USPS facility in Utah does nothing but decipher handwriting

https://kutv.com/news/eye-on-utah/what-happens-to-mail-with-band-handwriting-united-states-postal-service-letter-carrier-usps-mailwoman-mailman-cursive-taught-in-schools-unreadable-print-envelopes-undeliverable-packages-salt-lake-city-utah

by gscott • 3 years ago

252 229 3 years ago

kutv.com

geetee• 3 years ago

Tom Scott video: https://youtu.be/XxCha4Kez9c

leohonexus• 3 years ago

And the HN discussion of that video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32388279

intalentive• 3 years ago

Seems like a good use case for machine learning.

FoomFries• 3 years ago

Indeed, and this is why they continue to downscale the number of people doing such tasks.

noisy_boy• 3 years ago

They need 250 more as per the article (scroll to end).

bhawks• 3 years ago

ML is used extensively for this. These folks are handling cases that are low confidence or Id imagine building labeled training datasets.

armadsen• 3 years ago

There used to be many of these facilities. This is the last one. The demand has gone down as OCR has gotten better and hand addressed mail volume has decreased.

mochomocha• 3 years ago

Yann LeCun pioneered CNNs for this actually. OCR of zipcodes for USPS. Early 90's.

justsomehnguy3• 3 years ago

Always wondered why USPS didn't adopt a system for writing zipcodes similar to the one used in USSR:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stamp_Soviet_Union_1977_C...

Add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_postal_codes.svg

xboxnolifes• 3 years ago

These facilities exists specifically for the edges that the ML models are failing on.

blahedo• 3 years ago

Fascinating---most of the examples they showed were immediately legible to me, and not at all examples of "bad handwriting".

wrs• 3 years ago

It is a little depressing that near-perfect cursive writing is now regarded as “illegible”. I suppose the same thing happened to copperplate, though.

rootusrootus2• 3 years ago

My 12 year old daughter has not been taught cursive but she read it just fine.

pcl• 3 years ago

Having been belittled by my second-trade teacher for my abysmal cursive, I’m pretty happy to see that particular bit of arcana go by the wayside.

recursive• 3 years ago

I couldn't be happier about it. It's annoyed me ever since the third grade. And every time someone tells me "your signature must be in cursive". It's nearly as bad as daylight savings time.

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

I hold the generation as highly regarded

woodruffw2• 3 years ago

That’s just editorialization on the source’s part: the facility exists because cursive is legible to humans, but not easy for machines to automatically classify.

netsharc• 3 years ago

Google Lens is able to read my handwriting, and I think the tech for it has been around for 10+ years.

Wowfunhappy• 3 years ago

They mention in the video that they can't show real mail for privacy reasons, so it's not obvious to me what we're actually seeing, or if it's representative of what the workers see.

teh_klev• 3 years ago

Tom Scott did a fairly decent video on this a few months back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c

astrange• 3 years ago

I'm always surprised at the strangely boring topics he manages to turn into content.

Was even more surprised when I went to the UK, turned on the TV, and he was on University Challenge.

mhh__• 3 years ago

Celebrity/old people university challenge.

He was on only connect back in the day

ggm• 3 years ago

Old English jokes about lost mail to "degenerate bawd" finally making delivery to the electricity supply company

dbg314156• 3 years ago

Makes sense. Mormons are used to reading horrible handwriting from all the time spent looking at old census sheets.

themodelplumber4• 3 years ago

Can't believe how many hours I spent doing that xD

TBF the software tools for it were very helpful...plop down exhausted at the computer after 6 hours of church meetings and burn through a bunch of formal-ish handwriting data entry while half-braindead, necktie knot pulled down to the chest, black synthetic socks petting cat down on the floor, and bowl of favorite cereal at the ready. (Mormon alcohol equivalent is basically sugar)

I have friends who set regional records for processing those old forms. I want to say hundreds of thousands of pages or some wild amount like that. There was a lot of interesting geography and plenty of bio-stats to read, so for natural readers it was quite a comfortable hit in its way.

I did get into handwriting analysis later and that was more consistently fascinating on the other hand. There was always an open invite to bring found samples to the next meeting (this was not a Mormon thing, to be clear).

Everyone would then take turns pointing out possibly valid observations, ooh there's a felon's claw, anybody else see that, etc. Then at the end of the meeting they'd ask the submitter to share the general or specific identity of the sample. "That's my uncle so-and-so, the rascal was on a chain gang for 10 straight years" and so on.

But sometimes you would remember seeing the sample somewhere, so you had to brace yourself because it was definitely a serial killer and you'd spend the rest of the week thinking about that sample afterward.

In the society library there were texts about individual letters...like people have authored multiple books about the written letter T, and so on.

For my part I was paid for some analysis on the side and learned the hard way that you have to kind of hold back sometimes. It's nice to know you're accurate but a lot of people just. Don't. Want. To know that others can tell this or that about them. Lol. You can effectively front-run an individual's own self-reconciliation/processing capabilities and this often brings unwanted results.

One of my own specialties was that I could usually get a good idea of someone's MBTI type through their handwriting. I had already finished my certification in Jungian typology at the time. So then, bouncing back to handwriting traits, I could identify a kind of sub-type, and this would give ideas of the various cognitive-function perspectives that were probably relevant to the individual's current stage of personality development.

I never met anyone else in the field who I could really talk to about this, though it was very useful. Sometimes you have problems in life that are less conscious, so you can't Google them, LLMs don't help, etc. As a result, finding someone who knows "people _who think like you_, and how they made it" can be really helpful.

Even took an IQ test based only on my handwriting once, pretty neat experience.

dbg314156• 3 years ago

My grandfather probably spend 20 hours a week doing home genealogy work.

Going back to I guess the 80s, he always had the latest and greatest computer system in his home.

He wasn't super technical, but he knew how to use them for the things he cared about.

One year he hit an issue with a store-bought computer. I forget what the issue was, but he probably spent $5k on the computer, and it had hundreds, if not thousands of his work hours saved on it, and customer support led him down a path that wiped his hard drive.

After that, he would say, "Computers are light light bulbs, you can't trust them after a certain point..."

He complained about the customer support being so bad, so I told him we could just build one from pars if he wanted.

His eyes lit up, "You'd build me a computer?!"

So every 2 years, we would get together and build him a new computer.

He bought all the parts, and we'd build identical computers, one for him one for me... some of my fondest memories.

He got such a kick out of running performance benchmarks. 90-something year-old kid in a candy shop. He had to have the best parts.

From 1996 to 2016 or so, he had probably the most powerful gaming rig in Midland, TX... He had 3x 4k monitors, surround sound, and crazy silly amounts of RAM. Like... 128 GB was the last machine we built, back in 2016.

He'd always donate the "old one" to the church. I remember one year the kid they sent out had some IT knowledge. He was trying to write up a donation receipt, and Grandpa was like "64 gigabytes..." and the kid, thinking it was some old clunker since it was just sitting in an old Costco fruit-box at that point, was like, "Oh, you mean 64 megabytes of memory..." and Grandpa was like, in the most assertive tone an ultra-polite Mormon could muster, "No, sir. I mean gigabytes." This was like 2008 or so, when most high-end computers didn't have more than 8 GB of RAM. And Grandpa was just like, "It's got some old Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 Quad-SLI video cards..." And the kid was like, "Wait, how many video cards?" And Grandpa's attitude was like like, "Take that trash away, it's old and busted. Get it of my sight!" Ha.

He may have also liked playing flight simulators just a little. (=

dbg314156• 3 years ago

I have friends who set regional records for processing those old forms. I want to say hundreds of thousands of pages or some wild amount like that.

Yeah, it's insane! I loved how diligent they were! They take scans of every census record, and all the supporting forms that go into the record... then they distribute the forms to at least 2 independent people to extract data from. If there's a conflict, they send the data to a 3rd person... then they check all the entries against one another for accuracy. Retired folks are encouraged to participate, and it's pretty common for them to get "really" into it. 20-hours a week... pretty common amount of time.

They have to pass an eye exam every year to do it. My grandfather was heartbroken when his eyesight got to the point where he couldn't do it any more.

But yeah, the distributed work, with sanity checks, and conflict resolution baked-in, it was all so well organized!

K69bLrdd5K28vX• 3 years ago

https://transfer.sh/usM6ch/image.jpg

dylanpyle• 3 years ago

Very curious to hear more about this - how does processing census sheets fit in to LDS?

dbg314156• 3 years ago

Oh... um... I mean look, it's a bit controversial.

They document family trees, and then post-humorously baptize the dead so everyone's kin can get to heaven.

They mean well, and it's coming from a good place, but it's a little weird and it can be off-putting to know that they don't think any other religion's baptisms count so they have to do it over the LDS way. But look, they mean well.

Some background on the controversy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/us/jews-take-issue-with-p...

bennettnate52• 3 years ago

There are a few parts to it.

First, Latter-Day Saints believe that one needs to be baptized in order to enter into heaven (based on the teachings of Jesus Christ recorded in John 3:16). For this to come about for those who never had the opportunity to be baptized (let alone the countless individuals who never even heard of Jesus Christ while alive), they perform proxy baptisms on behalf of dead individuals. Obviously they don't baptize corpses; instead, they have a member of their faith baptized again, on behalf of an individual who has passed away.

To find out who of their family tree needs to be baptized, Latter-Day Saints perform tons of genealogical work, which includes indexing handwritten censuses into digital form. Hence the census sheets.

nohaydeprobleme• 3 years ago

Related HN discussion about handwritten mail delivery from March ("What is the minimal possible UK address?"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34995370

refurb• 3 years ago

Its kind of wild how critical infrastructure a reliable postal system is.

I moved to a country without one and it’s a massive headache. Letters may or may not arrive. If they dont arrive they may or may not be sent back to the original sender. I imagine some room in a government building with millions upon millions of undelivered mail.

I couldnt even get important mail from the US government. I ended up using a family member’s address in the US.

aww_dang• 3 years ago

Yes, here it is paid couriers or nothing. Even street names and building numbers are lacking. The postal system is just a gotcha.

ck2• 3 years ago

People after 2010 can't read cursive? Really? So weird to me.

The examples in the article are crystal clear to me, no?

canjobear• 3 years ago

It’s not taught anymore. I’d be interested in hearing from someone who didn’t learn cursive if the example in the article is actually hard to read.

ReactiveJelly2• 3 years ago

I half-assed learning cursive but was never really graded on it, and printed my whole life.

I hit "View all photos" and got this

- Mrs. Grace Dawn, 2110 Minsp (?) Church Drive West, Dr. Koven, Ken

- Nevada National Bank, W. Sahara Avenue, Las Vegas, Nevada, 89102

- M A Hill, Post Office Box 41, Whitesville, GA

- Knight and Associates, Park and Main, Butte, Montana (this one I guessed based on likely words)

- Twyla Sharp, HWC Box 7, Wyola, MI, 59089

These felt easy. I see some people's cursive that just looks like a ton of loops, with tiny squiggles differentiating the loops into actual letters.

I'm sure it's fast for them, but it's not accessible. And as a lefty, cursive doesn't flow well for me anyway, so I only print.

emodendroket4• 3 years ago

Well after 2010 it was dropped from most schools. So, yeah.

kibwen• 3 years ago

Just because kids aren't taught how to write cursive doesn't mean they can't still read it. Cursive letters are no harder to recognize than any other stylized font; the only potentially weird ones are "r" and "z".

Symbiote4• 3 years ago

The pictures are probably all sample/training images to protect the privacy of the mail.

(Was the case on another article I read about this system.)

yosito• 3 years ago

I wonder how long this system will exist before ML gets good enough that it just makes more sense to send illegible mail back to the sender and say, "sorry, whatever you wrote is not a valid address, try again".

Operyl3• 3 years ago

A lot of the stuff they process are actually machine printed, but for some reason the OCR just rejected. Had a bud that worked at the Utah facility, and the same sentient can be found through out the comment section of the Tom Scott video.

ReactiveJelly2• 3 years ago

If it's so easy for a human to fix it, I wonder how long the pipeline is between feeding that as training data into the next iteration of the OCR, and getting it deployed live?

emodendroket4• 3 years ago

The Surface handwriting recognition has been good enough for many years to recognize my cursive handwriting, which is fairly impressive, but I do like the idea of a public service striving to be usable even by people with handwriting not easily read by a machine, just like it's usable by rural users and others who are probably not the best targets from a pure business-minded perspective.

kristopolous• 3 years ago

I thought the vast majority are OCR and the humans are for the ones it fails at.

Regardless, all you have to do is tell people, say at the post office, that if they type the address and cut it out and tape it on, the mail will get there faster. Alternatively they could use a label maker to print out the address and then affix it to the envelope.

I bet people still writing address labels by hand probably mostly don't know that there's a speedup for fast machine legibility.

Dalewyn3• 3 years ago

Never; this facility will likely continue to serve for as long as the people exchange mail.

Sure, you might say "the sender should write better", but that's needlessly discriminatory and flies in the face of what the United States Postal Service stands for. Not being able to immediately read the delivery address is not an excuse.

The USPS considers it an absolute failure to do their duty if they fail to deliver mail that was otherwise furnished properly, and I commend their commitment.

jrpt• 3 years ago

I really think you're overestimating the average postal worker's sense of "duty" as well as how the post office works as a whole system. The USPS once delivered a postcard I sent to myself, because their system confused my "from" address with the "to" address. When I complained, they told me to go buy another stamp and send a new postcard. My postcard was crystal clear to a human, but somehow their automated system got it confused, and yet they acted like it was my problem, not theirs. This was about 15 years ago so maybe their automated systems are better now, but I don't think their "duty" or "commitment" has changed that much.

toast0• 3 years ago

If the destination address is illegible, chances are so is the return address.

Operyl3• 3 years ago

But not nearly 100%, it could’ve been as simple as an oil smudge from the machinery or water hitting a few characters on a specific portion.

emodendroket4• 3 years ago

This page goes absolutely haywire when I try to read it with the text flashing and jumping up and down. But that's a cool curiosity.

cbsks• 3 years ago

“after 70 hours a week it becomes like second nature”. Yikes, that is a lot of time working.

UberFly• 3 years ago

After 70 hours a week staring at terrible hand writing you reach a second level of consciousness. Involves drooling.

8uhaal3• 3 years ago

So here we are discussing how AI will soon kill us all or at least solve the big questions of science, and at the same time we employ 800 souls in Utah working 70 hours a week to decipher bad handwriting.

laichzeit0• 3 years ago

I think people underestimate the long tail of most problems. Even if it’s 98% good, what do you do with that last 2%? The same applies for self-driving and other computer vision related technologies.

tomcam6• 3 years ago

what do you do with that last 2%?

My plan when I finally purchase a self-driving car is to get 800 people from Utah to help me navigate for that last 2%

theodric• 3 years ago

Realistically, keep running Utah until the next round of sweeping budget cuts comes, then cook up some reason to return/destroy the remaining 2% as "undeliverable" and shut it down. Good service always gets sacrificed to save 2%

bschne• 3 years ago

I remember a patio11 thread about exactly this — once your operations reach a certain scale, even a 0.1% of cases problem takes a whole department to deal with

kumarm• 3 years ago

I suggest you watch Tom Scot mentioned in another comment and it might change your opinion. When OCR system was initially started 50% were done automatically. Today that is greater than 99%. Less than 1% are now handled by the Utah center and they it still going down (After closing rest of the centers already and Utah center is last remaining one).

8uhaal3• 3 years ago

Exactly my point! Machine takeover is further than you'd think, because of the long tail.

GoblinSlayer3• 3 years ago

https://ozgurnevres.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/terminato...

tomcam6• 3 years ago

In the 70s I worked in the mailroom of a college that had 1500 teachers and administrators whose departments I had to learn (for $3.75/hour). We'd get those big plastic boxes full of mail, and just know that Garrido was in Athletics, Loftus was in Psychology, etc. We'd throw the mail in the slots, then rubber band them together, pack into the electric golf cart, and deliver them. I still remember dozens of names and their departments. Also Dominique, one of the receptionists in Social Studies. Sigh.

Anyway, my cousin lives in a small Virginia town, current pop. 38,000 but closer to 5,000 back then. She has a slightly unusual first name. About 25 years ago I guessed it was rare enough that whoever threw mail in the town would remember it. So I sent the mail to Dorothy, Gloucester, VA (not her real name). No street address, no zip code. It got to her with apparently no delay.

I tried the same thing about 5 years ago but included her last name and the zip code for Gloucester. It never got to her, which makes perfect sense.

unyttigfjelltol3• 3 years ago

I send a fair amount of mail to addresses very near where I drop the mail-- as in, in the same ZIP, if not almost the same mail route (but not at the actual post office). I'm constantly puzzled that a) it takes a few days to reach the addressee no matter how close you drop the letter to the destination address and b) when I check, local mail is being postmarked at a regional center fifteen miles away....

ianai2• 3 years ago

What’s with the ellipsis,”….”? You’re using the completely wrong system to deliver a message at a distance it’s not meant to optimize. Sure maybe that would have been routine in the 1920s when almost all business was local, but those days are gone.

zrail• 3 years ago

Both of your observations are due to constant relentless cost optimization within the postal system. Local post offices, for the most part, don't postmark mail at all. Everything gets batched to the regional processing center where it goes through the big automated sorting machines.

I seem to remember a "local only" box in the town where I grew up but that hasn't been a thing for decades now.

jagged-chisel• 3 years ago

Knowing that our mail passes through the regional processing center before returning to the local area, we expect about three days if we mail a neighbor.

Post offices around us have two mail slots when you walk in to drop mail in the box: local only, and everywhere else. Presumably they have (once had?) separate localized processing for those in the “local” bin. Because of post office closures and reduced hours, I think everything is just passed off to the regional facility for the last few years.

Another interesting discovery: I live about 3mi from my parents. They’re over the line in another county. My post office services them, but when I still lived in their house, all our local government business (schools, taxes and whatnot) was in the county seat about 15mi further away from the serving post office, closer to the next regional facility further south. If we ever dropped mail, say from mom to her mother, in that town, it took at least an extra day because it had to hit two regionals before getting to grandmother’s local.

garrettgrimsley• 3 years ago

I have previously worked for USPS and can help clear up what is happening. The mail carrier and their assigned station (Post Office) should be thought of only as the ingress/egress of the postal system. It would be wrong to say that no sorting happens there, but the type of sorting that doesn't happen there is why your mail is being postmarked at a plant (regional center) fifteen miles away.

I'll use the location that I worked at as an example. In Wilmington, NC, once your carrier returns to the station, they drop your letter into a collection bin. This collection bin is driven to Fayetteville, NC, where it is then processed via OCR. After being OCR'd it has a machine-readable bar-code, and will be sorted for delivery to a local station. The machinery involved in the OCR and sorting process is larger than any of the local stations I worked at. Additionally, almost all of the mail pieces that I delivered were intercity, not intracity. Your use case is the exception, not the rule.

There are many exceptions and corner cases to what I described, but that's what the process looks like for most mail pieces. Locating the scanning and sorting machinery at a hub rather than each individual spoke makes sense. UPS, where I currently work, has some minor differences, but the hub and spoke model is largely the same.

windowsrookie4• 3 years ago

Did you include your $3.75/hour pay to imply it was a low salary?

$3.75 in 1975 is $20.97 today. A quick search shows starting pay for a mail carrier today is $16/hour. The federal minimum wage is 7.25/hour which would be $1.3/hour in 1975.

You were actually paid very well at $3.75/hour compared to today.

mvandermeulen• 3 years ago

Thanks for this, it’s always good to have up to date information.

What did you think of the rest of the story?

candyman• 3 years ago

There’s something weird about hourly wages to me. I had a grading job in 1983 that paid $12/hour. Which definitely felt good then, especially because I could grade papers while watching football games on Sunday. I know the math would make that number much higher, ~$36 in “current dollars.” What’s weird is that it didn’t feel that way back then or now. It’s just how I process it in my head I guess. The tuition at the school then I think was $17K/year and now it’s over $80K.

tomcam6• 3 years ago

Indeed. IIRC it was .25 over minimum wage. I worked 20 hrs/week and that paid all my living expenses-apartment, utilities, food, bus pass.

yowzadave• 3 years ago

A funny story went around the internet last year about a guy in Northern Ireland who received a letter that only had his first (common in Ireland) name, the town he grew up in, and a rambling description of his life story: https://mobile.twitter.com/weefeargal/status/147906907614423...

tzs• 3 years ago

When I was an undergraduate mail to "tzs, 1-59, 91126" would have probably got to me.

91126 was the zip code for Caltech undergraduate housing, which would have been sufficient to get the letter to the Caltech post office. The Caltech post office would have recognized 1-59 as the building code for Ricketts House and put it in the bundle of mail for Ricketts. The carrier there would have put it in the "T" box in the mailbox array in Ricketts lounge.

Scoundreller• 3 years ago

Lived in a house that had its own postal code in the country it was in. Tried sending a letter to the postal code, It didn’t make it :(

tomcam6• 3 years ago

Those dedicated zip codes are increasingly rare but def a hidden superpower you wielded appropriately

philjohn• 3 years ago

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• 3 years 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.

illiarian2• 3 years 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.

jjeaff2• 3 years 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.

clort2• 3 years 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.

Symbiote4• 3 years ago

On Tom Scott's video, you can see the software is provided by a commercial company "Eagle", and Siemens is mentioned too.

eastbound• 3 years 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.

sokoloff2• 3 years ago

Alternate view: this is a form of ECC, which is widely used in computing.

notjtrig• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

IOT_Apprentice• 3 years ago

Is it then Fed to the NSA servers in Utah as well?

WalterBright• 3 years ago

With all these advances in AI, why can't we get automated handwriting recognition? I'm still trying to decipher my grandma's letters.

code_duck• 3 years ago

One of these centers existed in a city in which I lived, Duluth, Minnesota, from 1995-2005. It was a fairly big deal for a city the size of Duluth, employing 1,000 people to start and ranging up to 1,400 at the peak. A former employee started a FB group that has a good photo of what these centers looked like in the 90s: https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155932292850485

MKais• 3 years ago

Maybe they should create a mobile application that uses the API of their OCR system and allows users to take a photo of the handwritten address in order to determine, before sending the letter, if it is readable or not.

And then lose their jobs.

michaelt• 3 years ago

There are plenty of details online of what makes an address easily readable. Just look at the specifications for getting bulk sender discounts.

masklinn2• 3 years ago

As if the people who write unreadable and nigh impossible to understand addresses would care to use such a system.

These are not “doctor’s handwriting” issues.

ElfinTrousers3• 3 years ago

I would estimate that the Venn diagram of people who would use such a system, and people hand-addressing postal mail, is two separate circles.

zinekeller• 3 years ago

Oh definitely, if you are willing to make it readable you would write it in all caps or even use a printer. It's either separate circles or a Venn diagram with the center containing only dozens of people.

expertentipp4• 3 years ago

The world needs such facility for processing doctors' doodles, or to start teaching handwriting in medical universities.

ElfinTrousers3• 3 years ago

Definitely a good use of everyone's time in a world full of electronic medical record systems.

expertentipp4• 3 years ago

Someone unable to write is half-illiterate, still. Not always and not everywhere printer is available or sometimes doctors don't bother issuing printed receipts.

MagicMoonlight• 3 years ago

“We are processing the requested change to your cookies settings” with a timer taking multiple minutes programmed in.

What a cancer website.

expertentipp4• 3 years ago

There are serious businesses working on malicious compliance now.

YeGoblynQueenne6• 3 years ago

I missed that completely. I scrolled the page and the modal just moved up the screen, so I could read the article without interacting with it at all.

Vile, and badly done. Hmph.

KyeRussell3• 3 years ago

Inarguably malicious, whereas the usual cookie popup crap can just be (barley) passed off as complete UX design incompetence.

ryan-c• 3 years ago

Wow. My ad blocker killed the cookie modal, I guess, but the site freaks out detecting that the videos that are supposed to auto play are not playing, and just keeps trying to reload them. Cursed.

chihuahua• 3 years ago

If auto play video ends up being broken, I consider that a desirable bonus feature of the ad blocker.

GoblinSlayer3• 3 years ago

They have accessibility from https://userway.org/ "Representative Accessibility and Consulting Provider".

noufalibrahim2• 3 years ago

I can't help feeling a little sad.

Handwriting was such an integral part of a person. You'd almost be able to identify a close friend just by looking at their handwriting and you'd see it frequently enough on letters and things.

As someone who practices Western calligraphy and who carries a fountain pen, i can't help but feel a little sad reading articles like that prove that the written hand is dying out.

KyeRussell3• 3 years ago

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. And I mean that almost literally. ‘Carrying around a fountain pen’ is definitely a bit of…fetish signalling. Dont get me wrong. I totally understand feeling sad about something that you’re into sinking further into obscurity. I’m just a little weary because it’s such Gen-X-and-above fodder to treat it as a sign of society in decline.

b1124• 3 years ago

because it’s such Gen-X-and-above fodder to treat it as a sign of society in decline

I think it is more of a "reliance on tech", not of any gen, but of "where society is".

The point of cursive, was writing fast and legibly. You can write far faster than typing, for example, on a smartphone keyboard.

There is no correct or incorrect thing here, however, losing cursive means we are trapped in a world where everything we write, everything we do, is tracked.

This is really more about optimal use of a medium (paper), and is equivalent to being able to type on a qwerty keyboard, which is equally learned and weird.

So for me, it is about the loss of non-electronic means.

And that may be OK, but we may also find it is not some day.

EG, we will surely want efficient paper use, if we all end up in some controlled state. You'd be nuts to use any computing device to communicate then.

skelpmargyar• 3 years ago

As someone who was ridiculed by peers and teachers and having had grades be dropped whole letters for poor legibility, I don't share the feeling. I tried years practicing and I am skilled in other dexterous tasks, but handwriting is not one of them. I still use a fountain pen though.

tomcam6• 3 years ago

When personal computers hit the scene it was like manna from heaven. It has always been a huge physical challenge for me to write. I have to expend an extraordinary amount of energy to keep my arm and wrist steady when writing. The result is barely legible at best. Torture.

Later when programs came out they let you draw perfect squares, circles, and lines, I felt we had finally ushered in a New Age. I’ll be happy if I never have to pick up a pen again.

owenmarshall2• 3 years ago

My handwriting still looks the same as it did in fourth grade. I was blessed with a forward looking teacher and school system that recognized my interests early and didn’t penalize me for bad penmanship. When my parents asked about my handwriting they said “why worry? He’ll be typing everything when he grows up - we all will!” And they were right!

YeGoblynQueenne6• 3 years ago

> Handwriting was such an integral part of a person.

That's a noble thought and all but it doesn't always work like you say. I bet my school teachers would recognise my handwriting from a mile away, yet even I have trouble reading what I used to write back then. And I wrote all the time. The only time I didn't write was when I was reading (I have this weird taboo about writing on books. I'm fine with drawing stick-figure animations on the corners though; you should see my school editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, truly epic stick figure swordfights). And just to be clear, I never had any trouble with reading, nor with grammar or syntax. It was just my handwriting that was horrible.

My handwriting was what you'd call cacography, the opposite of calligraphy. It was like a chicken dipped its claws in ink and went digging for worms on the page. Very recognisable, but really not very good handwriting at all. I think it's because I was always in such a hurry to take it all down that I didn't stop to think about reading it back later.

To be honest, computer keyboards saved my writing.

genocidicbunny• 3 years ago

It was like a chicken dipped its claws in ink and went digging for worms on the page.

Hilariously, my handwriting was frequently described by teachers as "как курица лапой" which is just about the equivalent of your description.

Despite my terrible handwriting though, I still enjoy writing by hand. I've found I rarely ever end up going back to much of what I wrote down, but the whole process of turning thought into word into writing is very therapeutic and helpful for remembering and processing things.

TheFreim• 3 years ago

I have this weird taboo about writing on books.

I completely understand this, I used to be unable to write in my books, but forcing myself to start writing in my books was completely worth it. Now it feels natural. Its extremely valuable in non-fiction works to be able to pull open to a chapter and instantly find everything I found noteworthy.

Writing in books also allows for a good notetaking workflow: read a chapter or section while highlighting interest parts and writing symbols/questions/notes when needed. Then re-read the chapter and take notes, focusing on what you highlighted. Move questions and comments to the notes, and perhaps research the answer to those questions if necessary.

Finally I would also suggest writing in books in order to instill a proper relationship with property. Books are tools for conveying knowledge, writing in a book simply continues to fulfill that purpose. They aren't idols that ought to be put on a bookshelf to look at, they ought to be read and referenced. I think being willing to write in books helps create a healthier understanding of ownership: we own property; the property doesn't own us.

Shorel• 3 years ago

I think it was the same for me.

Writing fast and nice is impossible, back then and now.

I learned to write nice and slow, it is completely impractical, can't do it for long texts, but it makes me feel better after so many years of only ugly handwriting.

sdfghswe• 3 years ago

Tell us more about yourself.

noufalibrahim2• 3 years ago

Apropos your point on writing in books, here is Mortimer Adler (of how to read a book fame) exhorting you to go ahead and scribble in your books

https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-...

xwdv• 3 years ago

I think it must be at least a decade since I’ve written an actual complete sentence by hand, a paragraph certainly must have been even farther back. Maybe I should pick up a pen.

bennettnate52• 3 years ago

It's little coincidence that the last of these facilities is housed in Utah. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints contributes a significant amount to family history work, which includes reading and deciphering old records written mostly in cursive. They also encourage their members to contribute to this work. Around half of Utah's population are members of that church, so there naturally is a much larger pool of qualified cursive readers to select from there.

rootusrootus2• 3 years ago

Not sure if this remains true today, but back when I was young you could go to your local LDS church and use their computers to search genealogical records. It may not be as useful today, but in the 80s it was some of the best stuff you could easily access.

thesuperbigfrog• 3 years ago

They are online now:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/

kneebonian• 3 years ago

So there are still FamilySearch center in many meetinghouses of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They have also put almost all their records online at www.familysearch.org

If you go to the meetinghouses however you can also get access to the records of several other organizations that have partnered with FamilySearch for reciprocal resource sharing.

Disclaimer: My primary client is FamilySearch

bookofjoe• 3 years ago

What’s the Point of Teaching Cursive?

https://archive.ph/WuZhn

What Killed Penmanship? We’re all texters and typers now, so if you can’t read that grocery list you scrawled, you are not alone.

https://archive.ph/6mm4j

amelius2• 3 years ago

Why don't we have postal addresses with reasonable checksums?

Symbiote4• 3 years ago

A zip/post code adds redundancy to a state, town and often street, sometimes more.

amelius2• 3 years ago

That's exactly why I added "reasonable" to my comment.

graupel• 3 years ago

I know a few people who have been hired at this facility but washed out in the training and testing program; the speed and accuracy required to work here is outstanding and evidently quite difficult to achieve.

juancn• 3 years ago

  "It can be hard, especially when you first start," Bousha explained. "A lot of them are not used to reading cursive and interpreting what they see. But after 70 hours a week it becomes like second nature."

70 hours a week just reading and typing addresses? Hopefully that's hyperbole.

dumael• 3 years ago

An aside but "Making Money" by Terry Pratchett references a similar sub-office of the Post Office in Ankh-Morpork--the Blind Letter Office. Amusingly, Lord Vetinari is able to assist with some as their addresses are mis-spelled vague directions rather than strict addresses.

webdoodle• 3 years ago

Conveniently right down the road from the [NSA Utah Data Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center).

USPS facility in Utah does nothing but decipher handwriting

Related Stories