Saturday, 20 June 2026

Norway near-bans AI in elementary schools to protect developing minds; Project Valhalla ships in JDK 28 after a decade; Lorin Hochstein on why LLM-written incident reports hollow out retrospectives

Engineering

JVM Weekly

Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

After a decade of development, Project Valhalla ships its core feature in JDK 28: the `value` modifier, which creates objects without identity and allows the JIT to eliminate heap indirection by scalarizing them and flattening them directly into arrays and fields. The target is the performance gap that has long forced Java developers doing data-intensive work — game engines, HPC code, financial modeling — to hand-code primitive arrays or accept the overhead of object pointers. Backward compatibility is preserved: existing code and null handling continue to work, while value-typed classes gain the memory characteristics previously reserved for primitives. For a language whose identity semantics were baked in from 1995, the change is foundational — the result of Valhalla's guiding insight that 'codes like a class, works like an int' required making identity something you explicitly request rather than the default you always get.

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Overreacted (Dan Abramov)

There Are No Instances in ATProto

Dan Abramov argues that AT Protocol's most important architectural property is routinely misunderstood: atproto has no 'instances' the way Mastodon does because it treats data hosting and application aggregation as independent concerns. In Mastodon, one server handles both your data and your social graph view — which means the instance operator controls your discoverability and migrating away is disruptive. Atproto decouples them: a Personal Data Server holds your posts, while any app aggregates across all PDSes independently. The analogy is RSS — a feed is hosted anywhere and any reader can consume any feed; no one node controls what you can discover or reach. The implication is that 'decentralization' means very different things depending on what is and isn't separated, and atproto concentrates the work of decentralization at the protocol layer rather than leaving it to instance politics.

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Tales from Production

Google Workspace Threatening to Block Firefox

Google Workspace has been displaying persistent warnings to Firefox users urging them to 'secure their device' by switching to Chrome — despite Google officially designating Firefox, Safari, and Edge as fully supported browsers. When pressed, Google support described the warnings as targeting admins only and framed them as recommendations rather than requirements, a characterization at odds with the alarming phrasing of the warning itself. The episode is a case study in how large platform vendors can leverage control over essential productivity tools to steer users toward their own browser without triggering formal interoperability obligations: the warnings are technically optional but behaviorally coercive when they appear inside tools organizations depend on daily. For administrators responsible for multi-browser environments and compliance testing, the practical effect is pressure to narrow the browser landscape regardless of the formal support policy.

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Kent Beck (newsletter)

Hey, n00b, We Didn't Hire You to Complete Tasks

Kent Beck argues that what organizations say they want from junior engineers — task completions — and what they actually need — learning capacity — are different things, and that conflating them produces a metric that AI now makes almost meaningless. The distinction between B-level and A-level performance lies not in completion velocity but in learning velocity: A-level engineers challenge assumptions about what problem is worth solving, discover high-leverage solutions others miss, refactor to reduce future costs, and document insights so the team benefits. The piece is implicitly a response to the era where junior 'complete-tickets-quickly' work is most directly exposed to automation: if a new hire's value is throughput alone, that value is substitutable. The durable case for hiring and developing junior engineers rests on how quickly they grow — which requires creating conditions where growth is possible rather than optimizing purely for output.

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Surfing Complexity (Lorin Hochstein)

I Am Dreading Our LLM-Written Incident Report Future

Lorin Hochstein argues that LLM-generated incident reports will be more damaging than most AI-assisted practices in engineering, because they bypass the single most valuable part of a retrospective: the writing itself. Citing Dick Guindon's observation that 'writing is Nature's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is,' Hochstein argues the writing step forces an author to confront whether their causal narrative is actually consistent with the evidence — and that this confrontation is where real organizational learning occurs. Unlike code (which tests validate) or operational decisions (where the system responds or doesn't), incident reports have no immediate correctness signal: a plausible-sounding LLM narrative looks identical to an accurate one until the organization makes the same mistake again. The temptation will be overwhelming precisely because writing incident reports is time-consuming — and so the forms will be preserved while the substance, the hard-won understanding of how the system actually behaves, is never produced.

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Construction Physics (Brian Potter)

Converting Coal Plants to Natural Gas

Brian Potter traces the approximately 140 coal-to-gas power plant conversions that reshaped US electricity generation after 2008, explaining why they happened, what they involved technically, and why the trend is probably over. Two forces converged: EPA's Mercury and Air Toxics Standards in 2011 required expensive emissions retrofits while the shale boom made natural gas cheap and abundant, making conversion economically attractive for older, smaller peaker plants rather than large baseload units. Conversion strategies range from swapping the coal boiler for a gas burner (cheap and fast but inefficient) to full plant replacement with a modern combined-cycle system (expensive but approaching fresh-build efficiency) — roughly a third of conversions were complete replacements. The heyday is probably over: obvious conversion candidates have already converted, grid-scale batteries are eroding the economics of peaker plants that were the natural target, and even the AI-driven power demand surge seems more likely to keep existing coal online than to trigger new conversions — illustrating how infrastructure transitions follow economic opportunity rather than policy wishes.

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Marginal Revolution

Colorado's Funeral Mistake

Alex Tabarrok revisits Colorado's 1983 experiment in delicensing funeral services — the only such case in the US — and the political reversal now undoing it. Research found that delicensing reduced prices and wages without evidence of widespread public harm; a 1990 state regulatory review found no verifiable threats to public health, safety, or welfare. But when a series of gruesome abuses came to light in 2023, news coverage repeatedly noted that Colorado was the only unlicensed state, and public pressure produced relicensing legislation set for 2027 — despite similar abuses occurring in licensed states. The case is a clean illustration of how intuitive demand for assurance overrides empirical evidence: people want a guarantee of good conduct that licensing cannot actually provide, and a regulatory regime that did not prevent the specific abuses has been reinstated because it feels as though it should have. The funeral director at the center of the worst Colorado case received 40 years in prison — precisely the consequence the author argues is the actual deterrent.

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Humanities

JSTOR Daily

The Nuclear Test Site That Advanced Oceanography

After the 1946 nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, the Navy returned in 1947 with a large scientific team that drilled 2,556 feet into the reef — and in the process confirmed Charles Darwin's theory of atoll formation and helped launch modern oceanography as an interdisciplinary discipline. The expedition recovered corals, algae, foraminifera, and mollusks at nearly every depth, providing physical evidence for Darwin's subsidence hypothesis that surface fieldwork could never have reached. Historian Ronald Rainger argues the story complicates both the 'military coopts science' and 'scientists exploit military funding' narratives: researchers knowingly and willingly did military work because they genuinely needed the Navy's ships, drills, and institutional access, while the Navy needed their expertise for navigation and submarine warfare — a symbiotic arrangement in which scientists progressively gained control over research design. The episode is an early instance of a recurring pattern in twentieth-century science: transformative capability requiring resources that only defense budgets commanded, with the knowledge produced outlasting and outrunning its military origins.

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Crooked Timber

In Honor of National Indigenous Peoples Day (Canada)

Two vignettes from early Canadian colonial history illuminate how systematic failures of epistemic humility and deliberate information asymmetry shaped outcomes across centuries. The 'Bad Overwinter' pattern — where European colonists repeatedly died in preventable numbers because they dismissed Indigenous knowledge while misreading familiar latitude markers as a proxy for familiar climate — shows how confidence in abstract metrics combined with social prejudice proved lethal, repeatedly; Samuel Champlain listened to local expertise and survived, but his deference was read as a political liability rather than sound epistemics because he lacked the aristocratic standing to make knowledge from Indigenous sources count. The countervailing story is sophisticated information warfare: a single Innu trading group ran a 40-year monopoly on the Saguenay fur trade by manufacturing opposing terror narratives simultaneously for French traders and interior nations — an early case of sustainable market power built entirely through manufactured information asymmetry. Read together, the two stories make a pointed argument about what 'not knowing what you don't know' has historically cost, and what mastery of the information environment has historically enabled.

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Norway Imposes Near-Ban on AI in Elementary School