On April 26, 2026, Kenyan runner Sabastian Sawe ran a marathon in one hour, fifty-nine minutes, and 30 seconds. It was the first time anyone ran a marathon in under two hours. 

Except I, personally, have beaten that record many times. I can go 26.22 miles in my car way faster than that. 

This is a very stupid thing to say, obviously, which is the point. There is an inherent value to doing things beyond just their practical outcomes. The sub-two-hour marathon is impressive even though we have faster ways of getting around because of what it symbolizes: someone working, over time, to improve themselves. 

Anyone who runs knows that you get better over time, and that improvement feels good. Very few of us are going to achieve anything as impressive as Sawe’s marathon time, but the underlying desire to keep reaching new heights is universal. 

And it’s not just runners. Anyone who plays video games knows that improvement is part of the appeal. When you start a new game you’re bad at it. That’s where the fun is—getting better. The same goes for playing musical instruments, writing, and pretty much any other activity humans are interested in. 

As a technology journalist I can’t help but spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be human lately, and I think this drive to improve over time is a big part of it. 

But AI can get in the way. 

A yet-unpublished paper by researchers including Grace Liu of Carnegie Mellon begins with a hypothetical scenario every teacher has faced. A student asks for help with a problem, only to come back later and ask for the same help again, multiple times. “You realize that your student isn’t learning,” the paper goes on. “You subsequently sit them down and talk about the value of persisting through challenges, of practicing new skills, and what it actually means to learn.” AI systems never do this. They are the equivalent of a teacher who when asked will give you the answer, every time.

In the study, subjects were asked to complete a set of math problems. Some of the subjects had access to ChatGPT early on; others did not. For the final few questions no one had access to AI—they had to answer the questions themselves. The users with access to ChatGPT were, on average, much more likely to get the last few questions wrong. Access to the technology meant people didn’t learn for themselves how to solve the problem. 

This is interesting in itself—AI use, even during the course of a short study, reduced the average amount that subjects learned. 

But it gets even more interesting: a sub-group of AI users achieved nearly the same solve rate as the non-AI users. What was different? Those users didn’t ask ChatGPT for answers. Instead, they asked for hints, clarifications, or advice on how to solve it. 

It’s just one study, granted, and it hardly covers all use cases. In general, though, it highlights a useful frame for how we choose to use AI tools: is it helping you to think? Or is it thinking for you? 

One response to a study like this could be to avoid using AI altogether, and that’s not unwarranted. But any technology can be used in multiple ways. Some of those ways are detrimental to self-improvement; others are helpful. It’s obvious that running a marathon by car does not improve my physical fitness the same way running does. But I use my car to travel to hiking trails, and those hikes do improve my fitness.  

A helpful way to think about your own AI use, then, is to ask whether you’re metaphorically driving a car while pretending to run a marathon. The research makes this clear: asking bots for direct answers will, over time, leave you less capable of self improvement. But asking it for hints and advice, then acting on that advice yourself, can help you learn.

I’ve tried to keep this in mind. I’ll sometimes ask Claude to check my work for factual mistakes, or typos, which I’ll then correct myself. It’s helpful. What I won’t do is ask Claude to write something for me. Why would I? I enjoy writing, and I want to get better at it. 

So, if you’re going to use AI, keep this framework in mind. Don’t use this technology to avoid learning—use it to complement it. Otherwise, what’s the point? 

Sill finds the best links on Bluesky and Mastodon so you don’t have to

I want to read more and scroll less. The problem is I find a lot of good things to read by scrolling.

Sill is a potential solution. The free site connects to your Bluesky and/or Mastodon accounts and shows you the articles shared most by the people you follow on those networks.

After signing up, and connecting all of your accounts, you’ll see a simple, finite timeline with nothing but links to articles from the past 24 hours. There are handy buttons for sharing, copying, and bookmarking the link, or you can just open it. You can also see the posts sharing the article, if you want, by expanding the yellow dropdown below the post. 

But maybe you don’t want to look at yet another website every day. Reasonable, and likely the reason for what I think is Sill’s best feature: the Daily Digest. Turn this feature on and you can get an email every day featuring the ten most mentioned links on your timelines. There’s also an RSS feed option, which is perfect if you’re trying to keep news out of your inbox. 

I’ve been using this for a couple weeks and generally find a couple good things to read every day. The quality of the articles you see is going to depend on the people you’ve followed, so you’ll have to do some curating on that end—though Sill does let you mute specific people and publications. The service also won’t show you anything new if you already religiously check those services. However, if you’re only occasionally checking in, but still like having interesting things to read, this could be a great compromise. 

Sill is free to use and completely open source. It’s offered by developer Tyler Fisher.

A few articles I wrote

• Over at WIRED I wrote about a few keyboard shortcuts I learned from my cat. I can't believe they let me do this.

• I also found a great free radio app for Windows, if you're the kind of person who likes music.

• And at PopSci I looked into buttons that don't actually do anything. I have a weird job.

Things you should check out

• The old world of tech is dying and the new world cannot be born. Baldur Bjarnason with thoughts about the end of the US-driven internet.

• Tiled Words is a game that combines crosswords and moving tiles. Try it.