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Hello, diligent HCI readers! I hope everyone enjoyed their Memorial Day weekends. We’ve got a lot of numbers in today’s edition. Get out your abacus. And tell me if you want more or less math in here: bob.herman@statnews.com.

$775 billion

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Republicans’ recent tax law targets supplemental Medicaid funds that have increasingly propped up hospitals. The cuts are expected to be even bigger than originally forecast, which almost assuredly will provoke an opposition campaign from hospitals.

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Hi! Hope you had a nice extended weekend.

Today: Eli Lilly’s gene-editing data seems promising for high cholesterol, an AI drug discovery CEO dispelled some AI drug discovery hype, and the new interim FDA chief is so far well received.

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InfoQ expands its online certification portfolio with new AI Engineering and Organizational Architecture cohorts, giving senior practitioners a confidential peer group to pressure-test production AI, platform, team design, and architecture decisions.

This article explores Kafka's transition toward a cloud-native architecture, examining how tiered storage, FinOps telemetry, elastic consumer scaling, virtual clusters, and Share Groups reshape the operational and economic model of event streaming platforms. It also analyzes emerging diskless-storage proposals and their architectural trade-offs.

Google's SynthID, designed to embed imperceptible signals into AI-generated content, is adding a new Content Detection API on Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, after gaining adoption by several industry players including Nvidia and OpenAI.

The call to action “to make 2026 the year of Java in the terminal” was quickly responded to by the launch of TamboUI. Inspired by Ratatui, the library used in Claude CLI, it promises support ranging from low-level terminal drawing to high-level APIs such as components and event handling. Currently at version 0.3.0, it has already been adopted by major projects such as Maven and Spring.

WASHINGTON — People in the food world didn’t know what to expect when the Trump administration appointed a little-known Florida attorney as the FDA’s top food official in 2025. 

They knew Kyle Diamantas worked at Jones Day representing food, beverage, and tobacco-industry clients. They saw the picture of him and Donald Trump Jr. holding giant, dead wild turkeys after a hunt. He had no experience in public health, in medicine or science, or in government.

The credentials didn’t scream qualified. And Diamantas was stepping into a center rocked by DOGE layoffs and a defiant resignation by former leader Jim Jones. 

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This week's Java roundup for May 18th, 2026, features news highlighting: GA releases of WildFly 40, Micronaut 5.0, Maven Embedded GlassFish Plugin 8.0 and Apache Fory 1.0; the May 2026 edition of Open Liberty; point releases of Gatherers4j, Apache and Kafka; and the seventh milestone release of Spring AI 2.0.

Schema proliferation builds slowly and gets expensive fast. One schema per event type feels right until there are ten tables, union queries spanning all of them, and a single field rename touching every schema. Discriminator-based schema consolidation collapses that to two tables, turning multi-table unions into a single query, while new variants are additive and don't break existing consumers.

Gunnar Morling, technologist at Confluent and Java Champion, shares his experiences with building high-performance applications in Java, especially in the data space. He shares insights from experiments with building durable execution engines, bootstrapping, and AI natively developing Apache Hardwood - a minimal dependencies Java parser for Apache Parquet.

Gemma 4 can be paired with multi-token prediction (MTP) drafters that use speculative decoding to generate multiple tokens in parallel, allowing the model to verify them in a single pass and achieve up to ~3× faster inference without quality loss.

Matteo Collina has proposed a Virtual File System (VFS) for Node.js core through the node:vfs module. The proposal includes about 19,000 lines of code and addresses common workflow challenges. While it has community support, concerns have arisen regarding the use of AI in its development, prompting debates about its implications for code verification and necessity in the Node.js ecosystem.

There was a flurry of activity in the OpenJDK ecosystem during the week of May 18th, 2026, highlighting three JEPs elevated from Proposed to Target to Targeted and three JEPs elevated from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 27. The proposed release schedule has also been finalized.

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Merck’s bet on an antibody-drug conjugate developed in China has paid off in a major Phase 3 lung cancer study, where sacituzumab tirumotecan paired with Keytruda sharply outperformed Keytruda alone in a subset of lung cancer patients.

Also, the NIH is down another leader, and Sam Altman-backed longevity startup Retro Biosciences raises more funds.

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