I touch my phone with messy hands all the time. They are water resistant now, just wash it after

It sucks now, no idea why, but a few years ago, with the Google Home mini, I could just yell out all kinds of cooking related questions with "Hey Google" and it would always give me a good answer, was great for doing stuff hands free when cooking, like when I just don't want to get raw chicken or whatever on my phone.

But yeah, it doesn't give me good answeres any more, usually trys to start an unrelated YouTube video or email me something about Youtube plus or w/e

I suppose thats a bit easier than reading it out to ChatGPT.

But your $800 glasses are exposed to the cooking area with steam, grease fumes, heat etc.

> "Why use a computer when a cookbook works fine?"

I still feel that way. I have cookbooks because I find the UX better than searching for recipes.

Right, but we're in the 1992 of these glasses. Maybe they'll be good eventually. They aren't now.

And frankly, even the online recipe experience leaves much to be desired. Skip past the blog post. Skip past the list of ingredients. Skip past another blog post. Find the single statblock on the bottom that lists ingredients & amounts, & instructions - hoping that it exists.

Like other commenters, I've also started going back to paper cookbooks.

Not the same.

Internet and recipe websites solve a real problem: accessing recipes was expensive and not easy

AR headsets don't solve any problems. If anything, they make up a nonexistent problem, attempts but fails to solve the problem, during which the experience becomes even worse.

Okay. Now: Imagine it's 2025:

Cookbook: Open book, follow steps.

New gadget from mult-billion dollar company: showcases on a live demonstration that it's a broken piece of crap that doesn't work.

Like, are we forgetting that it didn't work? It sucked at the job! Let's not what-if or have some imaginary "okay, but pretend it's actually good," deal here. It was bad!

No? Because traditional cookbook (paper or digital) is deterministic and LLMs are not.

honestly cookbooks genuinely are better

i got the art of italian cooking recently and it's genuinely far easier to get a recipe than trying to scroll through a 50 page monologue about the intracicies of someones childhood before even listing the ingredients

If executed well I think this could reduce a lot of friction in the process. I can definitely unlock my phone and hold it with one hand while I prepare and cook, but that's annoying. If my glasses could monitor progress and tell me what to do with what while I'm doing it, that's far more convenient. It's clearly not there yet, but in a few years I have no doubt it will be. And this is just the start. With the screens they'll be able to offer AR. Imagine working on electronics or a car and the instructions are overlaid on the screen while the AI is providing verbal instructions.

I'm oldish, so maybe I'm biased, but this sort of product seems like something no one will want, outside a few technophiles, but that industry desperately needs you to want. It's like 3d TV, a solution in search of a problem because the mfgs need to make the next big thing with the associated high margins.

To me the phone is a pretty good form factor. Convenient enough(especially with voice control), unobtrusive, socially acceptable, and I need to own one anyway because it's a phone. I'm a geek so I think this tech is cool, but I see zero chance I would use one, even if it were a few steps better than it is.

As a gamer, in my experience people don't want to play VR games either.

Beat Saber as a social party experience with friends in the same room, sure, that's fun... but for day to day gaming the amount of people who want to play VR games on the regular is nearly zero.

If they really want to lean into the VR use case that people want, its porn, but I suspect they won't put that front and center.

In my experience, the biggest obstacle to broader AR and VR adoption beyond reducing the price, size, and weigh of the hardware will always be the lack of good content creation tools.

I've been involved with two VR projects that were ultimately cancelled because, while we developed a sexy tech demo that showed the potential, building things out into something sustainable required too many resources and took too much time to maintain.

VR gaming seems like it is a bit of a niche, though. I think they want to sell glasses in quantities more like cellphones than gaming peripherals.

I agree they are reaching (and not finding) for an application.

Well it's clearly a first gen product. They could ship Snake and Tetris on it, probably, but I'm certain they're thinking about how to get apps and games on it.

> the only ones VR actually works well for

I had really expected a different "only one"

No offense, but there it this chart, and what this tells me, maybe just me, is that gaming is a niche within VR, not even majority use case. Zuck is probably right about VR/AR being the next big social media, only he's wrong that it'll be like Facebook/Instagram type of social media; it's old Twitter type of social media.

[1]:

Most played VR games

  Rank Name          Curr   24h pk All-time
  1.   VRChat        33,032 46,652  66,824
  2.   War Thunder   26,388 65,589 121,318
  3.   PAYDAY 2      23,513 31,619 247,709
  4.   No Man's Sky  22,509 46,010 212,613
  5.   OBS Studio    11,434 22,388  27,334
  6.   Phasmophobia   7,716 22,789 112,717
  7.   Forza Hz 5     4,940 13,617  81,096
  8.   Assetto Corsa  3,885 13,598  19,796
  9.   OVR Adv. Sett. 3,030  4,299   6,418
  10.  Tabletop Sim.  2,902  7,755  37,198

Games are not a prolific spy tentacle for hoovering up all kinds of data. They may have changed their name, but this is still the facebook company.

No, he preempted it because it was about to list all the ingredients necessary to make a steak sauce, despite having them in front of him. These are glasses, it should have skipped that part and went straight to what to do first.

Yeah as a fully integrated system and the selling point I'd expect you'd say something like "Look again I think you're getting ahead of yourself".

Maybe the tech wasn't quite fool proof and they tried to fake it and then the fake version messed up.

I distrust meta (and hate these voice assistants) as much as the next guy but to me it’s obvious that you would prepare the prompt and use pretty much the exact phrasing. Also, repeating yourself is normal if there’s no response at all. If it was truly all fake why not just cheat outright and just prerecord all of it?

I assume you couldn't watch the video because it's just a live stream of a guy standing in a kitchen and talking to his glasses. He's not on the stage with hundreds of people on the wifi and you can't see what the glasses are displaying at all.

I run multiple live streams from speakers to conference rooms and other bandwidth intensive offerings throughout the day in an incredibly crowded RF space. WiFi is certainly up to the task. Meta is a nearly 2 Trillion dollar company a failure of this order is ridiculous.

HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45200925

But 0 temp is much less "Creative" and may not be conducive to showing off the AI's latest tricks

Reducing temperature to 0 doesn't make LLMs deterministic. There's still a bunch of other issues such as float math results depending on which order you perform mathematically commutative operations in.

I take it they meant pre-recorded. It was definitely scripted and practiced.

Exactly. Like... what are they even saying here - that if the connection drops then it falls back to a tiny "dropped on their head as a child" 4b parameter LLM embedded in the physical firmware and so that's why it is giving inane responses?

Mad props to the presenter for holding it together though.

The ai is in the cloud

Edit0: ie without internet access the ai is unable to produce an answer other than some prerecorded ones I guess

In the live showcase the presenter even mentions that the wifi must have been bad for the ai to repeat the answer

I don’t even think that’s a word!

Yep I hope that mindset never dies. Meta is one of the last engineering-first companies in big tech and willing to live demo something so obviously prone to mishaps is a great sign of it. It's not unlike SpaceX and being willing to iterate by crashing Starships for the world to see. You make mistakes and fix them, no big deal.

why did they choose to air this live?

For an internal team sure absolutely, but for public-facing work, prerecorded is the way to go

Totally agree. Up until a few years ago failures during live demos on stage used to be a mark of authenticity, and companies playing recordings was always written off as exaggerated or fake. Now all of Apple's keynotes are prerecorded overproduced garbage.

Considering there's no camera pointing to your face they can't be all that interesting.