Today I was trying to explain to a company why it was idiodic to use the US Postal Service to validate addresses when you aren’t shipping via USPS:
I think part of the confusion arises when you ask for things like “Your full home address and post code,” as the US Postal Service does not deliver to my home address so, technically, there is no such thing as my “home address and post code”. To ship using USPS, you have to use the PO Box. To ship by other means (UPS, FedEx, etc.) you have to use the street address.
I suspect your fulfillment folks expect to be able to validate addresses with USPS, even though they’re not using USPS for shipping. That creates problems for the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people in the US for whom the USPS does not provide service to their homes. I have no trouble whatsoever with items reaching me that are shipped by UPS and FedEx to “99-9999 Main St, Anytown HI 96999” or via USPS to “PO Box 999, Anytown HI 96999”. In fact, all the carriers (including USPS) will ship without problems if I include both the street address and PO box. Fulfillment software, however, seems to often be written by programmers who can’t conceive of any situation other than their own, so they reject any address that includes a PO box (your system does) even if the address also includes a street address and works just fine for UPS and FedEx (and I assume others, though I can’t claim direct experience there). So your online system won’t let me actually enter my “full” address, rejecting it because it includes a PO box, and it then rejects my street address, presumably because the USPS won’t validate it.
After I wrote “tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people in the US for whom the USPS does not provide service to their homes” I began to think that figure might be far too low. I use Kagi search, and I know it has an optional LLM feature, so I asked Kagi how many people in the US don’t get mail service to their homes. It answered:
In the United States, a significant number of people do not receive home mail delivery, particularly in rural areas. Approximately 16% of the U.S. population lives in rural regions, where home mail delivery can be less common due to various factors such as population density and accessibility.
While exact numbers can vary, it is noted that many smaller towns and rural communities may not have regular home delivery services from the USPS. The Postal Service has indicated that it delivers to about 98% of the nation’s population, which implies that around 2% of the population may not receive home delivery. This translates to roughly 6.5 million people based on the current U.S. population estimates.
Thus, while the majority of Americans do have access to home mail delivery, a notable minority, particularly in rural areas, do not.
References
- How does the US Postal Service serve rural Americans? - USAFacts usafacts.org
- Postal Service continues to deliver mail and packages to 98 percent … about.usps.com
- Service Not Available: USPS Mail Delivery is More Limited Than …
www.serviceobjects.com- 4 things to know about the Postal Service plan to slow rural mail … cardinalnews.org
In the past, when I’ve tried using LLMs, I’ve ended up spending significant time getting the right prompt, then checking and fixing up the answer to suit my needs. Enough time that using the LLM wasn’t very efficient. This time, with my first prompt, I got a useful answer that didn’t need editing. It didn’t need checking, either, as it was exactly the kind of answer I was looking for and — LLMs being the excellent bullshit generators that they are — looks and sounds plausible. I gave the LLM credit, so if the whole thing is a hallucination, well, it’s not my fault.
Now, how much closer to death-by-carbon-emission did I take our planet by using that shortcut?
—2p
addendum 20250209@15:44
To get even more pedantic, because that’s who I am, ZIP Codes identify USPS delivery routes, not geographic areas. So my “home address” or “street address” or “shipping address” or whatever you choose to call the identifier for where I live does not have a ZIP Code. No delivery route, no ZIP code. Yet, no US bank will give me an account unless I provide a street address with a (completely arbitrary, apparently) ZIP code. Damn near any web form I have ever filled out that asks for a shipping address will generate an error telling me the ZIP code “is a required field” for US addresses if I leave it blank.