Amazon has almost 100% been using the local Prime Now drivers to deliver boxes - which is great because they come next day. Down side is drivers are always new and have no experience delivering mail. It's gotten a little better but I had to call amazon and request that their drivers not call me to tell me to meet them at the corner of the block for my package.
I've figured out that if I want something tomorrow, I check the prime now site and see if it's available there. If so there's a very good chance it'll come overnight.
What I wonder if how are the drivers compensated for delivering a box vs same day? Same day you tip them. So does that mean they're getting screwed for normal deliveries? Knowing amazon, probably.
I'm quite annoyed about this in the UK. They're basically trying to fabricate a price-obscuring tipping culture just so they can advertise "free same day delivery".
I would be totally happy to pay £2 for the service when I need it, but I don't appreciate being charity mugged at the checkout.
I don't know how you miss a massive apartment building? It seems their drivers followed the gps dot exactly (which shows the intersection). Even pizza guys get it right.
Why does Amazon need to kill any service. Even with their cloud platform, rack space, digital ocean and plenty of other providers are thriving and coming up.
AWS is infrastructure as a service. Digital Ocean sells virtual private servers. They aren't even remotely the same product. I host a blog on DO for a few buck a month. My company hosts their entire infrastructure on AWS for 4 different applications.
You can do the same on DO, it's just slightly more involved, almost certainly less resiliant and they supply less PaaS options.
In fact as an IaaS if you throw kubernetes at it, run ceph and put a little effort into getting autoscaling, then you have a knock-off cloud.
Amazons value is that it's cheaper for a small company than hiring the people who can do this well and you can hire a generalist to glue it all together.
FedEx is both an established airline AND one of the most trusted logistics companies on the planet. So Amazon can beat them when they can do this on demand:
For brevity: the above purports to show a time lapse of FedEx's fleet of DC-10s, Airbus A310s etc - packed with fuel, valuables and people - scrambling for the Memphis, TN hub and hooking in handily around a massive angry thunderstorm.
It looks like a perfectly organized, well timed dance - with incredibly high stakes.
The Fedex courier in my area has been consistently bad for years and doesn't get fired. Two weeks ago: doesn't come, doesn't leave a notice, two days in a row, claiming he came, I had a to exchange some salty emails with customer service to get my package. Each time I had to use Fedex these last 3 years I've had to do this cycle.
On the other hand I have developped a "good relationship" with the UPS courier.
The thing is, people like you and me are not primary customers of Fedex. Corporate is where it's at - when I worked at an oil refinery in Scotland, engineers would request parts that had to be literally delivered ASAP, and refinery didn't think twice about paying a bill in thousands of pounds for overnight delivery of few parts from US.
As a logistics manager - I would constantly switch between the two, depending on who could get me the best rate for our most common small package parcel sizes, etc.
They constantly alternate between "the best" and "shitty".
I live in quite a remote area, with UPS and FedEx drivers that are driving hundreds of miles per day on their route, often starting over 100 miles away, and yet they're both consistently excellent. They virtually never miss delivery estimates, and often exceed them. I'm honestly quite impressed with them, especially considering a moderate amount of their route is also on fairly poor quality dirt roads.
I have the EXACT OPPOSITE experience in my neighthood - FedEx always deliver package above and beyond but UPS has been shitty ALL THE TIME. I live in Northen NJ.
I'm a licensed pilot. What's interesting about that video has literally nothing to do with Fedex. It's a demonstration of the skill of the center and approach controllers at Memphis during inclement weather.
a) If anything, it is not a feat of Company, but of nowadays IFR systems in cooperation with ATC guys who probably sweated off at least 10 pounds during that shift.
b) Each and every airline does that, from top notch VIP charters to those we-are-declaring-emergency-because-our-company-doesn't-let-us-take-in-enough-fuel-so-we-are-landing-RIGHT-NOW-GET-OFF-OUR-WAY poor souls piloting Ryanairs.
c) Aviation is a market. If you pay, you get aircrafts and pilots. If you pay good, you get good pilots. That's it.
d) This is very inside the box thinking. An equivalent of this would be showing a video of a bunch of guys running to the local hardware shop, hastily throwing HW boxes into a car, driving fast and furious back to the site, assembling a server, plugging it in, installing OS and presenting it to the customer: here, your server.
So Amazon can beat them only when they can do all of this on demand?
No, they just built the AWS and "on demand" now means just clicking "I want an instance now" or even letting a balancer spin that up for you, done.
The article is talking about 15 years horizon and although that is a very brave speculation of Amazon's business plans and future events, just think about what 15 years means. 15 years ago, Windows XP has just RTMed a week before. GPS meant some ugly expensive box waiting an eternity to get a fix. Common large and heavy desktop crates called personal computers struggled with even playing a DivX video in CRT resolution. Capturing overhead footage meant flying an expensive helicopter running on expensive fuel and operated by highly trained pilot.
Nowadays, you can buy an entire device called "quadcopter" for less than an hour of helicopter flight time and fly around and videotape everything like in a computer game. We have small slates of glass called "smartphones" that smoothly play 2880x2160 videos while projecting them onto a 3D surface twice (VR phone-based headsets) or even smoothly render an entire VR game scene from polygons. We have cars using half as much fuel. You can tap on your slate of glass and a car arrives for you.
In 15 years we can have supertough drones flying right through hurricanes, micro hyperloops moving small cargo around entire states, warehouses on every other corner with duplicated stock, carpooling packet delivery services like some Uber-Fedex hybrid, or even outright cargo teleports spitting out pizzas from local restaurants, shoe orders from Amazon and hell monsters from Mars military bases with id Software calling out software patents on that and claiming intellectual property on 50% of incoming daemons...
Sorry for long post - basically what I wanted to say is that everybody can do that with airplanes.
Thanks for your post - I appreciate the constructive criticism - and agree the video isn't much to anyone with an aviation background.
I guess what I was trying to say, is that if you are an air-<whatever> business, you ALWAYS have to be an airline first - with all the Regulatory, Union, personnel, hardware, etc issues that come with it - and whatever else you want to do SECOND (air freight, passenger etc).
You know waaaaay more than I do - this is just my oversimplified take I am sure. I just am always impressed at the stakes / volume of traffic that goes in / out of the FDX hubs daily.
What's stopping Amazon doing the same thing over the next few years? They have the resources to buy some planes and write some software to schedule them. The hard thing would be negotiating with airports to get the same level of access that FedEx enjoys. I don't see what that would be a particularly big problem - it comes down to the fees they're willing to pay.
Just yesterday I had someone from the other coast leave a laptop charger. Rather messing with the UPS or FEDEX, I just ordered a new one and had it delivered to their address.
Where's the notion that non-mac chargers are any cheaper from? Have you seen prices of genuine HP, Dell or Lenovo chargers? They are just as, if not more expensive than Apple chargers. Sure, you can buy a replacement charger from amazon for $20 but then you can't compare it to a genuine apple charger.
A 90W brand-new, genuine Dell charger goes for about $25 on Amazon [1]. That's the same price as shipping that charger accross the US with FedEx 2Day delivery (without pickup).
I'm surprised this journalist, who apparently has some in-depth knowledge about the shipping industry, seems to be completely unaware of FedEx's contract with the US Postal Service. FedEx moves ALL mail that goes by air. That includes Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express. I don't see Amazon killing a company with a huge customer like that.
Gee, for a while I was Director of Operations Research at FedEx. My office was next to that of FedEx founder, COB, CEO F. Smith.
Poor Smith: One night at about midnight, I was in my office getting in a little violin practice before heading back to my rented room for some sleep (my wife was still in her Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins in MD). As I left to get some sleep, I saw Smith in his office. He had had to listen to my violin practice of scales, intervals, etc.!
The first good thing I did for Smith was write some software for scheduling the fleet. The BoD was seriously asking if such scheduling could be done at all. One evening R. Frock (he has a book on FedEx) and I used my software and produced a schedule for the full, planned operation. Smith's remark was "Solves the most important problem". Our two BoD representatives of BoD Member General Dynamics said "It's a little tight in a few places, but it's flyable". The BoD was happy, and crucial funding was enabled.
But by the night of the violin practice, I was working on better scheduling. Right, I was encountering the question of P = NP. So, I had chatted with G. Nemhauser about integer linear programming set covering.
Later I went for my Ph.D. in applied math and, in the studies, kept in mind the problems I'd seen at FedEx. So, e.g., model various cases of arrivals as a Poisson process -- from an axiomatic derivation of that process or just from the renewal theorem. Use some stochastic optimal control for some of the operational issues. Have some much more accurate cost estimating of the airplane operations and include those in the integer linear programming, etc.
Gee, for the last 10 years, I didn't know that Amazon was doing so much in such logistics. No way can they be avoiding some optimization problems for their logistics without wasting significant bucks. For a lot they were doing, I'd been there, done that, went to grad school for it, written software for it, etc. Could have helped them!
Scattering warehouses, sort centers, fulfillment centers, ships, airplanes, trucks, bicycles, drones, etc. all around and changing all that ASAP over time has to encounter some severe challenges in applied math and corresponding software, especially having those two keep up with the operational changes.
I know; I know; if assume that the operations will be big enough, then there are some approaches to those discrete optimization problems that use just some continuous techniques that are much easier. In that case, maybe for a while, during the rapid growth period, go ahead and don't try very hard on the optimization, scatter around, and anticipate that, when reach the target size, nearly all those warehouses, sort centers, etc. will be close enough to something optimal.
Then I wonder: What is Wal-Mart doing in response? They have a lot of warehouses, trucks, and stores and a Web site for on-line ordering? Right, they bought Jet.com. But anything else?
Fundamentally I begin to wonder about Amazon and airplanes: For FedEx, sure airplanes are crucial. But for Amazon? I wonder.
Why? What's the difference?
For FedEx, hour by hour, a huge fraction of what FedEx receives and ships is different, literally never done before, that is, could not have been stocked in a warehouse. E.g., FedEx may receive a legal brief, some medical samples, a custom 3D printout, etc. That was the first and last time those particular items were ever shipped. The variety of what FedEx ships is beyond belief -- stand in the sort center in Memphis and watch the stuff go by and have to give up on any simple overview.
For Amazon, all they ship is what's for sale on their Web site. So far, next to none of that stuff is perishable. And, for nearly all of it, the time, hours, days, weeks, from when it is created by the original manufacturer to when it is needed in an Amazon warehouse doesn't much matter.
So, in comparison with FedEx, the variety is much less. So Amazon has an easier t...
Assumption: There is a lot of content on the Internet, and generally people have interests and want appropriate content. The most effective current means are based on keywords/phrases; these means can work really well in some cases but are at best poor for about 2/3rds of content on the Internet, queries people want to do, and content they want to find.
For more: Generally, finding stuff has long been part of the field of information retrieval. That field long ago divided the whole problem into pieces. One big division was between (A) content a person knew existed and had some information about, e.g., keywords/phrases and (B) content that person did not know existed. The old library card catalog subject index is close to case (A) and so are the Internet search engines based on keywords/phrases. For case (B), that is closer to what might be called discovery, recommendation, curation, notification, subscription.
My startup is for being the best for case (B). For case (A), that will remain. What I am doing for case (B) is very different from what has worked well for case (A). Very different: E.g., there is no use of keywords/phrases.
So, my work brings together in a coordinated way (i) the unmet part of the user need to find stuff on the Internet, (ii) a new and very different UI/UX, (iii) some important new data, and (iv), for processing the data to get the results for the users, some new applied math (complete with theorems and proofs, based on some advanced pure math prerequisites) that is the crucial core of the work, that is, the means of getting especially good results for the users.
Some of the efforts seem to have taken some simple techniques and simple, old data sources for recommendation engines and bent the real problem to what these techniques could do; my view is that this is not very promising.
E.g., I believe that my work will do much better for letting people look for, say, movies than what Netflix got from their Netflix Challenge contests. Why? I believe that Netflix formulated the problem poorly, in too narrow a way. What I have done does not fit what Netflix assumed in their problem formulation.
Yes, my work is quite new but, still, supposed to be really easy and intuitive for users. E.g., I hope that a child in a third world country who knows no English will be able to get good with my work in a few minutes alone or sooner watching one example of usage. Right, I might put such an example on YouTube and have my Web site Help page link to that.
There is part of the math that is surprising: One would guess that no such good thing could be true, but it is. Of course, users will not be aware of anything mathematical.
To be a little more clear, my math is original and has nothing to do with anything I've seen in artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML). To be a little more clear, the AI and ML I have seen do contain some applied math but which is apparently quite narrow. In contrast, on the shelves of the QA sections of the research libraries, there is enormously greater variety, and my work is not on those shelves. So, instead of AI or ML, I just derived some applied (applicable) math.
Then I wrote the corresponding software. Currently there is about 100,000 lines of typing, for both the programming language statements and the documentation in comments in the code. There is much more documentation outside the code. And there is the math, typed into D. Knuth's TeX.
All the code appears to run as intended. The code appears to be essentially all that is needed for at least early production. Currently the code is in alpha test. I'm a solo founder, 100% owner.
The next steps are to complete the alpha test to let me be rock solidly sure the code is correct and ready for production, load some more initial data, do a beta test and get back comments, maybe tweak some parts of the code, say, for the UI/UX, maybe load some more initial data, and, the...
Thanks for sharing more details. Sounds interesting. I'd love to get a look and provide feedback when you're ready to open it up to more users. My contact info is in my profile.
This sounds really cool. I am struggling trying to wrap my head around how a recommendation system could be accomplished without some kind of graph connecting things together.
I'll be really interested to see how it turns out!
Sounds cool, I'd like to check it out when it's ready too.
You probably already know this, but VCs and investors won't like your work now because there's no proof of value. You should avoid them at this point, because you'd only get deals on terrible terms, like pocket change for a majority share to a no-name VC.
Don't talk to investors until you have enough traction and proof of value for them to want to invest in you, and draw up your own business plan for exactly what you intend to do with the money and how much it will expand the business. Then you can have investors coming to you and only accept deals on your terms.
There is always a question about that: When the subject of the sentence is clear, omitting that subject can result in more compact writing , but whether the writing is easier to read or not is a question. I thought that omitting some obvious subjects would help, but thanks for your feedback.
Years ago, Amazon used DHL. I complained once about the service with them, and they said they had to continue using them in my area until they'd had enough complaints. (Which I felt was kind of reasonable, I guess.)
Less than a year later, they were no longer using them in my area, and then a while later I hear DHL basically doesn't exist in the USA.
So yeah, Amazon can apparently kill a mail carrier. Whether they will or not will depend on how bad that carrier does its business.
I don't know that Amazon killed them, DHL just pretty much failed to get a foothold in the US market. I never had any trouble with them when they were delivering where I lived, myself.
I've had one package shipped by DHL to me, ever. The package never arrived, but the driver claimed it did; I even watched as the tracking showed it as "delivered" at a certain time in the morning on a day I was home and was watching for the package. I filed a complaint, and the driver came to me personally with a nasty attitude and left in a snit. I never did get my package, or a refund, or anything.
That was my one and only experience with DHL. I'm glad they no longer operate in the US. I've had countless packages delivered by UPS, FedEx, and USPS, and never had them go missing; my only problems were when drivers want a signature when I'm not home and can't leave it at the door and I end up having to drive to the distribution center to pick it up.
Amazon's edge isn't in shipping. It's in fulfillment.
Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) is a boon for many businesses, as it combines warehousing, packing/labelling, and shipping into a single interface at an attractive price. Let's not forget that they also bring customers and handle the entire billing operation, too.
If Amazon does harm FedEx/UPS, it won't be by starving them of packages directly, but rather by sidestepping their business, attracting companies to FBA, so that they never enter the "shipping" business sector.
I don't expect to see Amazon enter the point-to-point shipping business anytime soon.
I expect it. A family member has worked for FedEx ground since it was RPS, and has been telling me for years how Amazon kept hiring away their execs. And the company is your typical sclerotic old-style megacorporation mired in bureaucracy so it moves very slowly on everything.
69 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadI've figured out that if I want something tomorrow, I check the prime now site and see if it's available there. If so there's a very good chance it'll come overnight.
What I wonder if how are the drivers compensated for delivering a box vs same day? Same day you tip them. So does that mean they're getting screwed for normal deliveries? Knowing amazon, probably.
I'm quite annoyed about this in the UK. They're basically trying to fabricate a price-obscuring tipping culture just so they can advertise "free same day delivery".
I would be totally happy to pay £2 for the service when I need it, but I don't appreciate being charity mugged at the checkout.
No. Because there's such thing as competition. More than one company can survive and thrive in the same industry. That's my point.
Apples and oranges.
In fact as an IaaS if you throw kubernetes at it, run ceph and put a little effort into getting autoscaling, then you have a knock-off cloud.
Amazons value is that it's cheaper for a small company than hiring the people who can do this well and you can hire a generalist to glue it all together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-qPtWc4heA
For brevity: the above purports to show a time lapse of FedEx's fleet of DC-10s, Airbus A310s etc - packed with fuel, valuables and people - scrambling for the Memphis, TN hub and hooking in handily around a massive angry thunderstorm.
It looks like a perfectly organized, well timed dance - with incredibly high stakes.
edit: clarity.
On the other hand I have developped a "good relationship" with the UPS courier.
They constantly alternate between "the best" and "shitty".
a) If anything, it is not a feat of Company, but of nowadays IFR systems in cooperation with ATC guys who probably sweated off at least 10 pounds during that shift.
b) Each and every airline does that, from top notch VIP charters to those we-are-declaring-emergency-because-our-company-doesn't-let-us-take-in-enough-fuel-so-we-are-landing-RIGHT-NOW-GET-OFF-OUR-WAY poor souls piloting Ryanairs.
c) Aviation is a market. If you pay, you get aircrafts and pilots. If you pay good, you get good pilots. That's it.
d) This is very inside the box thinking. An equivalent of this would be showing a video of a bunch of guys running to the local hardware shop, hastily throwing HW boxes into a car, driving fast and furious back to the site, assembling a server, plugging it in, installing OS and presenting it to the customer: here, your server. So Amazon can beat them only when they can do all of this on demand? No, they just built the AWS and "on demand" now means just clicking "I want an instance now" or even letting a balancer spin that up for you, done.
The article is talking about 15 years horizon and although that is a very brave speculation of Amazon's business plans and future events, just think about what 15 years means. 15 years ago, Windows XP has just RTMed a week before. GPS meant some ugly expensive box waiting an eternity to get a fix. Common large and heavy desktop crates called personal computers struggled with even playing a DivX video in CRT resolution. Capturing overhead footage meant flying an expensive helicopter running on expensive fuel and operated by highly trained pilot. Nowadays, you can buy an entire device called "quadcopter" for less than an hour of helicopter flight time and fly around and videotape everything like in a computer game. We have small slates of glass called "smartphones" that smoothly play 2880x2160 videos while projecting them onto a 3D surface twice (VR phone-based headsets) or even smoothly render an entire VR game scene from polygons. We have cars using half as much fuel. You can tap on your slate of glass and a car arrives for you.
In 15 years we can have supertough drones flying right through hurricanes, micro hyperloops moving small cargo around entire states, warehouses on every other corner with duplicated stock, carpooling packet delivery services like some Uber-Fedex hybrid, or even outright cargo teleports spitting out pizzas from local restaurants, shoe orders from Amazon and hell monsters from Mars military bases with id Software calling out software patents on that and claiming intellectual property on 50% of incoming daemons...
Sorry for long post - basically what I wanted to say is that everybody can do that with airplanes.
I guess what I was trying to say, is that if you are an air-<whatever> business, you ALWAYS have to be an airline first - with all the Regulatory, Union, personnel, hardware, etc issues that come with it - and whatever else you want to do SECOND (air freight, passenger etc).
You know waaaaay more than I do - this is just my oversimplified take I am sure. I just am always impressed at the stakes / volume of traffic that goes in / out of the FDX hubs daily.
I've only recently hit power cord saturation, though.
Generic brands start at $7.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s/keywords=dell+90w+ac+adapter&ie=UTF...
Poor Smith: One night at about midnight, I was in my office getting in a little violin practice before heading back to my rented room for some sleep (my wife was still in her Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins in MD). As I left to get some sleep, I saw Smith in his office. He had had to listen to my violin practice of scales, intervals, etc.!
The first good thing I did for Smith was write some software for scheduling the fleet. The BoD was seriously asking if such scheduling could be done at all. One evening R. Frock (he has a book on FedEx) and I used my software and produced a schedule for the full, planned operation. Smith's remark was "Solves the most important problem". Our two BoD representatives of BoD Member General Dynamics said "It's a little tight in a few places, but it's flyable". The BoD was happy, and crucial funding was enabled.
But by the night of the violin practice, I was working on better scheduling. Right, I was encountering the question of P = NP. So, I had chatted with G. Nemhauser about integer linear programming set covering.
Later I went for my Ph.D. in applied math and, in the studies, kept in mind the problems I'd seen at FedEx. So, e.g., model various cases of arrivals as a Poisson process -- from an axiomatic derivation of that process or just from the renewal theorem. Use some stochastic optimal control for some of the operational issues. Have some much more accurate cost estimating of the airplane operations and include those in the integer linear programming, etc.
Gee, for the last 10 years, I didn't know that Amazon was doing so much in such logistics. No way can they be avoiding some optimization problems for their logistics without wasting significant bucks. For a lot they were doing, I'd been there, done that, went to grad school for it, written software for it, etc. Could have helped them!
Scattering warehouses, sort centers, fulfillment centers, ships, airplanes, trucks, bicycles, drones, etc. all around and changing all that ASAP over time has to encounter some severe challenges in applied math and corresponding software, especially having those two keep up with the operational changes.
I know; I know; if assume that the operations will be big enough, then there are some approaches to those discrete optimization problems that use just some continuous techniques that are much easier. In that case, maybe for a while, during the rapid growth period, go ahead and don't try very hard on the optimization, scatter around, and anticipate that, when reach the target size, nearly all those warehouses, sort centers, etc. will be close enough to something optimal.
Then I wonder: What is Wal-Mart doing in response? They have a lot of warehouses, trucks, and stores and a Web site for on-line ordering? Right, they bought Jet.com. But anything else?
Fundamentally I begin to wonder about Amazon and airplanes: For FedEx, sure airplanes are crucial. But for Amazon? I wonder.
Why? What's the difference?
For FedEx, hour by hour, a huge fraction of what FedEx receives and ships is different, literally never done before, that is, could not have been stocked in a warehouse. E.g., FedEx may receive a legal brief, some medical samples, a custom 3D printout, etc. That was the first and last time those particular items were ever shipped. The variety of what FedEx ships is beyond belief -- stand in the sort center in Memphis and watch the stuff go by and have to give up on any simple overview.
For Amazon, all they ship is what's for sale on their Web site. So far, next to none of that stuff is perishable. And, for nearly all of it, the time, hours, days, weeks, from when it is created by the original manufacturer to when it is needed in an Amazon warehouse doesn't much matter.
So, in comparison with FedEx, the variety is much less. So Amazon has an easier t...
For more: Generally, finding stuff has long been part of the field of information retrieval. That field long ago divided the whole problem into pieces. One big division was between (A) content a person knew existed and had some information about, e.g., keywords/phrases and (B) content that person did not know existed. The old library card catalog subject index is close to case (A) and so are the Internet search engines based on keywords/phrases. For case (B), that is closer to what might be called discovery, recommendation, curation, notification, subscription.
My startup is for being the best for case (B). For case (A), that will remain. What I am doing for case (B) is very different from what has worked well for case (A). Very different: E.g., there is no use of keywords/phrases.
So, my work brings together in a coordinated way (i) the unmet part of the user need to find stuff on the Internet, (ii) a new and very different UI/UX, (iii) some important new data, and (iv), for processing the data to get the results for the users, some new applied math (complete with theorems and proofs, based on some advanced pure math prerequisites) that is the crucial core of the work, that is, the means of getting especially good results for the users.
Some of the efforts seem to have taken some simple techniques and simple, old data sources for recommendation engines and bent the real problem to what these techniques could do; my view is that this is not very promising.
E.g., I believe that my work will do much better for letting people look for, say, movies than what Netflix got from their Netflix Challenge contests. Why? I believe that Netflix formulated the problem poorly, in too narrow a way. What I have done does not fit what Netflix assumed in their problem formulation.
Yes, my work is quite new but, still, supposed to be really easy and intuitive for users. E.g., I hope that a child in a third world country who knows no English will be able to get good with my work in a few minutes alone or sooner watching one example of usage. Right, I might put such an example on YouTube and have my Web site Help page link to that.
There is part of the math that is surprising: One would guess that no such good thing could be true, but it is. Of course, users will not be aware of anything mathematical.
To be a little more clear, my math is original and has nothing to do with anything I've seen in artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML). To be a little more clear, the AI and ML I have seen do contain some applied math but which is apparently quite narrow. In contrast, on the shelves of the QA sections of the research libraries, there is enormously greater variety, and my work is not on those shelves. So, instead of AI or ML, I just derived some applied (applicable) math.
Then I wrote the corresponding software. Currently there is about 100,000 lines of typing, for both the programming language statements and the documentation in comments in the code. There is much more documentation outside the code. And there is the math, typed into D. Knuth's TeX.
All the code appears to run as intended. The code appears to be essentially all that is needed for at least early production. Currently the code is in alpha test. I'm a solo founder, 100% owner.
The next steps are to complete the alpha test to let me be rock solidly sure the code is correct and ready for production, load some more initial data, do a beta test and get back comments, maybe tweak some parts of the code, say, for the UI/UX, maybe load some more initial data, and, the...
pr @ asimuv . com
Many thanks to all for your interest.
I'll be really interested to see how it turns out!
You probably already know this, but VCs and investors won't like your work now because there's no proof of value. You should avoid them at this point, because you'd only get deals on terrible terms, like pocket change for a majority share to a no-name VC.
Don't talk to investors until you have enough traction and proof of value for them to want to invest in you, and draw up your own business plan for exactly what you intend to do with the money and how much it will expand the business. Then you can have investors coming to you and only accept deals on your terms.
Less than a year later, they were no longer using them in my area, and then a while later I hear DHL basically doesn't exist in the USA.
So yeah, Amazon can apparently kill a mail carrier. Whether they will or not will depend on how bad that carrier does its business.
That was my one and only experience with DHL. I'm glad they no longer operate in the US. I've had countless packages delivered by UPS, FedEx, and USPS, and never had them go missing; my only problems were when drivers want a signature when I'm not home and can't leave it at the door and I end up having to drive to the distribution center to pick it up.
Good riddance, DHL.
Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) is a boon for many businesses, as it combines warehousing, packing/labelling, and shipping into a single interface at an attractive price. Let's not forget that they also bring customers and handle the entire billing operation, too.
If Amazon does harm FedEx/UPS, it won't be by starving them of packages directly, but rather by sidestepping their business, attracting companies to FBA, so that they never enter the "shipping" business sector.
I don't expect to see Amazon enter the point-to-point shipping business anytime soon.