I have been very pleasantly surprised by the usefulness of the USPS Informed Delivery [1] program which emails me pictures of the mail parcels arriving in the next day or two.
> Today, the USPS’s OCR technology can read handwritten mail at nearly 98 percent accuracy, while machine-printed addresses bump its accuracy to 99.5 percent.
> [...] it first started using a handwriting recognition tool in 1999. The USPS is currently in the middle of a 10-year modernization plan, which includes investments in technology, such as AI. However, the plan has faced criticism for raising the price of stamps and causing service disruptions in some areas.
$0.78 to send a letter or postcard anywhere in the USA seems so cheap that I don't think the "rising cost of stamps" could ever even cross my mind. I'm aware that it does matter to some people, though.
I will, however, be glad if it becomes too expensive for spam mailers.
Postage price increases over the past hundred years generally match inflation to within a couple percentage points. So agreed: it's a very low price for an impressive and efficient service.
The issue is when you want to send say 120 wedding invitations, that 78 cents adds up. Corpos get Pitney Bowes mail meters which print the barcodes and have a slightly cheaper rate, but the post office doesnt provide this convenience to consumers as far as I know.
I remember reading an article eons ago about the tech used for OCR at USPS in what I'm pretry sure was Wired. If I remember correctly, on each sorting line they were using something like 10 dual or quad 200 MHz Pentium Pro systems to accomplish the ultra high speed recognition that they required. That amount of computing power was absolutely mind bending to me at the time, now days it's laughable, a Raspberry Pi would blow it out of the water.
My undergrad university was involved in developing hand-writing recognition for the postal service when I was there in the late 80s / early 90s (https://cedar.buffalo.edu/hwai/hwai_home.html). They brought in a ton of grant money, and even hired undergrads to help with the research. My roommate worked for them when we were seniors, and I was envious of the fact he had access to his own sparcstation. This was in a time where the undergrad labs just had VT-220 terminals connected to a shared and overloaded sparc server.
I posted this on HN back in 2023, reposting now because I don't think this article goes far enough:
I’ll make the bold claim that the following industries / companies would not exist without the USPS:
The Airline Industry: In the early days of American aviation, air transportation was unproven and not financially viable, until the USPS built the necessary infrastructure and gave contracts to airlines to allow them financial feasibility… starting in 1918! [1]
Machine Learning: In 1989 Yann LeCun wrote his seminal paper “Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten ZIP Code Recognition”, which used the USPS’s data set and has today become the hello world of machine learning tasks. More importantly this is the first commercial or industrial application of machine learning. [2]
Netflix: Before Streaming became a thing, Netflix was shipping DVDs via the USPS. The Postal Service adapted its processes and equipment to make this financially feasible, supporting Netflix through its transition to streaming. [3]
Amazon: Early Amazon was only a book vendor, the USPS offered special rates for books that made it possible for Bezos to be profitable from his garage … in 1994, thus birthing the behemoth it is today. [4]
Chickens: okay, not really. But the USPS ships millions of pounds of live chickens and other animals each year! [5]
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 29.9 ms ] thread> Today, the USPS’s OCR technology can read handwritten mail at nearly 98 percent accuracy, while machine-printed addresses bump its accuracy to 99.5 percent.
> [...] it first started using a handwriting recognition tool in 1999. The USPS is currently in the middle of a 10-year modernization plan, which includes investments in technology, such as AI. However, the plan has faced criticism for raising the price of stamps and causing service disruptions in some areas.
$0.78 to send a letter or postcard anywhere in the USA seems so cheap that I don't think the "rising cost of stamps" could ever even cross my mind. I'm aware that it does matter to some people, though.
I will, however, be glad if it becomes too expensive for spam mailers.
[1] https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm
I’ll make the bold claim that the following industries / companies would not exist without the USPS:
The Airline Industry: In the early days of American aviation, air transportation was unproven and not financially viable, until the USPS built the necessary infrastructure and gave contracts to airlines to allow them financial feasibility… starting in 1918! [1]
Machine Learning: In 1989 Yann LeCun wrote his seminal paper “Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten ZIP Code Recognition”, which used the USPS’s data set and has today become the hello world of machine learning tasks. More importantly this is the first commercial or industrial application of machine learning. [2]
Netflix: Before Streaming became a thing, Netflix was shipping DVDs via the USPS. The Postal Service adapted its processes and equipment to make this financially feasible, supporting Netflix through its transition to streaming. [3]
Amazon: Early Amazon was only a book vendor, the USPS offered special rates for books that made it possible for Bezos to be profitable from his garage … in 1994, thus birthing the behemoth it is today. [4]
Chickens: okay, not really. But the USPS ships millions of pounds of live chickens and other animals each year! [5]
[1] https://www.history.com/news/us-aviation-airmail-passenger-f...
[2] http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-89e.pdf
[3] https://www.zdnet.com/article/u-s-postal-service-to-netflix-...
[4] https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-Media-Mail-Book-Rate
[5] https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm