Tom Scott
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2022–2026
7:53 · 7M views · Aug 8, 2022
Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.
Recommended in address and OCR threads as a look at the last human mail-coding operation.
8 comments from Hacker News
This Tom Scott video shows some of the surprising (to me) lengths to which the USPS does go to figure out the right address: this video Obviously this doesn't apply to your case, but I certainly didn't think they'd have a national center for decoding terrible handwriting.
Tom Scott did a great video showing the last one in operation. They use totally unique keyboards with what is essentially a stenography system: this video
this video might be of interest - it has some of what the machines are trying to read and what accuracy they need.
And like almost all things that are interesting, here's a Ton Scott video about the same topic: this video
Actually, we're talking about both, and you are wrong on both counts. If you weren't, you would be able to point to an existing system that has demonstrated the capability of classifying an image set on the order of iCloud's, without producing a false-positive. You can't, because such a system doesn't exist. Even the "solved" problem of OCR isn't capable of such a feat: this video