Ariel Adams, writing for A Blog to Watch, on the contrast between incumbent and independent watchmakers in 2024:

A company with a 100, 150, or 250-year history lingering in the air will have a different approach to decisions and communication than a first-generation one that is balancing right on the edge of its cash flow reserves. And yet, it feels like historical companies struggle with turning their established present and solid foundations into calmness, confidence, and a sight on the distant future — instead, sometimes all we get is stuffiness, condescension, and an obsession with the past.

Following the path of an unsetting sun across the sky in the summer months, pine trees north of the Arctic Circle develop a coil-like grain structure that imbues the trunks of the trees with an abnormal level of strength and durability relative to their straight-grained counterparts. So much so, that kelo trees remain standing long after they have died, shedding their bark while still erect, allowing the sapwood to dry and become bleached by the sun. The resulting timber is likewise strong, as well as being unusually resistant to rot and warpage. Kelo wood also boasts a characteristic colouration: greyish-white on the outside with reddish-brown heartwood.

Kello, which is the Finnish word for clock, shares the same Finno-Ugric root as kelo. While the etymology of the words themselves are believed to have been derived from the word for bell—just as clock is in English—the inherent qualities of both clock dials and kelo wood are protracted from the relative motion of the sun across the sky in the Northern Hemisphere.

The go-to storage solution for watchmaking workshops the world over.

Six researchers at Apple, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh, Hooman Shahrokhi, Oncel Tuzel, Samy Bengio, and Mehrdad Farajtabar, have found ample evidence that Large Language Models are incapable of logical reasoning:

Our findings support the hypothesis that current LLMs are not capable of performing formal mathematical reasoning

LLMs pattern match and do so at a scale that surpasses any single human brain's own innate ability to pattern match. This energy-intensive parlour trick has done a pretty good job of passing for intelligence across a range of domains and legitimate tests aimed at measuring cognitive ability. While these models may be able to fool us into thinking they can think, there is an abundance of evidence demonstrating that they lack the capacity to think and reason.

This impressive ability to pattern match at immense scale simultaneously serves as the Achilles' heel of modern LLMs. The massive data sets these models have been trained on has not and, indeed, cannot be vetted for accuracy by domain experts in any reasonable human-scale timeline. A significant amount of noise exists in the training data and the signal-to-noise ratio is liable to get much worse given the rate at which LLM-generated text, imagery, and video are flooding the pool of human knowledge. Feeding ever-bigger models more of this data is not the path forward. The next big breakthrough in silicon mimicking human intelligence will come from discrete, highly-specialized convolutional neural networks running alongside infallible logic systems (like calculators) via which a silicon-based prefrontal cortex orchestrates and carries out tasks.

Tori Latham reporting for Robb Report:

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, it is alleged that Hodinkee has faced numerous challenges in scaling and developing its business in recent years. Nevertheless, it is widely recognized for kickstarting the recent renaissance in watch collecting over the last decade, especially the last five years, so it’s no wonder Watches of Switzerland was interested in keeping it ticking. We’ll be curious to see how it manifests moving forward.

The small town of Spruce Pine in the Appalachian mountains is America's sole source of high-quality quartz, supplying the industries that depend on it at a global scale.

The remote community was pummelled with over two feet of rain from Hurricane Helene, resulting in massive flooding that destroyed homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure. The main rail line used to export quartz from the mines sustained severe damage from the storm.

Oliver Reichenstein, of iA Inc., relays the centuries-old philosophy of Giambattista Vico and how he applies Maker's Knowledge in his approach to developing products.

Creating a truthful product requires full understanding, a back-and-forth between making and thinking which, again, takes time. And time is expensive. We build better what we understand, but understanding takes time and money. Learning means failing, and failing until we make it work.

To understand things, you need to make them.

Quality and innovation are slow and expensive because they are tiny things that come at the cost of long cycles of big repetitive failures. You can’t innovate without failing. You can’t fail without pain.

We may not all fully understand that products made thoughtfully over a long period of time hold the most precious gift inside: The gift of time. But we all feel it. Good products feel more real because someone put their time and energy into shaping them.

Thought and words matter but ultimately, truth shows in what we do. Factum comes from [the Latin] facere, to make. A fact is literally what is done.

Verum ipsum factum.

Chris, over at Clickspring, crafts a cutter, pump pusher, and anvil for setting jewelled bushings in a dial indicator. From raw stock to finished product, with a brief exploration into horological movement decoration thrown in for good measure.

In this video for the Daily Mail, Zeke Spector and Marc Gomes pay a visit to the workshops of American watchmakers, Roland G. Murphy and Cameron Weiss, exploring the hand-operated tooling, CNC equipment, and staff that each firm employs to bring their watches to market.