But The basic idea is sound. If you invent a novel mechanism and publish it the government will grant you exclusive economic exploitation rights to that mechanism for the next 25 years. After that it is now fair game.

It is an attempt to solve the real problem that it is much harder to be first than second, the guy in first place has to spend all that time and effort to develop the thing, and the guy in second just has to copy the guy in first. To rectify this social injustice the patent system was developed, where the government would grant and enforce economic exploitation rights of the mechanism to the inventor.

https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Sh...

"We wish it to be understood, however, that our invention is not limited to this particular construction, since any construction whereby the angular relations of the lateral margins of the aeroplanes may be varied in opposite directions with respect to the normal planes of said aeroplanes comes within the scope of our invention."

Some people (Curtis) felt this claim was far too encompassing and should not be enforced. But I don't know, These guys just spent a decade working out an entirely new discipline, aeronautical control. And you don't think they deserve exclusive exploitation rights to that discipline for the next 20 years?

The real weird one from that era was the 7 segment led MHz displays that were popular in the 386/486 era. It was weird because the the chips could not change speed in the first place. And I don't want to say every system was like this, but every one I ever saw was set by a set of static jumpers or a dip switch. When you upgraded your cpu you put the little sticker that came with it on the chassis and changed the jumpers, they served the same purpose.

Here is one, https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd. This is for the pic32, so I may be wrong about the 16-bit thing.

I don't know if anyone has done it but it looks like it could fit, perhaps not on a original 8086 PC, but perhaps a 286 with 640K.

Not going to say your expectation is wrong, I too almost always want the tool to operate on the selected layer rather than whatever layer has the pixels. But moving the layer with the pixels is not a bad default, it makes single click quick layer alignment moves possible.

Also, salutes, sort of unrelated, but your post made me look into quick selection based editing, And there are some good operations I have never used in there including alt to move the selection and ctrl + alt to move what is in the selection.

I sort of get their point. The "Only one of these formats(the one you have never heard of) will save all aspects of your work, every other one will lose things, pick wisely." school of interface design is a massive footgun. But I like interfaces that get out of your way and just let you do things.

And I just had a bright idea, "forget the save dialog, just use the export dialog for everything" but it turns out the export dialog will not let you save to .xcf My disappointment is immeasurable. Why not gimp team? You dashed my last hope for a single unified interface. Somebody had to go out of their way to take that out.

Nothing wrong with XML, it is well understood, and the tooling is pretty good. But partial loads/edits is one thing it can not do.

It is not a big deal, I think formal verification is a very useful tool to help one approach correctness, but let me explain myself. When a program is written it is trying to solve a problem, when it solves that problem correctly it has no bugs, and when it solves that problem incorrectly those are bugs. For complex problems it turns out to be very difficult(impossible) to solve them correctly. Why is there an assumption that the formal verification spec will be any more correct than the program itself? They are both trying to solve very complex problems.

I was trying to get a feel for this by reading through the sel4 git changes trying to figure out how many bug fixes were for the OS and how many were for the spec. No real conclusion unfortunately. because they almost always have to fix both at the same time. a bug found in the OS means you have a bad spec and a bug found in the spec means your OS probably has a bug.

https://quicycle.com/understanding-electrons/

It is also my main complaint about traditional math notation, They enjoy trying to make the notation as concise as possible, single letter symbols, embedded subparts, no names for anything. I understand that having super a tight concise notation is a massive benefit while in the flow state, thinking about the problem. But man it makes it rough for us casual math enjoyers coming in fresh to the topic.

        
 : "\xe2\x98\xad" #symbol representing proletarian solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers

As a slightly related tangent, The compose key mnemonic interface for rarely used characters is pretty great, beats trying to remember alt codes.

After playing with it some more. Not close together, but more side loaded. On reflection while many of these forms would be awkward to find in a drawing program, I think this is the source of the superior spiral the author likes.

I probably lack the terminology to express myself properly, but color ends up being a very human thing, with a huge focus on primary colors(the colors that match the frequency response of the human eye) This is fine, we are human after all, but then I always feel color theory dives off the deep end, with color wheels and complimentary colors and triplets, etc. why? there is nothing physically cyclic going on. It never makes any sense to me that patterns based on it being cyclic would be any better than just picking colors. Any way, silly rant aside, if we wanted to define an objective physical color format, how would it be done?

Summary: Egypt was going to develop an indigenous fighter in the 1960's based off of a mostly finished Spanish design by a post WWII otherwise unemployed Willy Messerschmitt.

I First heard of the project via a pretty good youtube documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqIpJuqvsWQ Messerschmitt's Remarkably Good Supersonic Fighter (Not A Pound For Air To Ground)