Filing down a MacBook & Artemis II safe ocean return - Hacker News (Apr 10, 2026)

Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Lindy is your ultimate AI assistant that proactively manages your inbox - https://try.lindy.ai/tad - KrispCall: Agentic Cloud Telephony - https://try.krispcall.com/tad - SurveyMonkey, Using AI to surface insights faster and reduce manual analysis time - https://get.surveymonkey.com/tad Support The Automated Daily directly: Buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/theautomateddaily Today's topics: Filing down a MacBook - A blogger physically rounded off sharp MacBook aluminum corners for comfort, spotlighting ergonomics, right-to-modify, and user agency over factory perfection. Artemis II safe ocean return - NASA’s Artemis II Orion capsule splashed down near San Diego after a lunar flyby, validating heat shield, parachutes, and recovery workflows critical for future Moon missions. Chimpanzee community splits into war - Uganda’s Ngogo chimpanzee community fractured into two factions with lethal raids and infanticide, offering rare data on how group identity alone can drive sustained violence. Firefox add-ons scraped at scale - A developer collected and tested nearly the entire Mozilla Add-ons catalog, exposing phishing, permission abuse, search-monetization spam, and Firefox’s scaling limits for extension management. WireGuard Windows finally refreshed - WireGuard released major Windows-side updates—new driver and app versions—with long-awaited bug fixes, performance gains, and simpler code after dropping older Windows baggage. Split locks and CPU slowdowns - Research on x86-64 “split locks” shows certain misaligned atomic operations can cause noisy-neighbor slowdowns, with surprising differences across Intel and AMD architectures and implications for Linux mitigations. Keychron publishes CAD design files - Keychron opened a large “source-available” library of production CAD files (STEP/DXF/etc.), enabling modding and accessory design while limiting direct cloning and trademark use. Linux kernel rules for AI - The Linux kernel added guidance for AI coding assistants: humans remain accountable, licensing must be GPL-compatible, no AI-added sign-offs, and an “Assisted-by” tag improves transparency. JSON Formatter goes closed-source - The popular JSON Formatter extension archived its open-source repo and shifted to a commercial path, pushing users toward forks or a final “Classic” release for local-only formatting. 1D Chess puzzle gets playable - An online playable 1D-Chess variant shows how minimal rules can still produce tricky strategy, serving as a compact demo of complexity emerging from constraints. -Blogger Files Down MacBook Corners for Comfort, Urges Tool Customization -Artemis II Astronauts Return to Earth After Orion Splashdown Near San Diego -Ngogo chimpanzees split into deadly eight-year conflict in Uganda, study finds -Online 1D-Chess Game Revives Martin Gardner’s One-Dimensional Variant -Developer Scrapes and Installs Nearly All Firefox Extensions, Exposing Add-on Ecosystem Risks and Performance Limits -WireGuard Releases Major Windows Updates with WireGuardNT v0.11 and Windows Client v0.6 -Split locks on x86-64 can trigger costly cross-cache penalties, varying widely by CPU -Keychron Releases Source-Available CAD Design Files for Keyboards and Mice on GitHub -Linux Kernel Publishes Rules for AI-Assisted Contributions -JSON Formatter Chrome Extension Archived as Developer Shifts to Closed-Source Commercial Model Episode Transcript Filing down a MacBook Let’s start with that MacBook modification. In a personal write-up, Kent Walters describes physically filing down the sharp bottom corners of his MacBook because the edges were digging into his wrists. The point wasn’t shock value—it was ergonomics. He argues that aluminum unibody designs look crisp partly because they can be machined into crisp edges, but your body doesn’t care about industrial design awards. What’s notable here is the mindset: treat tech like a tool you’re allowed to adapt. Walters took precautions to keep metal dust out, removed material slowly, and then blended the area into a smoother curve, sharing photos months later showing normal wear. It’s a small story, but it lands in a bigger trend: “modify your own tech” is becoming less taboo, especially when comfort and usability are on the line. Artemis II safe ocean return Over in spaceflight, NASA’s Artemis II mission wrapped up with Orion—capsule name “Integrity”—splashing down in the Pacific roughly a few dozen miles off San Diego, bringing four astronauts home after about a ten-day lunar flyby. The headline isn’t just that they made it back; it’s that the critical sequence worked end to end: blistering reentry speeds, the expected communications blackout as plasma built up around the heat shield, then parachutes, then a tight landing that Mission Control called a bullseye. Recovery teams moved in, stabilized the capsule in challenging currents, performed checks for hazards, and then helped the crew out for medical evaluation and transport. Why it matters: Artemis II is about proving the whole chain—heat shield performance, parachute reliability, and ocean recovery operations—so future crewed missions can move from “test flight” to routine capability. Chimpanzee community splits into war Now for a story that’s unsettling, but scientifically important. Researchers studying the Ngogo chimpanzee community in Uganda—considered the largest known wild community—report that it has split into two factions and has been locked in a long, lethal campaign of violence since the break became final in 2018. Scientists documented dozens of targeted attacks, with multiple adult male deaths and a striking number of infant killings, and they suspect the real toll is higher. The study, published in Science, points to pressures like resource competition in a huge population and male reproductive rivalry, plus potential triggers such as disease and leadership changes that may have removed social “connectors.” The reason this is on a tech crowd’s radar isn’t voyeurism—it’s the hard reminder that complex, warfare-like behavior can emerge from shifting group membership alone, without the formal institutions humans often blame. And at the same time, researchers emphasize: biology may offer clues, but it doesn’t dictate human choices. Firefox add-ons scraped at scale On the software ecosystem front, one developer tried something intentionally extreme: scrape, analyze, and even attempt to install nearly every Firefox extension listed on Mozilla Add-ons—on the order of tens of thousands. Along the way, they hit practical limitations of the Add-ons API and worked around them to build a near-complete dataset, which they published for others to study. What they found is a mix of the expected and the alarming: some extensions are bizarrely large, many request more permissions than they plausibly need, and there are patterns consistent with bulk, low-effort publishing. The most consequential part is the security and trust angle. The author reported phishing extensions—like wallet lookalikes using tricky character substitutions—and noted Mozilla removed them quickly once flagged, which is good. But they also highlight how simplistic scams and “custom search” monetization add-ons can still reach large user bases. Then there’s the performance lesson: Firefox isn’t designed for a world where you install tens of thousands of add-ons, and at that scale the browser can become borderline unusable—massive disk churn, long freezes, crashes, and painfully slow add-ons pages. It’s a stress test, but it surfaces real questions about marketplace hygiene and the practical limits of extension architecture. WireGuard Windows finally refreshed Staying with internet plumbing, WireGuard finally shipped a major Windows-side update after a long quiet stretch. Jason Donenfeld announced WireGuardNT v0.11—the kernel driver and API layer—and WireGuard for Windows v0.6 for the app and tools. The user-visible additions are modest, but the big story is accumulated fixes, speedups, and code simplification after raising the minimum supported Windows version. In other words: less legacy baggage, more maintainability. Donenfeld also addressed recent chatter about Microsoft temporarily blocking WireGuard’s driver-signing account, calling it a bureaucratic hiccup that’s since been resolved. The practical takeaway: Windows users get a healthier, more modern WireGuard stack, but given the size of the update gap, careful regression testing is the responsible move. Split locks and CPU slowdowns If you like performance rabbit holes, there’s a deep look at “split locks” on modern x86-64 CPUs—cases where an atomic operation spans two cache lines and forces the CPU into a much heavier locking path. The article’s key point isn’t the microbenchmark itself; it’s the “noisy neighbor” effect. Under certain conditions, one core doing the wrong kind of misaligned atomic work can cause unrelated workloads on other cores to slow down, and the severity depends heavily on the CPU generation. Some chips contain the blast radius better than others, and the traditional shorthand of “it becomes a bus lock” doesn’t fully describe what actually happens on modern interconnects. Why this matters outside of trivia: operating systems, including Linux, sometimes mitigate split locks by trapping them and adding delays to protect multi-user quality of service. The article argues that approach can be appropriate in shared environments, but may be counterproductive for consumer desktops where the “fix” can become the bigger performance problem. The broader ask is simple: better vendor documentation so software can choose smarter tradeoffs. Keychron publishes CAD design files In hardware modding news that pairs nicely with the MacBook story, Keychron published a large public GitHub repository of industrial design files for many of its keyboards and mice. These are production-style CAD assets—useful for learning how real devices are put together and for creating compatible accessories. The license is “source-available,” not fully open: it’s meant to enable personal tinkering, education, and accessory ecosystems, while explicitly trying to prevent straight-up cloning and trademark misuse. The interesting angle here is cultural as much as technical: companies are experimenting with giving makers enough to build around a platform without giving away the whole factory playbook. Linux kernel rules for AI Open source governance had a noteworthy update too. The Linux kernel project added documentation on how contributors should use AI coding assistants. The stance is pragmatic: AI help is allowed, but nothing about the process changes—patches still must follow kernel standards, licensing must be compatible with GPL-2.0-only, and a human is still the one accountable. One clear line: AI tools must not add Signed-off-by tags, because only a person can certify the Developer Certificate of Origin. And for transparency, there’s guidance to add an “Assisted-by” tag naming the AI agent and model version. This matters because it’s one of the world’s most important codebases spelling out the legal and social contract around AI-generated contributions—less hype, more accountability. JSON Formatter goes closed-source A smaller but widely felt shift: the creator of the popular “JSON Formatter” Chrome extension has archived the open-source GitHub repository and is moving development toward a closed-source commercial model, aiming at a bigger API-browsing tool with premium features. They’ve left behind a final open release—positioned as “JSON Formatter Classic”—for users who want a simple, local-only formatter. The broader significance is the recurring tension in open source: widely used tools can become expensive to maintain, and maintainers sometimes pivot to paid models. For users, it’s a reminder to plan for continuity—whether that’s pinning versions, adopting forks, or choosing alternatives—especially for tools that sit in daily workflows. 1D Chess puzzle gets playable And to end on something lighter: there’s an online playable version of “1D-Chess,” a one-dimensional chess variant played on a single line of squares with a reduced set of pieces. It’s presented as a puzzle as much as a game—showing that even when you strip away most of traditional chess, strategy doesn’t automatically collapse into something trivial. It’s a neat, interactive example of how constrained rules can still produce surprising depth—and it’s the kind of toy problem that’s fun for humans and AI alike. 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