Ruling engines and lapping the ultimate screw

Amazing article, super fun details on how high precision machinery emerged.

The turn midway through to the communities & places doing hard work was a huge bonus:

> Let me emphasize the implications of this: a tiny town of a few thousand people had a telescope makers society at the turn of the century, when telescopes were still high technology, and they endowed it well enough it is still physically there. That’s sort of like a small town of a few thousand people having its own privately owned MEMS fab in the 1990s when this became a more common technology. Social capital is highly underappreciated and they had lots of it in those days.

A really nice tribute to expert communities, building on top of a lot of respect elsewhere in the article for yankee ingenuity! It feels like a thing quickly becoming lost. The last wooden boat builder left my hometown a couple years ago. That's it, the end of an era, just like that, we no longer can. Mass production & outsourcing and volume reduce us, make goods cheap but the people less. How are we supposed to grow social capital? We're losing something really core, losing one of humanity's best spirits: our enlightenment search, our inquiry & push to improve.

Some really great bringing it together at the end, reference to some wonderful organization research I hadn't heard about:

> Apparently the whole new ruling engine worked the first time, which is a minor miracle. A hugely successful scientific breakthrough done with a sort of miniature Klein type-1 organization. More of a Klein type-1 A-team; a common type of group for successful experimental physics ventures.

This is what happens in doer societies! This is humanities real lifeblood, figuring stuff out, making things happen, improving, cunning and insight and craft stacked atop each other.

I'm glad to see some of that hunt for good problems & jobs well done carry on in programming, but it feels unappreciated, something lost in translation between the craft & how the product is judged/assessed. Rather than being a mechanical craft that produces machines we can assess on their surface, rather than being exoteric & revealing about what it is that was created, machines are esoteric, concealed, running in dark data centers deep inside the corporate firewall, secured & alien & far away from their users. Personal computing is powerful, but that era fades, computer as craft being replaced by computer as control- Ursala Franklin's Perscriptive technology prefiguring, Holistic technology falling away. I disagree that digital matter is entirely as lesser as this article's final parting words, but I feel such strong affinity for computing having made nincompoops of us, having made is dumb and blind, rather than being what it could be, a field of revelation & enlightenment & exploration. I hope we find some hopeful leads to bring computing out of these dark ages & into a brighter more enlightened new era. Better comes; I will serve that brighter future.

> And tens of thousands of nincompoops fiddling around on a computer instead of learning how matter works with the eyes and fingers.

(Alas Scott goes into the comments to show his raw-cut attitude extends, ahem, quite far: "You might as well mention MRNA vaccines: amazing “breakthrough" that seems to do absolutely nothing other than give people weird cardiovascular diseases." Oh mercy. Never meet your heroes. Otherwise, thanks for the interesting great writeup Scott.)