I have the same reaction to this as I did to Soylent: I'd be a lot more inclined to try it if there was somebody involved with it who had some demonstrable background or expertise in nutrition, health or medicine.
The human body is a complicated thing, but while it's hard to improve, it's very easy to screw up. And screwing up someone's health can have consequences for them that last for years or decades. It can literally ruin their life. If that happens it won't be much comfort for them that their sad story has led you to pivot to a more promising approach.
For all the intellectual firepower of people in the tech community, there is a curious strain of anti-intellectualism that comes forth in projects like this; an eagerness to discount the expertise of people who have studied a subject for their entire lives, just because they weren't CS majors. It's like trying to send a man to the moon without working with any aerospace engineers. I honestly do not understand it.
In retrospect the 1990s components craze feels rather modest compared to what's happening now though, even if you allow for stupid ideas like CORBA IDL which hardly anyone ever used.
Right now it feels like every single tiny aspect of devops or JavaScript compilation/bundling or UI layouting alone has become more convoluted than the entire 1990s software stack.
I realize that we are doing a lot more with software now. But comparing only stuff that we used to do back then as well, like creating line of business applications, analysing some data, or create single user productivity apps, I can only shake my head in disbelief at the incredible loss of productivity.
I believe much of it is driven by a desire to architect every little app as if it had to scale to Facebook or Google size tomorrow, use Web technology for tasks that it is completely unsuitable for, and define "right tool for the job" in such a granular fashion that we end up using at least three database systems, three programming languages and scores of other distributed thingies in every single project. Just look at those "our tech stack" posts that come up frequently. It's insane every single time.
Now it's microservices. What used to be components with well defined interfaces sending SQL to an RDBMS in the 1990s has become a swarm OS processes with networking, service discovery and HA infrastructure in between. To keep it running you need some sort of cat herding devops and monitoring system. The possible failure states are beyond the capacity of human cognition.
But it makes total sense if you're a huge corporation that has an entire team working on each of those services. For Amazon it could indeed reduce coordination effort, increase accountability and make the system easier to scale. For a team of 5 or 10 people it's pure insanity to put a network between two "services" that don't absolutely have to scale independently.
We're scaling out everything instead of scaling up, even though scaling up is hugely more efficient up to a scale that 99% of all projects never grow into. In some cases (particularly in data analysis), we're paying 60% margins to cloud hosting companies for clusters that could be replaced by a single laptop using a simpler architecture.
The Web is such a great thing for all the new things it enables that we simply couldn't do at all in the early 1990s. But I really have to ROFL every time someone says "right tool for the job" and then goes on to layout a data entry form using CSS.
Here's my prediction: We're going see clusters of AIs running on top of AWS GPUs to optimize line of business apps for AWS pricing structures that no human being is able to fully grasp any more. And all of it will be set up by highly paid consultants sold by armies of salespeople.
Here we have an explanation for the productivity conundrum that has economists scratching their heads. So much more sophisticated technology and hardly any productivity growth. How come?
The human body is a complicated thing, but while it's hard to improve, it's very easy to screw up. And screwing up someone's health can have consequences for them that last for years or decades. It can literally ruin their life. If that happens it won't be much comfort for them that their sad story has led you to pivot to a more promising approach.
For all the intellectual firepower of people in the tech community, there is a curious strain of anti-intellectualism that comes forth in projects like this; an eagerness to discount the expertise of people who have studied a subject for their entire lives, just because they weren't CS majors. It's like trying to send a man to the moon without working with any aerospace engineers. I honestly do not understand it.