Remove "the" from the title and you get my initial understanding of the post in the home page of HN. I thought it was a piece about the latest sonic screwdriver or something like that.

There are USB to USB dongles (and even fully wireless bluetooth dongles!) that run firmware like QMK/ZMK which let you reprogram almost any keyboard you can find.

You can use them to use multiple keyboards with different functionality tied to the F keys (or any key, really), add extra layers (if ctrl+shift+win aren't enough layers for you), program in things like macros, and more. The most extreme case I've personally seen online was someone with individual hotkey labels printed on two keyboards besides their main keyboard.

The advantage to this over software remapping is that these dongles work like physical devices, so they'll work just as well over RDP or VNC as they do locally. Applications using raw key scan codes for shortcuts (which they shouldn't do, but alas) will also be fed raw keystrokes, which improves compatibility.

I use a bluetooth numpad remapped in software myself, and I wish I could reprogram it so I didn't have to deal with the software bugs (but reprogrammable keyboards are three or four times as expensive).

My favorite part was when the article just stopped and showed nothing but white space

https://imgur.com/a/RxmZmGQ

It’s like people don’t test this stuff with regular people - they just test how to maximize revenue with enough nonsense

Unfortunately, when managers expect a certain throughput, solutions like this often appear. I saw similar systems when I was a patent examiner at the USPTO. From what I recall being told, the USPTO's "form paragraphs" started out in the DOS era as some WordPerfect macros developed by an examiner, not management. Management defined the quota and examiners came up with creative solutions to meet the quota.

These solutions are symptoms of a broken system. I would not judge the people working within the system for using these solutions (edit: unless someone's quality is exceptionally bad like academic fraudsters as a academics work in a similar metrics-driven environment). Management (and politicians in the case of the USPTO) created the incentives that are the real problem.

Automation like this can be useful to enhance quality, but in my experience at the USPTO, there was a lot of automation they could have used to enhance quality, but they didn't. The incentives to improve speed are far stronger than the incentives to improve quality.