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Comment by remon | Hacker News Reader

Imagine still using Meta products in 2025.

I own the meta glasses. I enjoy them. Last night, I asked meta to look at the menu and calculate the best meal by price. It calculated that the protein in the chicken Marsala was the best deal for the price. I then asked it to look at the wine menu and tell me a good dry wine that wouldn’t be too expensive. The wine list was over 100 wines and the answer retuned in seconds. I enjoyed the meal and the wine. I will continue to use the glasses in 2025 as I’m finding creative ways to use them.

I'll bookmark this as the saddest thing to do with food in 2025.

I'm trying very hard not to be judgemental, but this comment fascinated (or horrified) me.

I grew up with some relatively minor food insecurity, and so outsourcing my food and beverage choice to a soulless machine sounds like my own personal hell.

And now Meta knows your location at that time, can use that lovely menu to derive ads better suited for its competition, has data on when you like to eat out, who else was there (let's not forget about DeepFace!), etc. While you ate your meal, you fed some juicy tidbits to their data repo on you and those around you.

Oh, hey, is that an ad for a local winery?

I’m in favor of banning all ads too. That ain’t an argument against ai.

How does it know the affordability of a menu item? If it’s only looking at a menu the odds are that it doesn’t have a lot of information such as serving size and calorie cost. You just asked an AI to give the statically correct item for affordability.

The wine it chose was how far down the list? Was it chosen at random or did it just match “chicken wine” with the first result?

This seems like you’re assuming the glasses help you decide but really it probably did what anyone would do and pick a random option or just give you the popular choice. Why even use glasses for that and instead just point somewhere on the menu?

It reasoned its choices. Told me the vineyard, what most people say about it. It gave me 3 food options originally and I said go by best value. It would be the same as if a friend recommended it to you or a server. How do I know the AI is giving me good advice? I don’t, but I’ve lived on earth long enough to know it’s not bad advice. End of day, the human makes the decision. We don’t lose agency unless we just say ok to everything. In this case, it was reasonable other cases maybe not. We still make decisions even if we use ai.

So in the spirit of not losing agency, out of the 3 items you told it best value, which appears to mean “lowest cost”. Best value can also mean portion size relative to cost. Further even relative to your diet restrictions and relative to the area of economic activity. All of those things I garuntee weren’t involved in the LLM “reasoning”. It’s okay to be wowed by sleight of hand LLM tricks, but expect everyone to be skeptical when you describe the situation.

The above criteria is how I would evaluate best value of menu items. If an LLM just gave me the cheapest of 3 dishes I wouldn’t use it because it is not adding any agency I already had.

Here’s another possible scenario:

The LLM retrieved “best value” or some relative synonym from the online review of the restaurant. The review says “I think the chicken marsala is the best value.” The review was posted 5 years ago and the portion sizes have changed when the new owner wanted to shrinkflate the food. Is chicken marsala still the best value? Was it ever the best value?

I think it’s clear you don’t understand llm’s and how they operate. The data is trained on orthotic patterns. Your description would be the contrary of real world llm.

Unless I'm really watching my budget (though, why would I be eating out at a place with a huge wine list and buying Meta glasses if that's the case?), I cannot possibly imagine the joy behind having a nice meal based on what AI told me is "the best deal" rather than trusting my own palate/gut and ordering what I know will bring me the greatest pleasure (or working with the sommelier to discuss my tastes and find something best-suited to both myself and my choice[s] of food).

You do you, by all means, if it brings you the most joy. But removing my own agency while allowing a company to track my entire dining experience to better serve me ads sounds so... hollow and dystopic.

This is what normal people used to discuss with the people they were eating with. Sad.

All that fancy technology just to address an optimization problem that's entirely solvable with a can of Vienna sausages and a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck.

I will optimize for health next. That won’t be so easy.

Do you really need a pair of glasses to tell you what to eat and drink? Wow, that must be the latest techie way to order food. A friendly reminder: you don't own those glasses, Meta does.

What does owning the glasses get me?

Thanks for providing a practical example of usage.

Made me tempted to buy one.

A question I have is, how are you presented with the prompt result?

Does it send you a message on your phone or does it tell you in a headphone?

And you you ask it verbally or can you also ask it using mobile phone?

The glasses have audio, bone induction and tells you the answer without anybody really being able to hear.

You can do both text or audio.

I agree with you apart from WhatsApp. I automatically know you’re from America if you don’t use WhatsApp.

This.

Never thought that once we had Skype we'll still not solve video calls cross-platform on every bloody device by 2025, including, but not limited to, linux, TVs, Android boxes, Chromecast with Google TV, and so on.

I really want to get off Whatsapp, but everyone simply refuses to do so out of simplicity, lazyness, and ignorance.

Signal is the easy and obvious alternative.

XMPP/Matrix are different paths that also work (and both rely on TURN/STUN, like everything), but that requires someone running those servers in your vicinity of friends.

It’s not particularly popular in most of the Anglosphere.

There are plenty of people who are aware of the "trade-off" of using their products but are still happy to do so. Just because they've come to a different conclusion to you doesn't mean they are in some way "wrong" to do that.

No, not always. In this case, yes.

I mean, every single person I know uses either WhatsApp/IG/FB

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