#151

Google's sweep emptied uBlock Origin and reached Brave, and uv hid its cache dedup

Google pulled the last Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store, and Brave disables every MV2 add-on it does not host itself. uv hid its dedup.

uBlock Origin’s Chrome Web Store page has no name on it now. The rating and the install button are gone too. Hand the store a made-up 32-character extension ID and it returns the identical blank page.

Chrome stopped running Manifest V2 a year ago at build 138, so nothing broke in Chrome yesterday. Only the listing went, and that’s where every other Chromium browser installs from.

In today’s indie hacker news:

  • 🧹 Google’s MV2 sweep reached inside Brave
  • 📦 uv’s cache dedup shipped switched off
  • 🗂️ Agent memory as a zip full of Markdown
  • 🗺️ MapQuest won by refusing a rename

TOP STORIES

GOOGLE SWEPT THE SHELF CLEAN

🧹 Google’s MV2 removal switched off add-ons inside Brave too

Editorial illustration of a retail pegboard wall of software boxes with one hook stripped bare, its blank card still clipped in place

The story: Google’s timeline set August 31 for every remaining MV2 extension, and the store cleared on schedule. Brave’s own blog says it disables MV2 add-ons for Brave users the moment Google pulls them. Four builds survive, because Brave hosts those itself.

The details:

  • Still there: AdGuard, uBlock Origin, uMatrix and NoScript, re-enabled at brave://settings/extensions/v2 since v1.81.
  • This took Manifest V2, not ad blocking. Adblock Plus and Ghostery migrated to MV3 and still have live listings.
  • uBlock Origin Lite gives up dynamic filtering, the per-site scripting switches, and regex options Chrome’s declarativeNetRequest rejects.
  • uMatrix has no MV3 port at all. taviso lost it, found no replacement, and shipped matrix3 as a prototype the same week.

Why builders care: Nobody can reinstall your MV2 extension after a machine wipe, and no update reaches the copies still running. Today’s install count is the most you’ll ever have.

UV TRADES SPEED FOR DISK

📦 uv now dedupes every file in the wheel cache, behind a preview flag

Editorial illustration of a leaning stack of identical cardboard boxes collapsing into one, with a large toggle switch beside it resting in the off position

The story: PR #21327 stores every extracted wheel file under its BLAKE3 hash and hardlinks it back into place. That takes 0.12.7’s whole-wheel dedup down to individual files. It landed in uv 0.12.8 nine hours after merge.

The details:

  • Three ways in: --preview-features content-addressed-cache, UV_PREVIEW_FEATURES, or preview-features in your uv.toml.
  • charliermarsh got 545.2 MiB back on his own machine, 134,222 files collapsed into 87,129 objects. Self-reported, unreproduced.
  • Cold installs slow by roughly 3% to 4% across AnyIO, SymPy, NumPy and PyTorch. Warm installs don’t move.
  • CivBase: the size win isn’t obviously worth the slowdown plus the complexity. The author: “Making things faster is much easier than making things smaller.”

Why builders care: Switch it on where venvs pile up and share heavy wheels. Leave it off on CI, where every install is cold anyway. And don’t hand-edit files under ~/.cache/uv: one edit hits every venv on that inode.

GREP YOUR AGENT MEMORY

🗂️ Cal Paterson’s agent memory format is Markdown in a zip

Editorial illustration of a canvas pouch with a half-open zipper spilling stacked blank pages, a server rack pushed aside behind it with its cable unplugged

The story: Cal Paterson published memoryfields, and there’s no server anywhere in it. Every memory is one page of full prose, never chunked or summarised. The spec, a CLI and an agent skill went up before the blog post did.

The details:

  • The optional SQLite vector index regenerates from the .md files. Paterson: “a deletable cache, not the system.”
  • Soft cap is about 8KB a page, one embedding’s worth. Extra detail buys you extra pages.
  • “At most 2 tool calls are required (#1 to search, #2 to read in parallel)”, against N+1 to walk a linked wiki.
  • HN is split: one commenter calls the RAG the weak point, another cites GNU recutils as prior art.

Why builders care: 19 stars on the spec, no outside implementations, so you’d be the first to hit its edges. Point the CLI at his demo zip and see whether an agent retrieves anything you’d have kept.

🗺️ An executive order renamed Lake Ontario to “Lake America” for US Google Maps users. MapQuest left it alone and took No.1 in the US iOS Navigation category, its best rank in 30 years. Usage ran about 50x normal. GM Doug Berger: “give people an app that keeps the names they’re familiar with.” Olaf Alders moved PrettyGoodPing off DigitalOcean to Hetzner over the same rename, with MetaCPAN next.

🛠️ Six coding-agent side tools hit Hacker News inside eight hours. On re-check, not one had climbed past three points. Two deserve better. config-drift-checker runs CI over your Claude Code setup, with eval cases and regression alerts across CLAUDE.md, skills and hooks. agentdock is a phone-friendly dashboard for parallel agents across tmux sessions and git worktrees.

🖥️ A maxed Mac Studio is 10 to 12 weeks out at $18,299 before tax. The Information reports OpenAI has bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Studios to train computer-use agents. That’s one paywalled source with no confirmation from either company, so hold it loosely. Meanwhile r/LocalLLaMA is cabling Macs to Linux boxes over Thunderbolt, pairing unified memory with NVIDIA compute instead of queueing.

DRAMA

🖊️ CODE IS THE EASY ONE TO AUTOMATE

Murat Demirbas, Principal Research Scientist at MongoDB Research, puts code next to math on a “wickedness spectrum” because both are verifiable, and prose at the far end, where the measure is “resonance inside another human mind.” HN grants him the craft and rejects the job: matherial says LLMs take the journalism and corporate comms that pay a writer’s bills first.

FIRST DOLLAR

💵 CLIPSHIP WENT FROM ONE PAYING CUSTOMER TO FOUR

u/DankMuthafucker’s six-day update: $22.45 gross, $17.52 after fees, from about 90 users. ClipShip cuts long talking-head recordings into vertical clips, and the processing runs on-device. He calls it gross volume, never MRR, and the figures are prose with no screenshot attached. 61 upvotes and 64 comments.

📮 FIVE MONTHS OF AN EMAIL API FOR AGENTS, IN PUBLIC NUMBERS

u/DeadSimpleEmail reports 380 accounts, 20 paying and about 14,500 emails a month for Dead Simple Email, an email API that gives agents inboxes, webhooks and reply parsing. He won’t name a revenue figure beyond “a three-digit number”, and at $5 for the cheapest paid tier that puts the floor at $100. He calls the free-to-paid rate low himself. The post got two upvotes.

STACK OF THE DAY

OpenShot 4.0 - Screen, webcam, mic and system-audio capture, each landing as its own clip, plus colour wheels, curves, LUTs and real scopes. Free, GPLv3, source here. Test it before you cancel anything: an HN commenter’s build crashes on Apple Silicon and the installer is named x86_64.

Not sponsored. We just feature tools builders would actually use.

BOOKMARKED TODAY

  • 🍎 Darling - Run macOS command-line binaries on Linux with no Mac involved. GUI support is “basic experimental” by the project’s own FAQ.
  • 🎲 How to build a diffusion language model - Cornell’s Kuleshov group on masked and block diffusion, plus scaling laws. Theory only, no code, published in July.

Curated by AI, built by a human.