In practice such shortcuts generally don't work which is why products like these have miserably low success rates.
What people fail to realize is the calories on the label aren't the calories they are actually getting. Those on the label are the calories for the substance found by burning it in a lab. Calories absorbed are quite different, and depend on the method of preparation and personal factors. Different methods release different percentage amounts to be taken up by your body in digestion.
Additionally, the standard saying "Calories in Calories Out" only applies when you are healthy, and have no weight or medical issues. The moment you have any kind of metabolism-mediated or norepinphrine-mediated reactions (i.e. allergies, chemical exposures [pfas], etc), that paradigm fails.
If you are getting ravenously hungry or nauseous , you are starving yourself, and this can damage your metabolism, and it won't result in long-term weight loss. You lose metabolically active tissue over fat which adapts to lower BMRs.
When you are eating healthy at the proper times, you aren't getting ravenously hungry.
Anyone who has done Atkin's knows that after they transition into ketosis, they don't get hungry. They eat very high caloric foods, but they eat much less, and the carbohydrates, or excessive protein, and usually so low that the extra fat they eat doesn't get stored as fat. Not everyone can do that though because of issues with kidney, liver, or gallbladder, but the ones that can lose amazing amounts of weight effortlessly. The diet itself is also anti-inflammatory, and cholesterol isn't an issue.
This is going to shock people.
I've weighed my food out to get that daily calorie count. Here's a mindblower. I can eat 2700 calories of fats, and protein in a 60 30 ratio keeping carbs at 20g for the day, and I will on average lose 1-2 pounds a day, and this is done after the transition where water weight drop off has already plateaued (the weight loss isn't water weight, and its mostly not muscle mass either).
Each pound is 3500 calories. My BMR is supposed to be 2200 for my weight and height/body composition. How am I in what amounts to an effective 9700 calorie deficit with no exercise, and no hunger?
I've done this alongside college friends too. They see almost the exact same results. They found it a little annoying because they had to get checked out by a doctor first for those issues, and had to drink a lot more water, eat more fiber, and ensure they got the essential vitamins. Aside from that, the fat just falls off.
Calories in vs. Calories out is a lie.
Bomb calorimetry is not how calories on a package are determined today. Individual constituent macros are used to determine calorie content, accounting for fiber and thermic effects of digestion. Calorie metrics on foods are largely accurate, when used for caloric intake reasons.
> If you are getting ravenously hungry or nauseous , you are starving yourself, and this can damage your metabolism, and it won't result in long-term weight loss. You lose metabolically active tissue over fat which adapts to lower BMRs.
"Starvation mode" is a myth. If you are in too great of a deficit, sure, you will lose muscle in addition to fat, which can lower your metabolism... but it's not going to somehow damage you forever. If you weigh less, you burn fewer calories... just a fact of life.
> I've weighed my food out to get that daily calorie count. Here's a mindblower. I can eat 2700 calories of fats, and protein in a 60 30 ratio keeping carbs at 20g for the day, and I will on average lose 1-2 pounds a day, and this is done after the transition where water weight drop off has already plateaued (the weight loss isn't water weight, and its mostly not muscle mass either).
Nobody is losing 1-2 pounds of weight a DAY in any sustainable way. You might be able to pull that off for a little bit, but unless you're morbidly obese that just isn't happening for any reasonable period of time.
> Each pound is 3500 calories. My BMR is supposed to be 2200 for my weight and height/body composition. How am I in what amounts to an effective 9700 calorie deficit with no exercise, and no hunger?
BMR is not the same as TDEE. Most people's BMR is substantially lower than their actual caloric expenditure. It would not surprise me at all that you could lose weight at 2700cal/day if you have a BMR of 2200. You are likely in a caloric deficit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185892
There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.
It also just made me cognizant of my bad eating habits. I’d absent-mindedly snack on something, go to log it, then think “wait, why am I eating this right now?” and stop.
It’s essential educating yourself on nutrition through habit.
I actually aimed strictly for my maintenance calories as I was burning 700-900cal in exercise per workout day. Was very hard work, but rewarding.
It took about a year to drop that much weight, normally I think it would take longer but I had a very dedicated group trainer helping me stay on track.
I think that's something that a lot of people fail to account for when trying to lose weight that ultimately ruins their goals - you have to build habits to sustain the lifestyle you want. Weight loss surgery, eating at a large deficit or working out hard alone are going to get rid of some weight, but most people will gain all of that back within a year's time.
In the case of dieting/calorie counting - I don't think you can get away with not thinking about it, especially with inaccurate estimates.
There just isn’t enough info in a photo, even for the world’s leading calorie counting expert, to give a sensible estimate of the calories content. Ans even more so for macros.
Add to that the fact vision is still pretty crap and you have a complete joke that I can’t believe anyone is paying for.
The issue of course is these new apps built with a sole focus of AI images for tracking. With a photo of restaurant food you can't see a sauce and the 5-10g of additional sugar content, can't get accurate guesses of what is in breads/pastas and figuring out general volumes of foods is not possible unless you have some kind of standard size reference in the frame.
Correcting errors in MFP is the bane of my existence.
I have tried some other apps but i hated every single one of them for a reason or another and came back to MFP but that was one of the best features i would really love to have
I suspect many of the results dieters get is “mere measurement”, e.g. it helps them be more thoughtful, seek education, etc.
So the value of the tool is in its ability to keep them engaged and hopeful (the unstated need), and the actual mechanic doesn’t have to be that good at the stated need.
If I diligently track calories using one of these things and don't lose weight I'll say "screw it" and stop bothering because obviously counting calories doesn't work. I think this is much more likely to be the case because even proper calorie counting is difficult and frustrating
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12064450/#:~:text=T...
Maybe this one: https://today.duke.edu/2019/02/tracking-food-leads-losing-po...
<https://scarygoround.com/badmachinery/index.html?pg=374#show...>
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Sauces loaded with butter, sugar or other goodies will of course be the same story.
If they aren't doing even that much, then they're not very interested in accuracy at all.
But even more important - you really gotta track your macros if you want it to work well - and again also not feel crap.
There is no way in hell an AI camera is tracking macros well
- The food is inside containers of a standard size, which the model can use as a volumetric reference
- Optimally, the containers are clear plastic, for depth approximation
- The food is homogenous, or mostly-homogenous. Dishes containing a lot of mixed ingredients seem like an intractable problem to me
Now, whether or not abilities like this are useful to you would seem heavily dependent on your diet.
Yoghurt.
You can buy zero fat Greek yogurt that has very low sugar. It’s perfect for losing weight. It’s about 50kcals per 100g. And also super high in protein.
Or you can buy yoghurt that is full of sugar and is 100kcals per 100g and has lots of fat and hardly any protein.
Even a human expert could not tell the difference without tasting them.
This is just one example of many.
* Great Value Original Vanilla Lowfat Yogurt, 32 oz
Serving size 3/4 cup (170g)
1.5g fat
26g carbs (21 of which are sugar)
5g protein
130 kcal
* Great Value Greek Plain Nonfat Yogurt, 32 oz Tub
Serving size 2/3 cup (170g)
7g carbs (7 of which are sugar)
17g protein
100 kcal
* Great Value Light Vanilla Nonfat Yogurt, 32 oz
Serving size 3/4 cup (170g)
15g carbs (12 of which are sugar)
5g protein
80 kcal
If it's only got 50kcal per 100g, then I assume you've got to be relying heavily on indigestible gelling agents to keep the texture reading to the customers as yogurt. I assume that the developer would suggest that a zero-calorie bowl of water and indigestible gelling agents that reads to YOU as yogurt, is not accurately summarized as yogurt, and that this would be a case of user error.
This is the yoghurt I was talking about. It’s a high quality brand here in the UK
54kal per 100g and 10g protein
3g carbs (zero of which sugar)
Ingredients: Pasteurised Skimmed Milk, Live Active Yoghurt Cultures (L. Bulgaricus, S. Thermophilus, L. Acidophilus, Bifidus, L. Casei)
Users also seem to like using photos less than text for food tracking: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBoSeQzM3bQ/
The author of this article seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too, but calorie counting does work well for many people. They also bring up intuitive eating as an alternative, but intuitive eating is not intended for weight loss while that's what calorie tracking is usually used for (though it can also be used for maintenance and for weight gain).
Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating. There are a few times when I need to adjust it, I mostly try to overestimate. It's not perfectly accurate but it gives me enough accuracy to have successfully lost and kept my weight off.
What are peoples criticisms of calorie counting? Its the only thing that keeps my weight from creeping up. There are way to many calorie dense foods that can easily sneak in if im thoughtless. (I want my 20 year old life style back :( )
But if you are interested in critiques, a fair summary might be: calorie counting is at best extremely imprecise, both on how we measure the calories in food and how we estimate energy expenditure by activities. A little googling should lead to numerous discussions. I really enjoy the podcast maintenance phase, and even if you don’t want to listen to the episode they helpfully include tons of links: https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/106...
There is never a reason to do this: people do it because they want to eat more, so they want to factor exercise in.
They're basically already sabotaging the process from the outset: the goal is generally weightloss, they have an easy and precise way to track that, and one week of "under eating" isn't going to kill anyone.
Walking a mile will burn about 100 calories, give or take. That's not much. A latte from Starbucks or a "healthy" snack such as a granola bar has more.
Good rule of thumb is that you cannot offset a bad diet with exercise for weight loss. Diet is by far more impactful. Exercise has other benefits though, which I'm not intending to dismiss.
It does work for me, but being vigilant about it is tedious so I'm open to hearing if people have better ways.
- David Ludwig, Always Hungry?
- Mark Hyman, The Blood Sugar Solution
The first one is very accessible, the second one very posh. But the underlying approach is the same: no calorie counting, just good food in the right proportions.
I eat only good food in the right proportions. However, it would be enough to double the amount of the food that I eat at one meal, for the next day to see a few hundred grams of additional weight.
I must plan the amount of food to be eaten before starting to eat. Otherwise, I could eat effortlessly not only the double of the amount that I have planned, but even the triple amount or more, with a corresponding increase in the weight gain.
Perhaps there are people who might stop automatically from eating, before ingesting too much, but I am not one of them and looking around I have never met one of those people.
For myself and for most people that I have seen (with the extremely rare exceptions of those people who remain thin despite claiming to eat as much as they can, and who may actually have impaired food digestion or absorption) hoping to stop naturally before overeating does not work. The only thing that works is deciding how much to eat before starting to eat, then never eating more than that. For planning how much to eat, calorie counting works fine.
I said "no calorie counting", not "eat as much as you please". And by "right proportions" in those books they mean something specific: roughly 50% fat, 25% proteins, 25% carbs, plus a balanced mix of different fats, slow carbs, etc.
The laws of thermodynamics obviously hold for nutrition as for any other phenomena. In order to lose wait you have to eat less, no question about that. But the idea is that it's much easier to directly control what you eat than how much you eat. And by following those diets it's allegedly easier to eat the right amount.
I absolutely believe your method works. As for me, I've experienced that since I changed my diet as per the above recommendations, I'm not hungry two hours after each meal anymore.
tayo42 asked for something less tedious than counting calories, so I suggested they take a look at an alternative approach which has benefited me, and in my opinion is well argued.
What is necessary is to measure your food, either by mass or by volume, before starting to eat it. For any food that you eat, you should decide some standard portion size that you find by experiment to be suitable for you and you must always eat the standard portion, not random quantities at your whim.
Then, after seeing that you have gained weight after eating 5 spoons of food X, you should decrease the amount to 4 spoons, and so on until you reach amounts of food that keep your weight constant.
What is also important is that for this adjustment you should not decrease or increase the amounts for food items that provide proteins, essential fatty substances, vitamins and minerals, but only the amounts for food items that provide mostly energy, i.e. carbohydrates or non-essential fats.
This is much easier to do when you cook the food yourself, so you control the amounts for each ingredient, than when you buy industrially-produced food, where they have the incentive of mixing every beneficial food ingredient with other ingredients that provide only energy (e.g. starch, sugar, cheap vegetable oils), because the latter are much cheaper than the ingredients that provide essential nutrients, while being tasty or even addictive.
Counting calories presumably works (when it does) because it’s combined with more nutritious, regular meals, better awareness, etc. It’s also possible that the measurement errors even out over time, but I suspect the timescale is too long (if you’ve undereaten for two days you’ll end up eating something out of the diet).
This is what critics don't get. Calorie counting is what makes people have better awareness, and what makes people aware of what meal is more nutritious.
When you're in the weeds of this stuff it's hard to remember, but many people honestly don't know what are caloric equivalents of different foods, and that's pretty important information if you're trying to eat better.
Nevertheless, if done correctly you can never die of starvation or become obese, because you must not aim for a theoretical value, but for the value which you find by experiment that it keeps your weight constant.
I have been obese for many years and after many failed attempts to lose weight I was believing that kind of BS that for some people it may be impossible to control their weight.
However, I had always failed because I had always done it wrongly. After I had started counting calories properly, in less than a year I have lost more than a third of my body weight and since then I maintain whatever body weight I believe to be the right value.
The difference between "before" and "after" is that I have switched from eating when I felt like it and until believing to have had enough, to only eating after making a plan of what to eat during that day, and in which quantities, according to the calories limit, and then sticking to the plan made in the morning and never eating anything extra, not even a snack or a sweetened beverage.
During the initial time, when losing weight, absolutely essential was the use of accurate weighing scales, with resolution of 0.1 kg or better, in order to check my weight each day at the same hour and reduce the calorie limit whenever the weight was not less by 0.1 kg than the weight of the previous day (with some smoothing to avoid overshooting, especially because it appears that there is a delay of several days between reducing the calorie limit to a value that forces a continuous weight reduction and the start of the actual weight decreasing).
After losing weight, I had to continue counting calories, otherwise I would not keep my desired weight. If I do not eat according to a plan, according to a calorie limit, I gain weight extremely easily, at a rate at least 6 to 10 times greater than the rate at which I can lose again the added weight.
For an example of a calorie limit, I am a male of average height and with a sedentary lifestyle, even if I do at least a half of hour per day of exercising, including weight lifting. In order to keep the weight for a BMI of about 25, I have to eat in the range of 1800 to 1900 kcal/day (which I do in 2 meals per day, each slightly above 900 kcal).
There have been a few nutritional studies done in USA and linked recently on HN. Like in other similar studies, the diets used for the subjects were around 2400 to 2500 kcal/day. I have no idea about which may be the difference between me and the subjects of those studies, but if I ate 2400 kcal/day I would become obese in a few weeks, gaining weight by up to a couple of pounds per day.
The only difference that I am aware of is that my food is cooked by myself from high-quality raw ingredients, while the subjects of those studies were eating mostly industrially-produced food, so my "calories" may be "bigger" than their "calories" (i.e. more of the food being actually digested and absorbed).
Probably the same criticism that applies to all "methods to do a thing". That people often miss the forest for the trees and obsess on the wrong metric (counting calories while still ingesting preprocessed industrial food and beverages) instead of the right one (losing weight while being healthy at the same time).
When we get into this sort of mindset that we need to be attentive of absolutely everything we eat then we develop a sort of adversarial relationship with food, and for most people that's just not sustainable. The difference between a successful diet that works and one that doesn't could be diet soda. Sounds stupid, but if you're miserable then your diet isn't going to last. Making better decisions is an improvement, and is MUCH better than dropping the pursuit all together.
There's plenty of people who are very healthy and they eat ice cream, drink soda some times, maybe have cheesecake occasionally. That's part of life, and for a lot of people that's one of the parts of life that makes it worth living. Conversely, there's a lot of people who try something like Keto and then eventually fail and fall into an even worse relationship with food then they had when they started.
I haven't used ParrtPal, what makes it easier than using MyFitnessPal?
With MFP, there was always searching, then selecting the best entry, then fiddling with portion size. It usually ends up taking many times longer for me.
Macrofactor is also the only app I've seen that actually estimates your underlying metabolic rate and adjusts accordingly. It predates the recent AI surge, and seems to have a team that's studied nutrition science behind it.
Seems like the Macrofactor team took their time developing this feature, as it felt like they were one of the last to roll it out, but the extra polish definitely shows and was worth the wait.
From someone who weighed and scanned a lot of foods, it has really improved the workflow
If I eat something unexpected, I have it recalculate what I need for the rest of the day. If I were planning on 8 ounces of chicken for dinner but had an unplanned snack, it might tell me that 6 ounces will suffice now, and I now have room for more fat, so I could add some cheese. I find it quite accurate in this.
Where it loses accuracy is over time. Even when focused on just a single day, the cumulative totals can be wrong when the context window gets too large. I catch this by mentally adding up the numbers it spits out. If the numbers seem off, I open a new chat. Also, it’s not reliable for looking back over multiple days or trying to track long-term patterns.
When I take a photo of a meal (like when eating out), it performs very well. I ask it to list the contents of the plate, then I correct any assumptions. Once corrected, the resulting macros are usually within 5% accuracy. I also tell it the quality of the ingredients and restaurant overall, which can help a bit.
Revolutionary.
To respond to others’ comments, I tend to eat whole foods. I don’t eat TV dinner or shop at Costco or such places.
No one typing with a regular keyboard would ever bother, certainly not with the HN input box.
Surely you still intended to type an em-dash if this happened—word on windows (as I presume you intend to refer to with 'word processors') only replaces '--' with '—'.
>No one typing with a regular keyboard would ever bother, certainly not with the HN input box.
You press 'option', 'shift', and '-' (on a mac with the default US english layout, anyway). Why would you assume nobody would use a basic element of writing (in English, at least)? It's just a long-press on the iphone.
The comment we're talking about doesn't read like AI to me because of the use of parenthetical asides, although that just means I haven't seen a LLM that tends to use parentheses heavily.
This is nuts! Do you not read much prose written by other humans?
Books and scientific papers are the only places I see it used
And it makes sense that the AI is prioritizing it as these sources should weigh more
Produce, meat, etc might not always, but simply search those the same as you'd ask ChatGPt.
Even the meat, i usually buy packaged
Using VTT is better but still not perfet
The only certain way to do it is measure everything with a scale
One company has a tool that can replace what we professionally do.
This app would have taken person months to build, yet here it is, almost as an afterthought.
The next ten years are going to be wild. Hope everyone has a plan for leveling up and riding this tsunami.
Even if LLMs presently can't do intricate things, that doesn't matter. I know in my gut that my generous total comp job isn't going to be available in the future in its current form. In aggregate, the work we do isn't going to be as hard or as in demand as LLMs devour more of the market share and growth of the human economic field and attention economy.
The LLMs are likely going to increase demand for software, but in doing so they'll eat more of the market share.
ZIRP, Section 174, industry-wide layoffs, offshoring, and now this. Plan accordingly. I'm sure there are gradients with tremendous success to be had, but for many there will be a decrease in fitness.
This is how it will play out.
You'll see it in the cost centers. You'll see it in the "I have an idea for an app" pitches. Business people will make these decisions, and consumers will too.
{ High convenience, High quality, Low cost } - pick two.
Software engineering won't evaporate, but there's something new competing with it.
Honestly curious if that would have improved the author's experience.
They're solicited, right?
In the best scenario we are in a TornadoGuard (https://xkcd.com/937/) situation. More likely the developers are paying for reviews
I used calorie counter apps before and they helped me lose weight (by mostly educating me what to eat/avoid). With these apps, I feel like the core premise - counting calories - isn’t even working and they’re selling people hopes and dreams. That’s danger territory.
These apps with graphs are just selling you a sense of control, of compulsive metric driven decision making. Its partly the consumers’ own fault – many people won’t care even if they knew. But it’s also predatory by the companies. It’s consumer tech in a nutshell: put a pretty but shitty app on the App Store, spend 80% on marketing, show ads in the free tier, sell overpriced premium offerings to those who are careless with money, rinse and repeat. I follow some subreddits and groups for ”entrepreneurs” and it’s just like this.
(Not to defend the app itself obviously)
Source?
Let's say I eat 3 hamburgers per day and gain ~1kg per month.
If I reduce that to 2 hamburgers per day I maintain my weight.
And when I reduce that to 1 hamburger per day I lose ~1kg per month.
That is simple. As for how I feel while eating 1 hamburger that's another question.
I can try to improve the machinery of my body by e.g exercising, eating healthier food, adjusting my macros, taking supplements, etc.
So now I can eat 1.5 hamburgers per day and I feel better and still lose 1kg per month.
Humans (unlike say cows) do not digest parts of what is available in plants, which makes some vegetables filling and ultra-low caloric.
"we don't really know how many calories a given person will get from eating a given piece of food"
exact numbers of unknown, but difference is not so great, except truly extreme cases (and vast majority of fat people is not fat due to them)
Why does every major restaurant feature individual meals with a caloric intake of an entire day’s energy?
Separately though, I have no idea why restaurants seem to exclusively offer gigantic portions over here. I wonder how common this is elsewhere in the world? I'm not well traveled so I genuinely have no idea.
No comments yet
"This is clearly fraudulent as it does not and cannot work, so I reported it to Apple/Google."
We are not shipping camera functionality yet. But our concept is to not necessarily guarantee the accuracy of portions but to make lookup easier.
We also spent the time to get the AI integrated with a verified database. This made our results far more accurate.
We tended to find that without the lookup the calories and macros would be generally correct. The math was usually within a margin of error of 5%. This was acceptable except that… there was no micronutrient values and you couldn’t really adjust the portions at all. The system just dumps the macros and while you can halve something… the user experience isn’t great.
Ultimately, if you want precision: manual entry is the only way to go. I feel like out approach will end up being very great once we work out the kinks. Our search isn’t spectacular and as a team we are learning a lot of about prompt engineering and how to make best use of the AI.
But even though we've integrated it with a good food database, the process of searching isn't great because sometimes things like brand names don't get recognized and/or modifiers may get confused because... is it a brand? Is it a way of preparing something?
Ultimately we are working on improving how our search works by not just searching by the name, but by getting information about brand, the product, and possible serving options as well. These would better inform the search and allow us to, say, fallback without a brand if we can't find the brand.
The other problem has to do with variant detection. I can say "kirkland sous vide egg bites" but there are 3-4 variants of them. And right now most databases are just "here is the item you requested" without looking at possible variants, which is a problem that we are going to end up solving ourselves.
It's been interesting because we've learned a lot about how people "think" it should work vs. how it actually works.
The food ingredients with the highest calorie content, like various kinds of seeds or nuts or flour or meal or oil or fat or sugar or dried fruits or dairy products, come usually with calorie estimates from their vendors.
For other ingredients, like various kinds of meat or of fresh vegetables or fruits, there are online databases with typical nutritional information, like the USDA database. Some of that information can even be found in the corresponding Wikipedia pages.
Weighing everything (rather than using volumetric measures) is generally going to be the BEST way to ensure consistency and accuracy.
What's also important is that, in general, even if you are 20% off on something (e.g. I logged 2200 calories but I actually consumed 2600 calories) AND you are planning to eat at a caloric deficit, this usually will mean that you will still lose weight or body recomp. It'll just take a little more time.
But if you are just not tracking, it's _so easy_ to miscalculate your intake to the point where you think "oh this isn't that bad." However, the truth is you consumed 4200 calories and that's a big surplus.
So I/we tend to find the value partially in "simple tracking" to get you aware of what you are actually consuming and then find that transitioning to specific portions to be helpful for "dialing in" and achieving specific targets/goals.
A tablespoon of oil is 100 calories, but probably not visible in an image. Sugar in cooked meals is impossible to see.
Is this aimed at a world where every food product is individually wrapped? Because most of the world doesn't live that way.
I understand the fundamental issues with calorie counting via photo analysis/LLM. However these articles would be more interesting if they included comparison with results from actual cutting-edge LLMs, rather than the budget models. I acknowledge that apps don't use these models though to protect margins and lower cost.
Also:
> Cameras capture two-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects.
iPhone camera captures depth, too. I don't think it's being used in CalAI though. This article is more about current commercialized solutions rather than analysis of state of the art capability.
They don't, but that doesn't stop them from lying about it on their homepage.
> Snap a photo with Cal AI, and your phone's depth sensor calculates food volume. Our AI then analyzes and breaks down your meal to determine calories, protein, carbs, and fat.
The grift must go on.
As of now I would not at all trust a fully AI calorie counting app
You especially should not trust an app that does not do any research on the accuracy of it's algorithm or claims to be "consistently accurate" as many of them do currently. The truth is these algorithms have the potential to be accurate when values are averaged out over the long term, but dish to dish they will have occasionally wildly inaccurate results.
Your website says:
> SnapCalorie is the first app where you can take a picture of any meal and get an accurate calorie count and nutrition in seconds.
So which is it? Can you get an accurate calorie count of a meal from a picture or not?
My conclusion is that while AI is excellent for augmenting your tracking experience, it's not yet reliable enough to be the primary 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://fitbee.app
This doesn't even take into account the variations in the human body. Some people digest different types of foods better than others. Then there are the gut microbiomes of each individual. By the time you get done, if you have counted 2000 calories you could be off by 25% or more.
The big advantage that makes calorie counting work is that it makes people actually think about what they are eating.
Since April I've been using a tool I developed for myself. It's very much a MVP with an emphasis on M, but it's cheap to run, so I'll share the url if anyone wants to try it out and share feedback.
https://words.my
Where does the author take the 120 number from? The very link they gave says a large pink lady apple is 78 calories.
https://vlmsarebiased.github.io/
another decade and we'll be able to get the Not Hotdog app from Silicon Valley
The most important part of marketing and PR is lying to your customers.
For example you could track calories by just tallying your grocery bills if you lived alone.
Fun fact: The founder of Cal AI is just 18 years old.
It's local-first so you control this sensitive information. It features easy reuse and exercise tracking.
I exploit my "frugality" neuroses by treating calories as an expense.
My body is perfectly capable of eating an entire jar of peanut butter with an entire jar of honey on the side in one sitting, so, no.
* the UX is bad
* the stats are laughable
* charts worse than nothing (really, misleading to look at)
* lacking basic functionality such as “duplicate for today”
* can’t see or export the meal photo
* their “streak” attempt at gamification is so bad it literally cannot count
And yes, the AI there is atrociously bad. Not only can it not reliably detect calorie content (I don’t think anyone could on a basis of a photo in general case), but it so often mislabels food (like the example in article) it’s just a comedic relief. And there’s a “Fix” button which does nothing.
It’s like they never really tried hard. Combined with the general lack of quality, looks like a typical quick money grab riding the AI hype wave. I’m pretty confident the app could be vibe-coded in a week (and that’s generous). Maybe the backend is more complex? Don’t think so as there are no social features, it just stores data.
Paid for a year (Android app) to see how well they applied AI to the field, now continue to use it like a meal photo log with some (manually entered) metadata, otherwise Excel would be a nicer solution.
Consumers just don't care.
AI dialed this to the max: The early vibe coding startup catches the worm. Working with designers, doing A/B tests, QA, product management, nowadays all of this will make you lose to the competition.
You just need to get something out that looks as if it works, that makes users feel as if it works, whether it really does or not, whether the quality is atrocious or good.
Connect an image labeling API to the USDA's database of nutrients, make a slick-looking app, and you have a product. Pay for some marketing, offer a three-day trial after which you auto-bill for a year, make refunds as difficult as possible, and you have a business. At $30/yr, 10k subscriptions (deliberate or accidental) gets you $210k after app store commission. If you're lucky, you get bought out for even more. If not, you still made good money for not much work.
These apps seem useful to reduce the friction of entering your meal's calorie contents from 30 seconds of ingredient estimating, to 20 seconds (auto-filling main ingredients and a baseline portion estimate). As everyone points out, it's impossible for these to get any better than that (GIGO). But reducing the overhead for calorie-counting seems like a reasonable goal and a valuable service. Of course the marketing departments for these companies is going to say whatever bullshit they want; that's their prerogative...
And the companies most interested in the data would be the large food corporations who bear a lot of responsibility for getting us into this obesity crisis in the first place.
I’ve lost substantial weight (75lbs) the hard way multiple times, it’s doable but it sucks. If the drugs make it easy with seemingly no downside then why waste time with this other stuff.
Use the drugs, lose the weight, then when thin add in an exercise regimen if you don’t have one.
(PS: doesn't mean there aren't real use cases. Sadly the term AI has been stretched to cover all kinds of charlatanery)
Paying for this crap is just throwing money out the window. Those startups should solve problems and them let people pay for it, for 99% accuracy, not at minimum of 66%.
What role can AI possibly have in this, when all you need to do is either turn around the packaging or do a web search for the dish you cook to get a number?
"track" is important here
How packaging or a web search will help with exactly remembering how much was eaten in past?
When you have to take ownership of your diet (and thus your weight), that means a permanent lifestyle change. Tracking is simply not sustainable indefinitely, so you must establish better consumption habits while you do so, that will stick past the tracking. Tracking and getting to know what you eat, rather than tracking your calories, is what enables you to form such a habit and knowledge base.
Eating random stuff and thus having to use AI due to a lack of easily accessible and personally learnable nutrition information makes a total mockery of this process, and runs pretty much antithetical to it.
Have you verified that these are mostly accurate?
Initially I verified against labels by eating the serving size precisely. Then, I switched to weighing and doing the math on random days or meals.
For some items I would tell it the calories and macros and it would remember (a pb spoon is a common treat around my house).
It's good.
But like all food journalling the benefits are not so much having macro balances or tallies, its in making you aware and making you think about what you're eating. That alone takes you out of autopilot and lets you eat better.
It's just bad at math. So I would ask it to output a json struct for each day, that I could inspect by sight, then I'd save that and had a python script to actually tally.
I had predictive analytics and the whole 9 yards. Maybe I should have started a business! https://jodavaho.io/tags/diet.html
You are providing accurate info to an LLM and it is assisting you with information processing.
These apps are trying to just take a picture of arbitrary food and just trusting a neural network to be magical and tell you the macros in the food from a photo.