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Comment by amazingamazing | Hacker News Reader

With mass information you could infer much more from pictures. With some sort of standard cube in the picture as well as taking a picture at an angle that emphasizes all three dimensions you could also better estimate the relative volume.

It’s tractable I think, but not from a pic alone.

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Yes one could potentially increase accuracy greatly. One big problem would be occlusion.

There is already a solution to this that would be very hard to beat (and one can choose to use or not use an LLM to assist): prepare food yourself and use the information provided by the manufacturer.

If you consider time at all what you suggest is hardly a solution. It is the most accurate, but even 50% accuracy at orders of magnitude faster to calculate would be more useful for the main use case which is losing weight.

However for diabetes accuracy is likely preferred and I’m not sure any computer vision would be palatable.

maybe, but not always. I could make two identical-looking sandwiches with very different calorie content by changing the type and quantity of sauce on the inside of the bread. I could give you two "pasta with creamy sauce" dishes that look similar on camera but have different macros by partially swapping Greek yogurt for heavy cream. Dropping a couple tbsp olive oil into my marinara sauce does wonders for flavor but barely affects appearance when plated. Same with lard in my refried beans.

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