Michal Matyjek 🇺🇦
KayeAdopt the Juicero or be left behind. A vital shift is underway in juicing. The Juicero is no longer optional. It's tomorrow's future, today. 40% of jobs are impacted by the Juicero. The Juicero isn't the future, it's a present necessity. Nobody hand-juices anymore. To hand-juice is like an impairment. Everyone must now focus on the delegation and the verification of a juice. We become less juice producers and more juice enablers. Adopt the Juicero or be left behind. We are burning every forest and poisoning every river to produce more Juiceros. You will become obsolete if you don't get on the Juicero bandwagon. Students must not be taught how to hand-juice. 80% of jobs will be lost to the Juicero. Students must be taught to exclusively focus on how to collaborate with the Juicero. Education must focus on orchestrating agentic Juicero systems. The Juicero is inevitable. Adopt the Juicero or be left behind. Adapt or risk becoming obsolete. As the Juicero rapidly advances toward automating up to 90% of juicing, the skills that will matter most include juice design, Juicero fluency, juice delegation, and juice quality assurance. 110% of jobs have been replaced by the Juicero.
(Context: The Juicero was a very expensive machine that came with a DRM lock and could almost perform a simple task some of the time. It's a useful key to understanding Silicon Valley madness.)
Maxwell (it/its)@kaye And it wasn't even a juicer.
𝑱𝑨𝑴𝑬𝑺 𝑩𝑼𝑹𝑻𝑶𝑵@maxissakitsune @kaye it was more like an automated vice for Capri Sun packets, right?
From Okesska With Love
Pseudonymous 
This isn't #Schedenfruede, this is the happiness of seeing someone else have their mind blown. 
Rimas 
@kaye, OMG, I just read an about Juicero on Wikipedia and CNet, and it's hilarious! 🤣 I even felt like I had to tell my wife about it.
Botch Frivarg@kaye (not only that IIRC it was later found out that the pouches of precut stuff it needed could be nearly as easily squeezed by hand which I think also says something about the techbro mindset)
Andrew Zonenberg@kaye the juicero was expensive and drm locked but my understanding is that at its core, it in fact *was* a very good juicer.
Unlike LLMs.
Maverynthia🌱I mean if not juicing anything makes it a good juicer. (It just squeezed DRM capri sun-like pouches)
@Maverynthia @kaye the point is that there is a useful, though expensive, machine inside all the enshittification of a juicero.
LLMs don't even have that. There's no way to jailbreak one to make it useful.
How is it even useful? It didn't juice anything. People were getting better mileage out of cutting the pouches open (which had DRM on them) and squeezing them by hand.
Travis F WDRM circumvention involved scissors or a knife... so.. it'd be silly to put someone in jail. Then again DRM circumvention legality changes by state, country, etc.
Nentuaby@travisfw @Maverynthia @azonenberg @kaye Yep. Nobody was ever arrested for it because it would have been TOO intensely silly, but it WAS a federal crime. Because the DMCA is a very well-designed law. :/
Glyph@Nentuaby @travisfw @Maverynthia @azonenberg @kaye Nobody was arrested for Juicero circumvention because A) it’s not clear that you are “making a copy” by juicing fruit, so the thing you are circumventing is arguably not a copy-control mechanism at all, and, more importantly, B) juicero the company never had any significant amount of economic or political power.
Plenty of people went to jail or were economically ruined by equivalently trivial and ridiculous DMCA circumvention cases.
Asimech@azonenberg @Maverynthia @kaye I think I see the confusion:
The Juicero, at least early models, were badly over-engineered so they actually had $400 worth of _parts_ inside.
Meaning DIY people rushed to buy them whenever people were selling theirs for cheap.
And that was spun as "but it was a good design/juicer/machine" by people trying to save face.
But a machine = parts × design and the design was trash.
@Asimech @Maverynthia @kaye Ah interesting.
My understanding was that it was more of "What if you gave an engineering team an unlimited budget to build the best juicer imaginable, then slapped DRM on top of the result". Seems that wasn't entirely accurate.
@Asimech @Maverynthia @kaye Anyway, it still did juice at least a little bit so still better than a LLM.
See when I hear "juice" as a verb, I think of squeezing actual fruit/veggie and not shiny foil packs filled with fruit/veggie pulp. Cuz like that's basically "pre-juiced".
Like, then, do we "juice" a tube of toothpaste? 🤔
However this does seem like an appropriate image for Silicon Valley to have these foil DRMed packs growing on trees and vines that you put into this expensive machine to "juice".
However, your right that it did squeeze something to extract "juice" from it. So it does more than LLMs and NNs.
Oh and China apparently made a JuiSir, which Juicero sued for patent infringement.
🔶Mark Nicoll 3.5%🏴🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇳@azonenberg @Asimech @Maverynthia @kaye
Llms have a use they are proficient at both predictive text and translation.
Llms have a use they are proficient at both predictive text and translation.
@duckwhistle @azonenberg @Asimech @kaye
While burning down the planet where a non-llm algorithm would do just fine.
@duckwhistle Based on everything I've heard LLMs are worse at both than the traditional algorithms we've had.
With predictive text the quality drop is hidden by the fact that platform decay had hit most of them before LLMs came about. And the big names like Google were never the best ones to begin with.
With translations LLMs are just hiding the rough edges, which makes it sounds better but really just makes it harder to tell when the translation can't be trusted.
@duckwhistle I really need to emphasise the translation problem here:
LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and their design prioritises _looking_ correct over _being_ correct.
LLMs always need a competent person to check their work and with translations that would require doing the work so LLMs are just an unnecessary step at best.
At least with traditional algorithms there were usually dead giveaways for when the translation was way off. Or when it was a human translated common phrase.
@Asimech
Don't get me wrong I dont think google translate is reliable enough for use in a professional context, but it was great for use in situations where human translator was never going to be an option.
And the traditional algorithms for both those things were LLMs, that's were the technology originated.
It's only with the "advances" in the late 2010s that they became something incredibly inefficient, and the switch to using the same models for all applications, that the quality degraded.
Don't get me wrong I dont think google translate is reliable enough for use in a professional context, but it was great for use in situations where human translator was never going to be an option.
And the traditional algorithms for both those things were LLMs, that's were the technology originated.
It's only with the "advances" in the late 2010s that they became something incredibly inefficient, and the switch to using the same models for all applications, that the quality degraded.
@duckwhistle I was talking in private context.
LLMs are worse than traditional algorithms for translating for private uses.
Because LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and you would need to check the work to know it's at all accurate.
And that last part of yours is BS.
Do you seriously think Nokia 5110 ran an LLM for its T9 input?
And e.g. Google Translate started as an SMT, moved to NMT (and got worse). Neither of which is an LLM (which are worse still).
@Asimech
They may not meet the modern size requirement to be considered an LLM, but the term predates what you are limiting it to.
Even were that not the case I'd argue LLMs are just a fancy NMTs trained on significantly more data, rather than just a model specific for translation.
The differences between the first GPT and an SMT is no greater than the difference between the first GPT and GPT 5.
Fundamentally they are increasingly complex examples of the same software development paradigm. 🤷
They may not meet the modern size requirement to be considered an LLM, but the term predates what you are limiting it to.
Even were that not the case I'd argue LLMs are just a fancy NMTs trained on significantly more data, rather than just a model specific for translation.
The differences between the first GPT and an SMT is no greater than the difference between the first GPT and GPT 5.
Fundamentally they are increasingly complex examples of the same software development paradigm. 🤷
@azonenberg That's what I though when I had first heard of it years ago.
Well, minus the DRM. I learned about that later.
When I learned all it did, and could do, was squeeze empty bags of pre-made juice I was really confused about what was the point.
_Then_ I learned about the DRM and the whole thing made sense, in a way that made me think even less of techbros.
Claudius@azonenberg @Maverynthia @kaye from reviews I read at the time, you could squeeze more out of a bag after the machine was done. That was, because it pressed two plates together flat.
It was not effective.
It was also extremely expensive (machine and refill packs both) and slow.
It was not efficient.
No, it was not a *good* juicer.
It's funny that the worst juicer *still* outperforms LLMs in terms of "it does what you ask it to", though 🤣
morph@claudius @azonenberg @Maverynthia @kaye well it wasn’t a juicer in any sense of the word, was it? The juice was made in a factory, the Juicero was just a pouch squeezer (and, as you say, not a good one). It absolutely couldn’t juice any fresh fruit
@morph @claudius @Maverynthia @kaye Huh.
I thought the pouches contained chopped (not like pureed) fruit, and that it could hypothetically juice anything you could get into a suitably shaped plastic bag if you got around the DRM lock.
@azonenberg @morph @Maverynthia @kaye cnet called them "prepulped": https://www.cnet.com/culture/juicero-is-still-the-greatest-example-of-silicon-valley-stupidity/
Also here's someone on youtube cutting open a bag:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bojSloU93k
@azonenberg @morph @Maverynthia @kaye Here, Bloomberg did a "side by side" comparison of just squeezing a bag with your bare hands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lutHF5HhVA
God, I Love this thing. It's _so_ stupid :-D
Do You Need a $400 Juicer?
@claudius @morph @Maverynthia @kaye TIL. lol.
All this time I had thought it was just a DRM'd juicer and apparently they couldn't even get that part right.
@azonenberg @morph @Maverynthia @kaye here's how well the thing worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uMPymBFq6w
This Juicer Is Everything That’s Wrong With The World (Or At Least Silicon Valley) | Fast Company
@azonenberg @morph @Maverynthia @kaye someone at the time did a full teardown, and the quality of parts inside was pretty good. Machined metal gears and stuff. I believe Juicero genuinely wanted to make a "good" device. It was outrageously expensive, but not in a scammy way. Just in a "we took this in a ridiculous direction and just kept going" way.
@claudius @morph @Maverynthia @kaye Yeah that was the original impression I had.
I thought the idea was "let's take whole fruits and veggies, chop big stuff into few-cm pieces if they're too big to fit in a flat pouch, slap some DRM around it, and charge obscene prices a la printer ink".
And make a no-holds-barred high quality juicer that relied on locking you into their supply chain, but could hypothetically have juiced anything you wanted if it wasn't enshittified.
That's the classic bay area "take something that worked perfectly fine, throw a bunch of VC money at it, wrap it up in DRM, and sell it as a better alternative" model.
Not sure what the point of prechopping the stuff was.
Damon L. Wakes@claudius @azonenberg The contents of the bag are incredible - essentially 90% of the way to being juice already. I was also under the impression that it was at least pressing diced fruit pieces.
Mark Shane Hayden@azonenberg Juicero was a stylish, robust, over engineered and expensive appliance that was exceptional at...
...squeezing little bags of macerated fruit...
...except if the little bags lacked the Magic Barcode...
...which you could only get through an expensive subscription
Such a ridiculous concept that even if you did jailbreak the thing it is absurd to go through the expense and effort for a fekkin BAG SQUEEZER whether it works or not.
Honestly the analogy is spot on with respect to LLMs. They are stylish, robust, over engineered and expensive prediction machines, and they can and do work with specific, basic use cases, but the immense resources expended for those specific use cases are very much reminiscent of the Juicero.
Alexander Janßen@itnomad Squeezed these foil packs of veggie/fruit pulp into a cup for you. That's it.
And the packs had DRM on it so it they "expired" you had to buy new packs. You "couldn't" get the juice from it using you $400 tool. (However a knife worked just as well)
Felipe 🐁@azonenberg Not really, no. It just squeezed contents out of a bag where you could get the same result with your hands faster than the machine. Thoroughly snake oil.
Do You Need a $400 Juicer?
William Pietri@azonenberg @kaye That is not correct. It was grossly overengineered and wasn't a general juicer. It just squeezed pre-made bags that a person could squeeze well by hand. At best, it was very good at fooling people into thinking it was a good juicer. A detailed teardown is here:
Here’s Why Juicero’s Press is So Expensive
Hidden away in Juicero’s bad week of press is one of the most powerful lessons we preach to hardware startups: unconstrained development is lethal. Last week Bloomberg published an article exposing how easy it is to “hack” Juicero’s produce packs by squeezing them with your hands, deeming the $69
@williampietri @kaye Yeah I had thought that the "pre-made bag" bit was just for DRM purposes.
Like, a Keurig can totally brew ordinary ground coffee if you can pour it into a k-cup of the right size and convince it to do so.
Helge Wurst@azonenberg @kaye It was? Afaik it for the most part squeezed out pre-shredded bits swimming in their own juice, leaving behind a lot of waste in the shape of a multilayer plastic pouch.
I prefer the centrifugal juicer.
While we're at it, teardown time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-inside-a-juicero-juice-packet-2017-4
@azonenberg @kaye man those pouches really were pre-microplastics-awareness
Kay Ohtie 🔜 FWA@azonenberg @kaye it wasn't though. The pouches it squeezed were already basically cooked or at least pulped. A rolling pin would've done just as good of a job.
And no support for making any custom juicing blends for it to squeeze fruit from. That would've been the cool part, and from what I remember was purposefully insinuated but never actually stated, so when they said it wasn't gonna happen it predictably flopped.
Lux 
@azonenberg @kaye it was possible to squeeze the proprietary bags by hand without needing to buy a $700 machine to do it. But you needed a proof of purchase of the machine to buy the bags.
The comparison with LLMs is on point.
This video is said to have caused their bankrupcy.
Do You Need a $400 Juicer?
Pyxaron@azonenberg @kaye It wasn't even a juicer, it was an excessively overbuilt juice dispenser.
It collapsed when people found that they could just squeeze the pouches by hand.
trillytrillAs it should. Lord, I hate DRM tech in everything. 
Daniel AJ Sokolov@azonenberg @kaye That's news to me. AFAIK, Juicero was as much of a juicer as the pop dispenser at Carl's Jr is a cola nut cracker.
Zalasur 🐸🇺🇦@kaye I struggle to remember a time before the juicero
Григорий КлюшниковKaye, yeah I like how the "revolutionary" part of the whole thing, and why it needed an internet connection and an app and an account, was that it was capable of disobeying its owner. Also, yes, horribly overengineered.
Lappenjammer@kaye Wait, what? I thought you made that up to drive home the message about LLMs. No way!
@lappenjammer Oh, it's real. https://archive.is/b2a4u And it destroyed $120 million in startup venture capital.
@kaye Yeah, I looked it up on Wikipedia. Even if you needed the machine to juice the packs, buying overpriced stuff because you can't use the machine otherwise seems like like badly ripped of Nespresso.
Softwarewolf@kaye Also we put 50% less plastic in your hand juicers because they are obsolete Juicero is the future now
Anthk
0x4d6165 (Julie or Mae)@kaye A single drop of blood will cure cancer!!!
StoneBear 
@kaye F the juice, give me COFFEE. Hand-picked, hand dried, transported by mule-cart to the electric railhead, loaded onto ships powered by SAF, delivered to the roaster in electric vehicles, roasted with solar power, fetched by me on my electric bicycle, ground by hand, brewed with water heated by windmill power, in a French press that modulo the screens will basically last several generations. And everybody involved in this whole cycle gets paid a living wage and has universal healthcare.
This is my nirvana, my hill that I will not die on, but live until I am 105, dug into the side of it in a sustainable hobbit-hole covered in solar panels.