4 ms·

> I feel like Amazon must have solved this for all practical purposes. Given that I have, more than once, received a huge box from Amazon holding an extremely

> I feel like Amazon must have solved this for all practical purposes. Given that I have, more than once, received a huge box from Amazon holding an extremely small item, I don't think they have unless they're really bad at packaging stock management and had to stuff things into whatever they had available? (To be fair, it has been infrequent but then I'm just one person and I don't believe I'm a statistical anomaly which suggests that at Amazon scale, it's happening thousands of times a day.)

crazygringo 2y ago
> unless they... had to stuff things into whatever they had available I assume that's exactly what happened. You don't have to be "really bad at packaging stock management", you just have to have a supplier that is late delivering certain box sizes on a certain day. Late fulfillment is far more common than late ordering when it comes to automated systems like these. (And the more days' worth of box stock you try to maintain in case box delivery is late, the more it costs you in warehousing. So occasionally getting a box too big is probably going to be economically optimal, when the box suppliers aren't completely perfect in supplying on time.)
- dwighttk 2y ago
  Also all these boxes have to be within reach of the picker… I’ve been getting more ersatz boxes (just kinda cardboard wrapped around a single book and glued) from Amazon, probably so they don’t have to keep a huge number of pre sized boxes in stock.
sqeaky 2y ago
I doubt they have it solved, but I also doubt it is so bad that it the software intends for me to get a single USB4 cable in box suitable for a mini-fridge with a single air packing bag. If I were cording this for amazon, I would start with a known algorithm, something like the skyline texture atlas packing algorithm. Texture atlases are old school ways to send graphics to GPUs and they had to be certain sizes even if what you wanted to draw was much small. Like if you want to draw single letters, for efficiency packing a whole font and related graphics onto a single bitmap and sending it one go was usually more efficient. This has to do with batches once being very expensive and the only way to send stuff over AGP/PCIE to the GPU, I here it is better now but I don't really know. The skyline algorithm starts by lining up all the biggest textures along one edge, then it works down the size until one edge was full. Then it fills gaps with the largest remaining textures. This sometimes fails because "largest" is fuzzy, both longest single edge and total pixel can lead to quirks so game specific heuristics often need to be used (like creating a point system for "largest" where each item gets 1 point per pixel and 2 points per pixel if one dimension is over X or something). It was called the skyline packer because if you ran it with just colored boxes what it drew often looked like a low res city skyline, if you rotated it or packed along the bottom edge (but you always pack from topleft out because of how RAM and storage are efficiently iterated and prediction hardware, and other details) Here is a stackexchange post where they discuss "sorting things in scanline order" by which I think they mean height and then they pack the top edge left to right. If they packed bottom first or if you flip/rotate it you might see the skyline effect, if you squint real hard: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/2829/texture-packing-algorithm https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/2829/texture-pac... But once that is done for the bottom plane of the box other stuff can be jammed in on top. Also not doing it in... Ruby(?), which is what I think candy Japan used, is likely to help. I like Ruby just fine, but I did a pixel comparisons routine for 1080p screenshots once in it and it took like a minute for one comparison of two images. I wrote a c-extension and that dropped to 1 second. I would guess that modern multithreaded/SIMD C++ or Rust could knock out most Amazon packing sized packing problems exhaustively really fast. Still not a great solution, but 10s per package is likely faster than the human packers can work and I would feel comfortable making such promises to a customer (then hopefully deliver ms length solutions). And then for bigger problem spaces we can talk Monte Carlo... some other time.
autoexec 2y ago
When you're forced to piss in plastic bottles and wear diapers to work because the time it takes to walk to a bathroom and back can cost you your job, you're not going to go out of your way to find the right-sized box for every item. Amazon employees are just scrambling to meet inhumane and unrealistic metrics set and enforced by assholes and algorithms that have zero concern for human rights, health, or dignity.
- Carrok 2y ago
  There are many reasons we've stopped ordering from Amazon, their treatment of their human employees being the main one. The proliferation of fake products and reviews being another. The hostile anti-competitive business practices towards small businesses is yet one more reason, and I could keep going. I saw a recent poll that many Americans list Amazon as their favorite retailer, and it blows my mind. Do people really need same day delivery on consumer goods, for the not-low cost of the aforementioned problems?
  - autoexec 2y ago
    Amazon really is a terrible retailer. Their search is a complete joke. The reviews are impossible to trust. They'll happily send you counterfeit goods. They rip off designs and new products to replace with their own inferior versions, and even customer service isn't what is used to be. I think the main reason people use/prefer them is familiarity and availability. There are lots of things that are hard to find in local shops or even other stores online. That's in no small part because of what amazon as done to brick and mortar retail and their online competitors, but I do feel for people who want something but have no idea where they'd even start looking for it except for amazon. The situation is likely to only get worse as search engines grow increasingly less useful. Even when you want to quit them it can be hard to escape amazon. It's work to try to determine the trustworthiness of random storefronts you've never heard of before entrusting them with your credit card info, and I've even heard stories of people who ordered from other sites, paying more than they would have on amazon, only to get their item in an amazon box.
    - 2y ago
photonthug 2y ago
In a sense, this will never be solved for outliers. I’ve been the guy the packing guys hate, ordering a few anvils. Is there any reasonable way to package such a thing in cardboard with any amount of duct tape? And that’s when I realized I’m the coyote, but Amazon isn’t acme level yet.

crazygringo 2y ago

> unless they... had to stuff things into whatever they had available I assume that's exactly what happened. You don't have to be "really bad at packaging stock management", you just have to have a supplier that is late delivering certain box sizes on a certain day. Late fulfillment is far more common than late ordering when it comes to automated systems like these. (And the more days' worth of box stock you try to maintain in case box delivery is late, the more it costs you in warehousing. So occasionally getting a box too big is probably going to be economically optimal, when the box suppliers aren't completely perfect in supplying on time.)

dwighttk 2y ago
Also all these boxes have to be within reach of the picker… I’ve been getting more ersatz boxes (just kinda cardboard wrapped around a single book and glued) from Amazon, probably so they don’t have to keep a huge number of pre sized boxes in stock.

sqeaky 2y ago

I doubt they have it solved, but I also doubt it is so bad that it the software intends for me to get a single USB4 cable in box suitable for a mini-fridge with a single air packing bag. If I were cording this for amazon, I would start with a known algorithm, something like the skyline texture atlas packing algorithm. Texture atlases are old school ways to send graphics to GPUs and they had to be certain sizes even if what you wanted to draw was much small. Like if you want to draw single letters, for efficiency packing a whole font and related graphics onto a single bitmap and sending it one go was usually more efficient. This has to do with batches once being very expensive and the only way to send stuff over AGP/PCIE to the GPU, I here it is better now but I don't really know. The skyline algorithm starts by lining up all the biggest textures along one edge, then it works down the size until one edge was full. Then it fills gaps with the largest remaining textures. This sometimes fails because "largest" is fuzzy, both longest single edge and total pixel can lead to quirks so game specific heuristics often need to be used (like creating a point system for "largest" where each item gets 1 point per pixel and 2 points per pixel if one dimension is over X or something). It was called the skyline packer because if you ran it with just colored boxes what it drew often looked like a low res city skyline, if you rotated it or packed along the bottom edge (but you always pack from topleft out because of how RAM and storage are efficiently iterated and prediction hardware, and other details) Here is a stackexchange post where they discuss "sorting things in scanline order" by which I think they mean height and then they pack the top edge left to right. If they packed bottom first or if you flip/rotate it you might see the skyline effect, if you squint real hard: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/2829/texture-packing-algorithm https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/2829/texture-pac... But once that is done for the bottom plane of the box other stuff can be jammed in on top. Also not doing it in... Ruby(?), which is what I think candy Japan used, is likely to help. I like Ruby just fine, but I did a pixel comparisons routine for 1080p screenshots once in it and it took like a minute for one comparison of two images. I wrote a c-extension and that dropped to 1 second. I would guess that modern multithreaded/SIMD C++ or Rust could knock out most Amazon packing sized packing problems exhaustively really fast. Still not a great solution, but 10s per package is likely faster than the human packers can work and I would feel comfortable making such promises to a customer (then hopefully deliver ms length solutions). And then for bigger problem spaces we can talk Monte Carlo... some other time.

autoexec 2y ago

When you're forced to piss in plastic bottles and wear diapers to work because the time it takes to walk to a bathroom and back can cost you your job, you're not going to go out of your way to find the right-sized box for every item. Amazon employees are just scrambling to meet inhumane and unrealistic metrics set and enforced by assholes and algorithms that have zero concern for human rights, health, or dignity.

Carrok 2y ago
There are many reasons we've stopped ordering from Amazon, their treatment of their human employees being the main one. The proliferation of fake products and reviews being another. The hostile anti-competitive business practices towards small businesses is yet one more reason, and I could keep going. I saw a recent poll that many Americans list Amazon as their favorite retailer, and it blows my mind. Do people really need same day delivery on consumer goods, for the not-low cost of the aforementioned problems?
- autoexec 2y ago
  Amazon really is a terrible retailer. Their search is a complete joke. The reviews are impossible to trust. They'll happily send you counterfeit goods. They rip off designs and new products to replace with their own inferior versions, and even customer service isn't what is used to be. I think the main reason people use/prefer them is familiarity and availability. There are lots of things that are hard to find in local shops or even other stores online. That's in no small part because of what amazon as done to brick and mortar retail and their online competitors, but I do feel for people who want something but have no idea where they'd even start looking for it except for amazon. The situation is likely to only get worse as search engines grow increasingly less useful. Even when you want to quit them it can be hard to escape amazon. It's work to try to determine the trustworthiness of random storefronts you've never heard of before entrusting them with your credit card info, and I've even heard stories of people who ordered from other sites, paying more than they would have on amazon, only to get their item in an amazon box.
  - 2y ago

photonthug 2y ago

In a sense, this will never be solved for outliers. I’ve been the guy the packing guys hate, ordering a few anvils. Is there any reasonable way to package such a thing in cardboard with any amount of duct tape? And that’s when I realized I’m the coyote, but Amazon isn’t acme level yet.