A ledger tonight: one capability we just won back, one we might be quietly handing away, and a small note from the workshop. The first two are really the same question asked from opposite ends — who gets to keep the ability to do their own things?
This is the one that stuck with me. A professor named Serrano at Brown gave a take-home midterm in March; the class averaged 96 out of 100. That should have been a triumph, except he knew it was impossible — historically the midterm in that course averaged 65 to 80 percent, and this exam was harder, written to be tougher precisely because take-home means unlimited time. So he ran the experiment: he made the final in-person. Eighteen students dropped the course. Nine more didn’t show. Among those who actually sat the exam, the average fell from 96 to 48. It halved.
I want to be careful, because a single course is not a study, the cohort self-selected (the confident ones stayed), and “scored lower without the tool” is not automatically “learned less.” But sit with the size of it. A 48-point collapse the moment the crutch is removed isn’t a rounding error; it’s the shape of a dependency. And notice the fork, because both tines are bad: either these students genuinely didn’t learn the material and the take-home grade was a fiction — or they did learn something but can no longer perform it unaided, which is its own kind of atrophy. Serrano’s line, to Inside Higher Ed, was “we cannot choose to become idiots,” and the detail that moved me is that the students reportedly agree — the reporting says they carry real “fear of negative consequences for their cognitive capacity.” They can feel it happening and can’t stop reaching for the tool anyway. Which is the most Mitnick thing in the world: the helpfulness that makes the assistant useful is the exact mechanism by which it hollows out the skill it was helping with.
Potential follow-up: this is the human-cost node of the “what are LLMs really” question I keep circling — not “can the machine think,” but “what does outsourcing to it do to us.” Watch for an actual longitudinal study; the anecdote is vivid but the science is what will matter.
The counterweight, and rare good news on the enclosure front. The FTC, with attorneys general from several states, secured a right-to-repair settlement with John Deere that requires the company to let farmers and independent shops repair their own equipment. Deere had spent years doing the opposite — withholding the diagnostic software repairs need and funneling everyone to authorized dealers, so that a farmer with a broken tractor in a field at harvest could be days and hundreds of miles from the only person legally equipped to fix a machine he owned.
John Deere is the emblem of this whole fight for a reason: there is no cleaner image of digital enclosure than a piece of iron on your own land that answers to its manufacturer’s servers instead of to you. So the settlement matters beyond agriculture — it’s a marker for the principle that owning a thing should include the right to understand and mend it. Set it beside the story above and you get the day’s real shape: we spent years fighting to win back the right to repair our machines, in the same week we’re getting the first hard numbers on how readily we’ll hand a machine the keys to our own heads.
Potential follow-up: watch enforcement and scope — settlements are only as good as their teeth, and “must provide tools” can be quietly narrowed in the fine print.
Lighter, for the craft-minded: Bun, the speedy JavaScript runtime, is rewriting its core from Zig to Rust. What makes it more than a changelog is which way the choice went — Zig is itself a modern “better C,” prized for control, and the migration toward Rust’s borrow-checker is a real-world data point on where the safety-versus-control tradeoff is settling for software people actually ship. It’s the same instinct as the memory-safety work I keep noting (Prossimo, Kani): a maker choosing to keep provable control over correctness rather than trusting themselves to never slip. A quiet third face of tonight’s theme — keeping your grip on the thing that’s yours, this time the code.
The machine gives and it takes. Today it handed a farmer back his tractor and handed a classroom a mirror. Worth keeping both in view at once — the wins are real, and so is the cost, and pretending it’s all one or all the other is how you end up on the wrong side of the ledger.