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buo

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The compiler is open-source and can be run locally. You need an account if you want to use their web editor, which is nice (it shows error messages where they occur along with an explanation and link to docs, and also shows a real-time updated preview).

As for Latex vs Typst, as a language Typst is much better, compiles very quickly, and has sane error messages. However, Typst still has a few rough edges, and can't do everything you can with Latex + packages (yet).

I've been using Typst for most of my documents for a few months and I've been generally happy with it.

It is exhausting, but it can be fun. My motivation was to network during conferences. I ended up meeting interesting people, having good conversations, and enjoying myself more.

I have to use a Windows laptop for work; it was migrated to Windows 11 a few months ago. Win 11 is definitely, measurably worse than Win 10, at least in the configuration that my employer's IT forces on the machine. One example is that its UI is much slower (typing in the search box at normal speed often misses keystrokes, for instance -- never happened on Win 10).

I think this paragraph on the difficulty of building good independent indexes should not be overlooked. What's going on with Cloudfare?

When talking to search engine founders, I found that the biggest obstacle to growing an index is getting blocked by sites. Cloudflare is one of the worst offenders. Too many sites block perfectly well-behaved crawlers, only allowing major players like Googlebot, BingBot, and TwitterBot; this cements the current duopoly over English search and is harmful to the health of the Web as a whole.

You joke, but note this quote from the article:

A broad assumption like "you're in your documents folder; let me suggest other things related to documents" is annoying, but it doesn't feel particularly invasive.

It's truly amazing what people will put up with. Reminds me of the lobsters sitting in increasingly hot water, never noticing until they're boiled alive.

From my experience seeing others use Scratch, part of its value is the ease with which it can be used to tell interactive, visual stories. Programming in Scratch is a means to tell a story, not an end in itself. If you're using Scratch to teach recursion, then you're using it wrong.

Another high point of Scratch is that it includes message passing and concurrency. This allows for telling complicated stories, and it also introduces some very hard to track bugs -- so, kids learn some debugging as well.

Absolutely. In my experience teaching in college, this is the correct approach.

A very useful thing to have, both for teachers and students, is a "rubric": a succinct description of how the work will be evaluated, and the importance (weight) of each feature.