4 ms·

This is a pretty good example of the things required to keep a service running reliably that likely would not be done by a commercial company with no delivery g

This is a pretty good example of the things required to keep a service running reliably that likely would not be done by a commercial company with no delivery guarantee offered. I can't imagine FedEx, UPS et al going to these lengths.

echelon 4y ago
If a private company contracted this job, not only would they earn money from the USPS, but they could provide the service to other companies. Lots of public and private entities need this service. But even better - they'd build up an institutional set of training data for machine learning and could build the best handwriting recognizer on the planet.
- illiarian 4y ago
  > not only would they earn money from the USPS You mean siphon money from USPS > they'd build up an institutional set of training data for machine learning and could build the best handwriting recognizer on the planet. You mean, they'd use private people's data to build up a closed dataset they'd sell to other companies for money.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - KyeRussell 4y ago
    I agree that the privatisation of the USPS would be a very bad thing. However the language you’re using, esp, in the second point, is optimised to be alarmist at the expense of being accurate. You aren’t doing anybody any favours by being intellectually dishonest. Is it a closed dataset, or are they selling it to other companies? Your language evokes privacy concerns. I’m sure you know that, and I’m sure that that’s intentional. Using someone’s handwriting as training data for OCR, as part of a training dataset significantly large enough to be used as training data in the first place, does not pose a material additional privacy concern.
    - b112 4y ago
      does not pose a material additional privacy concern. But it does. It so very much does, because it always does. Always. Every time. Data gets anonymized, then other firms de-anonymize. Co-mingled anonymized, too. And once the MBAs see it, it will be pried away, and sold, and processed, and snarfed, with hooks during training too. Because it always happens. Always. Every time. It's like candy to a child, like food to a starving man. At this point, we are insane to think data stored or even observed, is not being monetized against us. So the parent's post is not alarmist, because it always, always happens.
    - illiarian 4y ago
      > Using someone’s handwriting as training data for OCR, as part of a training dataset significantly large enough to be used as training data in the first place, does not pose a material additional privacy concern. USPS literally processes people's private addresses. I'm amazed how you can say "Does not pose privacy concern" with a straight face when the entirety of the past decade has shown us that if there's private data, companies will abuse it, sell it, leak it etc.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  USPS already has extremely good handwriting recognition tech. If a human is reading it, it's going to be a very difficult and unique case that the machine couldn't figure out.
  - vincnetas 4y ago
    yes, but does AI can deliver mail to Dorothy, Gloucester, VA (see one of root comments)
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      Notice that the Utah facility handles the entire United States, so unless "Dorothy" is very famous for living in Gloucester ("Trump, Florida" might work) that's not going to work even with humans in the loop at this stage. It'd get delivered, if it does, because rather than drop mail they'll send it to Gloucester and the delivery people in Gloucester might be able to fix that, so nothing to do with this facility.
- clort 4y ago
  I worked ~20 years ago doing this exact job at Royal Mail in UK. The software that they were using was not their own, but being created on contract by Lockheed Martin, who did not write it themselves but subcontracted out to another company. I'm pretty sure that the basics of the software will have been sold again and again to different companies. The end result of the contract was that Royal Mail did not own the software and when the development contract was up, there were several stupid things that could not/would not be fixed without serious money being spent on a new contract. The issues that we (as keyers) had with the software in development were virtually impossible to address, given that there were several corporate layers between the contacts. The one time that a load of developers came to our data centre to observe keyers in action, one of our quick-thinking lower managers managed to snag a contact detail and for about a month there was an easy option to get small niggles fixed. oh, btw my tph was 2-3000 so I don't know why the USPS workers are so slow. Actually thats just boasting, I probably do - it is likely that the software is a whole lot better than it was, which means that the quality of the images that it cannot handle has gone right down and takes longer for a human to process as a result.
  - sbuttgereit 4y ago
    I did the same job back in the mid-90's at the facility discussed in the article when it first opened. The piece rate was probably higher, though the measure we cared about was keystrokes per hour so I don't know if I ever saw a real statistic for this. The work-load almost certainly has changed with technological improvement. Back then, my recollection is that we'd see more machine type than handwritten addresses, but only slightly. Also we were only filling in the gaps depending on how well the original OCR worked. Sometimes we'd have to key in the important portions of the whole address (house number, part of a street name, postal code)... sometimes just the postal code, and sometimes only a portion of the postal code. Some of these data entry modes were faster than others; the extended "zip code" data entry only required two numeric keystrokes whereas the full data entry mode required much more time.
  - aelhage 4y ago
    I worked on the LM side of this team ~8 years ago, and it sounds like they learned some lessons since you had to deal with them! The ML team was still in house and working on all sorts of projects, and there was a sizeable software team working on the software around this. One of my most valuable lessons working there as a green engineer - you can figure out more in an hour sitting down with the end user then months of meetings before then.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  On Tom Scott's video, you can see the software is provided by a commercial company "Eagle", and Siemens is mentioned too.
eastbound 4y ago
This is a pretty good example of a thing that is not required to keep the service running reliably (akin to sending an IP packet with only a partial IP) and that governments, with no incentive to properly allocate Earth’s scarce resources, would typically keep running aimlessly. Then they tell us we consume too much resources.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Alternate view: this is a form of ECC, which is widely used in computing.
- notjtrig 4y ago
  USPS is a government service but it is self funded, the domain system has evolved a pure unregulated capitalist way of dealing with this dilemma. Purchasers of domains are simply expected to buy all misspelled and closely matching addresses or a opportunistic advertiser or worse will set-up shop.
1123581321 4y ago
UPS and FedEx would have similar facilities if they didn’t require you to mail through their stores or partners, or with a preprinted label. It’s the guaranteed pickup of any stamped paper from any mailbox that is the the marvel of USPS, when you think about it.

echelon 4y ago

If a private company contracted this job, not only would they earn money from the USPS, but they could provide the service to other companies. Lots of public and private entities need this service. But even better - they'd build up an institutional set of training data for machine learning and could build the best handwriting recognizer on the planet.

illiarian 4y ago
> not only would they earn money from the USPS You mean siphon money from USPS > they'd build up an institutional set of training data for machine learning and could build the best handwriting recognizer on the planet. You mean, they'd use private people's data to build up a closed dataset they'd sell to other companies for money.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  I agree that the privatisation of the USPS would be a very bad thing. However the language you’re using, esp, in the second point, is optimised to be alarmist at the expense of being accurate. You aren’t doing anybody any favours by being intellectually dishonest. Is it a closed dataset, or are they selling it to other companies? Your language evokes privacy concerns. I’m sure you know that, and I’m sure that that’s intentional. Using someone’s handwriting as training data for OCR, as part of a training dataset significantly large enough to be used as training data in the first place, does not pose a material additional privacy concern.
  - b112 4y ago
    does not pose a material additional privacy concern. But it does. It so very much does, because it always does. Always. Every time. Data gets anonymized, then other firms de-anonymize. Co-mingled anonymized, too. And once the MBAs see it, it will be pried away, and sold, and processed, and snarfed, with hooks during training too. Because it always happens. Always. Every time. It's like candy to a child, like food to a starving man. At this point, we are insane to think data stored or even observed, is not being monetized against us. So the parent's post is not alarmist, because it always, always happens.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    > Using someone’s handwriting as training data for OCR, as part of a training dataset significantly large enough to be used as training data in the first place, does not pose a material additional privacy concern. USPS literally processes people's private addresses. I'm amazed how you can say "Does not pose privacy concern" with a straight face when the entirety of the past decade has shown us that if there's private data, companies will abuse it, sell it, leak it etc.
jjeaff 4y ago
USPS already has extremely good handwriting recognition tech. If a human is reading it, it's going to be a very difficult and unique case that the machine couldn't figure out.
- vincnetas 4y ago
  yes, but does AI can deliver mail to Dorothy, Gloucester, VA (see one of root comments)
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    Notice that the Utah facility handles the entire United States, so unless "Dorothy" is very famous for living in Gloucester ("Trump, Florida" might work) that's not going to work even with humans in the loop at this stage. It'd get delivered, if it does, because rather than drop mail they'll send it to Gloucester and the delivery people in Gloucester might be able to fix that, so nothing to do with this facility.
clort 4y ago
I worked ~20 years ago doing this exact job at Royal Mail in UK. The software that they were using was not their own, but being created on contract by Lockheed Martin, who did not write it themselves but subcontracted out to another company. I'm pretty sure that the basics of the software will have been sold again and again to different companies. The end result of the contract was that Royal Mail did not own the software and when the development contract was up, there were several stupid things that could not/would not be fixed without serious money being spent on a new contract. The issues that we (as keyers) had with the software in development were virtually impossible to address, given that there were several corporate layers between the contacts. The one time that a load of developers came to our data centre to observe keyers in action, one of our quick-thinking lower managers managed to snag a contact detail and for about a month there was an easy option to get small niggles fixed. oh, btw my tph was 2-3000 so I don't know why the USPS workers are so slow. Actually thats just boasting, I probably do - it is likely that the software is a whole lot better than it was, which means that the quality of the images that it cannot handle has gone right down and takes longer for a human to process as a result.
- sbuttgereit 4y ago
  I did the same job back in the mid-90's at the facility discussed in the article when it first opened. The piece rate was probably higher, though the measure we cared about was keystrokes per hour so I don't know if I ever saw a real statistic for this. The work-load almost certainly has changed with technological improvement. Back then, my recollection is that we'd see more machine type than handwritten addresses, but only slightly. Also we were only filling in the gaps depending on how well the original OCR worked. Sometimes we'd have to key in the important portions of the whole address (house number, part of a street name, postal code)... sometimes just the postal code, and sometimes only a portion of the postal code. Some of these data entry modes were faster than others; the extended "zip code" data entry only required two numeric keystrokes whereas the full data entry mode required much more time.
- aelhage 4y ago
  I worked on the LM side of this team ~8 years ago, and it sounds like they learned some lessons since you had to deal with them! The ML team was still in house and working on all sorts of projects, and there was a sizeable software team working on the software around this. One of my most valuable lessons working there as a green engineer - you can figure out more in an hour sitting down with the end user then months of meetings before then.
Symbiote 4y ago
On Tom Scott's video, you can see the software is provided by a commercial company "Eagle", and Siemens is mentioned too.

eastbound 4y ago

This is a pretty good example of a thing that is not required to keep the service running reliably (akin to sending an IP packet with only a partial IP) and that governments, with no incentive to properly allocate Earth’s scarce resources, would typically keep running aimlessly. Then they tell us we consume too much resources.

sokoloff 4y ago
Alternate view: this is a form of ECC, which is widely used in computing.
notjtrig 4y ago
USPS is a government service but it is self funded, the domain system has evolved a pure unregulated capitalist way of dealing with this dilemma. Purchasers of domains are simply expected to buy all misspelled and closely matching addresses or a opportunistic advertiser or worse will set-up shop.

1123581321 4y ago

UPS and FedEx would have similar facilities if they didn’t require you to mail through their stores or partners, or with a preprinted label. It’s the guaranteed pickup of any stamped paper from any mailbox that is the the marvel of USPS, when you think about it.