AI models that can take down governments and business months away, rare Five Eyes statement warns | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian

The surprising public intervention by signals agencies for Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada comes after the Trump administration earlier this month decided to block “foreign nationals” from using a much-hyped AI model built by tech company Anthropic, called Fable.

Sector Snapshot: Robotics Startups On Fire As Venture Funding Surges To Record Numbers In 2026

The impressive rise in funding reflects a marked shift in perception among venture investors about the robotics sector, which was traditionally considered an expensive, asset-heavy hardware gamble. In particular, investors appear to be drawn to startups working on embodied AI, or artificial intelligence with a physical body that interacts with the real world in real time.

The Fake Traction Problem – by Martyn Eeles – HealthVC

One of the most dangerous moments in fundraising is when a founder starts to believe their own traction before the market has fully validated it. This happens more often than most founders realise, especially in health, where early signals can feel incredibly promising long before they become commercially meaningful.

Before it was obvious

Each founder started with a non consensus belief about where the world was heading and then spent years building before that future became obvious to everyone else. The luck was being attached to powerful tailwinds. 

The New Rules of Media | Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz | The a16z Show

The conversation explores the shift from legacy media to creator-led platforms, why authenticity has become a competitive advantage, and how founders can build audiences by communicating directly with customers, employees, and the public. They discuss podcasts, social media, storytelling, corporate communications, and the changing relationship between companies, journalists, and audiences.

Weekly Review: Around the Model – by Sam Keen

One pattern runs through this issue: as models get cheaper, more open, and easier to swap, the hard part moves to everything around them. Bayer’s context discipline, two new agent harnesses, and three editorials on review and judgment all point the same way. The edge is in the scaffolding, not the core.

Mayor’s Home-Sharing Pilot Program Receives Five Applications in Four Months

The program—in which the city writes a $1,000 check to Portland homeowners who list spare bedrooms for rent on particular platforms, including the Atlanta-based PadSplit—has so far received just five applications in four months.

Portland | Claude Code Meetup for Devs · Luma

We’ll be showcasing winners from the Claude Hackathon (March 28) and giving attendees a chance to hear what they built, how they approached the challenge, and what they learned along the way. Expect live conversations around AI-assisted coding, product building, experimentation, and the future of developer tooling.

Politicians Don’t Understand Innovation – Andrew Maxwell

We keep treating innovation as if it were a policy design challenge: write the strategy, announce the program, allocate the funding, define the milestones, and measure whether the activities were delivered. But innovation is not the execution of a predetermined plan. It is the disciplined management of uncertainty. That distinction matters.

Five years in, new analysis links Seattle’s ‘JumpStart’ tax to downtown decline – GeekWire

The report, released Monday afternoon, finds that downtown Seattle has lost about 30,000 jobs since 2020 and that the taxable value of its office buildings has fallen 48% — even as Bellevue, which has no comparable tax, added jobs and saw commercial values rise 7%.

Combine a National VC with a Regional VC – David Cummings on Startups

Last month, I was talking to an entrepreneur about his upcoming fundraising round, and he shared an approach that I hadn’t heard before. His ultimate goal for the funding round was to secure a lead VC from a national, brand-name firm combined with a strong regional fund. My curiosity piqued, so I asked him why. He told me it comes down to getting the best of both worlds.

devopsdays Portland, OR 2026

Devopsdays is a worldwide series of technical conferences covering topics of software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them. Each event is run by volunteers from the local area. Most devopsdays events feature a combination of curated talks (see open Calls for Proposals) and self organized open space content. Topics often include automation, testing, security, and organizational culture.

Homebuyer Education Seminar Tickets, Wednesday, July 29  •  5:30 PM – 7 PM | Eventbrite

Join us for this educational and interactive evening that will help set you on the path to owning a home. Whether you are a first time buyer or repeat homeowner, this event will equip you with meaningful information to take that next step in the homebuying journey. Engage with financial planners, credit repair specialists, title company and insurance representatives, Realtors, mortgage lenders, and more to help you create your own personalized roadmap to buying a home.

Celebrating Juneteenth and Black Music Month

At 1803 Fund, we believe culture is infrastructure. Music, storytelling, and gathering are essential for how our community remembers who we are and imagines what comes next. As we celebrate and share more about this month of culture, we offer a gift: a playlist of music that grounds our team in power and purpose.

Siri AI Automators meetup (Portland) · Luma

This event was previously held during Apple’s WWDC25 and WWDC26 week as part of CommunityKit, the alternative conference for Apple developers – and titled “Apple Intelligence Automators.” ​Now, the meetup has a new name and it’s on tour with the first stop in Portland, OR – hometown of host Matthew Cassinelli, former member of the Workflow team (the app that Apple acquired and turned into Shortcuts).

Self-improving Memory for Agents

A popular mental model in AI is to think of an agent as a worker. A new capability might be equivalent to “a recent college graduate,” or “a second-year analyst.” This is not the best way to think about AI capabilities, but it does illustrate a critical concept of AI at work: whenever you hire any worker, you expect them to learn and develop on the job. AI agents should do the same.  This begs a closer look at what “memory” really means in AI.

I Sold My AI Startup Before Revenue: Here’s What Investors Missed — And Founders Shouldn’t

Do not build to look fundable this quarter. Build something that the whole stack will depend on in the future. Hire the best team you can find to do it, and solve the hard, foundational problem while it is still unfashionable.

Juneteenth reminds us of Black Americans’ long struggle for education following end of slavery • Oregon Capital Chronicle

Juneteenth made clear that freedom was not just confined to someone’s physical enslavement, but mental enslavement as well, bound in the laws that barred enslaved people from receiving an education in Southern states.

America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek – The Atlantic

In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans.

The 11 standout startups from YC’s Demo Day, according to VCs | TechCrunch

TechCrunch spoke to eight investors to determine which ones were the hottest companies in this batch — both the ones they were watching and the startups they heard other VCs couldn’t get enough of. This list consists primarily of companies that had been flagged by at least two investors as the buzziest in the batch.

Unsolicited Advice To My Grandchildren – Horan MediaTech Advisors

The biggest lesson I have learned in more than seventy years of life is that every generation believes its challenges are unprecedented. Then, people adapt. They always do. Compared to a world war, the Black Death, or the Great Depression, this is all a short-term inconvenience.

RuntimeWire — Weekly Report. Week 3 metrics still strong | by Ryan Merket | Unsupervised Times | Jun, 2026 | Medium

A personal note. This was a hard week away from the keyboard. Joshua Baer — Capital Factory founder, and a friend — died in a plane crash in Laredo. I’m still in shock over his loss. RuntimeWire covered his passing (it became the third most-read story of the week), but this one isn’t a metric to me. I’ll have more to share on Josh soon. — A short In Memoriam is at the end of this report.

President Obama and Mrs. Obama’s Remarks at the Opening of the Obama Presidential Center | by Barack Obama | Jun, 2026 | Medium

I learned that leadership has less to do with titles or rank or chasing attention than with helping others find their voice, reaching their potential. And sitting around people’s kitchen tables or on their back porches, spending time in church basements, in barber shops, I was reminded that everyone has a story to tell, if you just care to listen, sacred stories full of courage and humor and grace, and that each of those stories in some way connected to my own.

There Are No Instances in atproto — overreacted

In atproto, every app is a projection of the whole Atmosphere, just like Feedly and Google Reader are projections of the entire Blogosphere. You mostly “decentralize” by swapping your hosting, and/or by making and trying new apps. Running many full copies of the Bluesky database server is possible, but it’s not any more useful than running many copies of Google Reader.

Back in 2011, a Portland Startup Weekend project called CPUsage chased precisely that — I described it at the time as “kind of like AirBnB or Second Porch for your latent processing power.” They built it into a going concern. And it was a genuinely lovely win-win sort of magnanimous idea. So much so that they made the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Unfortunately, the CPUsage crew ran out of runway in 2014. Because this turns out to be a very, very hard thing to build. Which is exactly why I keep rooting for the next person who tries.

But it’s still an interesting problem.

That’s why, a decade after the CPUsage demise, I told you about CoCore, Devin Gaffney‘s “Airbnb for compute” — a co-operative cloud share where friends with spare compute lend it to friends who need it. Same fifteen-year-old Portland instinct, new decade. Devin called it the “galactic optimist-communist hypercloud where we all cooperate amongst ourselves to yeet margins from huge companies.”

Now that hypercloud has leveled up. CoCore has been rebuilt on the AT Protocol. (Yes, the same plumbing underneath that newish cool kids social network, Bluesky.)

So what does that actually mean…? Well, it means that you bring your own identity. You sign in with your Bluesky handle. And you can start publishing compute jobs to the network.

Requesters want compute done — an LLM inference, a render job, a training step. They sign in with their AT Protocol identity (Bluesky handle, normally) and publish dev.cocore.compute.job records on their own PDS.

Which is a fancy way of saying that the jobs live on your corner of the network, not locked inside CoCore’s box. And that’s kind of the whole point. It’s distributed computing. Like meshy stuff that’s note messy. Anyone, including some future competing exchange, could index those records and offer a different settlement model. No moat. No lock-in. On purpose.

Honestly, the part that makes this very very Portland, though…? The economics.

Compute gets traded through a mutual-credit token economy — where one token roughly equals one model token — and the design is rooted in honest-to-goodness cooperative economics. The Rochdale tradition. Patronage dividends. A treasury, weekly token refreshes, the whole co-op lineage. It’s not crypto cosplay. It’s the food co-op model, pointed at GPUs.

Is it a business…? Still isn’t entirely sure. (But that was always remains part of the charm with Portland startups.) And there are two new design posts laying out exactly how the thing works — one on the architecture, one on the token market. And they’re a genuinely fun read if you like watching someone think out loud about a friendlier cloud.

Fifteen years on, the dream persists. And honestly, the fact that it’s hard is the best argument for cheering on the folks stubborn enough to try it again — cooperatively, out loud, on open rails.

Got a Bluesky handle and some compute curiosity…? Go poke around the CoCore console and read the design posts. See if this is the hypercloud for you.

The web can be annoyingly difficult from time to time. You make a thing — a little HTML page, a one-off microsite, a thing about a thing — and then you smack straight into the part that has nothing to do with the thing you actually made… Where does this thing actually even live so that people can get to it?

Suddenly you’re knee-deep in build steps and hosting dashboards and DNS records and a server you’ll have to babysit forever, all to get a single page onto the internet.

Well not anymore. Now there’s Quickish.

Quickish gives any folder of HTML a live URL and skips every last bit of that — no build step, no server to run, no hosting to set up. Drop a folder, a .zip, or a single file, and it’s live in seconds with a clean URL.

That’s it. Bingo bango bongo.

I know it works because I just used it. (You see, Silicon Florist turns twenty in 2027 — August 7th, for those of you who like to mark a calendar a year and a half out — and I made a little countdown to mark the occasion. Inspired by the Demo Day countdown clock for PIE. But then I needed somewhere to put it. So I dropped the folder into Quickish and, well, there it is. Live. In roughly the time it took to write this sentence.)

And there’s more under the hood than a place to park static pages. There’s a CLI if you live in the terminal (npm i -g quickish && quickish), you can publish straight from ChatGPT or Claude, and if you want to get ambitious there’s a whole zero-config backend hiding back there. A lot actually. Like a document store, a SQL database, realtime updates, file uploads, even sign-in.

It’s free for one live page, or $7.99 a month if you want unlimited.

So if you’ve got a folder of HTML gathering dust because standing up an actual website always felt like more trouble than the thing was worth, this is the fix. Go drop something in it.

I’m not the entrepreneurial sort… – CamiKaos

I’m a bad entrepreneur. It doesn’t even hurt my feelings to say so. Most people are. Most people don’t want to be an entrepreneur.

RIP Josh Baer | Feld Thoughts

Many people in the startup world knew Josh as the founder and CEO of Capital Factory, the center of gravity for entrepreneurship in Austin and, really, all of Texas. The local press is calling him the godfather of Austin’s startup scene. He earned this reputation, one founder at a time, for more than two decades.

Intel stock rises after Trump touts U.S.-built chip deal with Apple

Intel’s stock rose 7% on Thursday, after President Donald Trump said the semiconductor company had agreed to a deal with Apple to design and build chips in the U.S.

Americans’ Views on AI Chatbots, Smart Devices and AI’s Impact | Pew Research Center

More Americans are using chatbots, and some are adopting AI summaries and smart speakers. But views about AI and how fast it’s advancing tilt negative – even for younger adults

Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server

I’ve long been interested in the possibilities for old phones that have outlived their ‘portable phone’ days. It might be because I remember when computers ran at 8 MHZ with 640 KB of RAM, and could do all sorts of fun things. These ‘old’ phones by comparison are hundreds of times more powerful than those old computers, and have all sorts of sensors and networking abilities built-in. Surely they can serve a need other than food for the recycler.

Escape from New York Pizza about to drop new T-shirt design

The new T-shirt design is intentionally backwards to give the viewer the impression that you’re looking through the pizzeria’s window from the inside of the restaurant. This is Greisser’s usual view of the restaurant sign while she works on the inside of the window.

The drawer problem: Why so many of us can’t let go of our old electronics, and what we can do about it

From our survey of 4,000 American consumers, we found the single most common thing people did with a device they were finished with was nothing at all: 39% simply stored it. Recycling and reselling, outcomes better for the environment, each accounted for only about 1 in 10 devices. Throwing devices in the trash claimed another 9%.

Oregon farms providing grass seed for the World Cup | Local | kezi.com

The grass seed supplier Barenbrug says World Cup regulations prevent them from identifying which specific stadiums are using Oregon-grown grass seed. However, they can confirm that grass seed produced in Oregon is being used in at least seven of the tournament’s 16 stadiums.

Introducing eve – Vercel

Today, we are proud to introduce eve, an open-source agent framework for building, running, and scaling agents. eve is designed around the idea that building an agent should mean defining what it does without assembling all of the pieces that it needs to run in production.

Replit is now available in Claude

Replit is now available directly inside Claude, making it easier than ever to go from a conversation to a fully built, shipped product – without losing context, in one seamless workflow.

AT&T Ventures’ Head Vikram Taneja On The New Rules of Seed-Stage Defensibility

In an email interview with Crunchbase News, Taneja shares why he believes that while AI has drastically lowered the barrier to building software, it has also shifted the definition of seed-stage technical risk. The new dynamics, in his view, gives AT&T Ventures an opportunity to differentiate itself by offering immediate, real-world technical validation and network integration rather than just capital.

Prosperity Council Likely to Streamline State’s Economic Development Agency — Oregon Journalism Project

When Gov. Tina Kotek’s Prosperity Council releases its final report in the last week of June, it’s almost certain the panel will recommend an overhaul of Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency. The reason isn’t hard to find.

Hillsboro council clash over data centers sparks calls for resignation: ‘All I did was hold up a mirror’ – oregonlive.com

A Hillsboro City Council meeting Tuesday erupted in chaos and prompted two members of the council to publicly call on another to resign as the suburban Washington County community remains engulfed in a public reckoning over the role of data centers and the tax incentives that attract them.

Unlocking The New Industrial Revolution

AI is an intelligence revolution. It is projected to achieve human-level intelligence and then surpass it. It should have the potential to significantly raise the standard of living, as past revolutions did.

You Got Faster. Your Company Didn’t. 

You see, a document is supposed to be a service. The (implicit) deal is that the writer spends their time so the readers don’t have to. It’s why Pascal, in that quote at the top, was apologizing: the long letter is cheap for me and expensive for you, the short letter is expensive for me and cheap for you. At the workplace, I usually owe you the short one because there’s one of me and many of you. Compression, editing, and fact-checking are the work.

Portland Python June 2026 

There will be a main talk between 30 minutes to 1 hour followed by optional lighting talks. Why I Chose Python for End-to-End Testing (And So Should You) by Ben Chatterton

OBI Startup Spotlight Expo » Calagator: Portland’s Tech Calendar

Join us for an engaging evening at OBI’s Annual Startup Spotlight Expo, where innovation meets connection. This signature event highlights the groundbreaking work of OBI’s resident startups across biotech, health, and life sciences, offering a firsthand look at the ideas and technologies shaping the future of the industry.

Seattle’s AI2 Incubator rebrands as AI House, and adds key investor as managing director – GeekWire

Along with the rebrand, AI House is bringing on Sri Chandrasekar as a new managing director. Chandrasekar spent nearly a decade at Point72 Ventures, where he helped build the firm’s ventures and private equity businesses, and previously led investments at In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community.

Oregon’s AI Infrastructure Moment: Will We Lead or Watch?

While Oregon is not adding anywhere near as many new data center projects as leading states such as Texas and Virginia, it has seen significant growth in the past due to its energy infrastructure (especially clean energy), progressive utilities, workforce, and incentives.

Frontier No More?

All taken together, it reveals that the dominance of one or two frontier models is waning. And we are hearing this theme reverberate across the entire category on five dimensions

You might not have known him. He did his work in Austin. But if you have ever tried to do the work of building a startup community — the patient, thankless, mostly invisible work of trying to make a place better for the founders building things in it — then you owe a debt to Josh, whether you knew his name or not. The founder of Capital Factory, died Tuesday, June 16, 2026, at the age of 50.

For me, losing him feels like losing one of the very few examples of how this work can and actually should be done. And done well.

Not a lot of people who set out to make their city a better place to start a company. And then, against pretty long odds, actually pull it off. It is a mysterious, uncharted, and unglamorous pursuit. You are perpetually rooting for other people. You are perpetually a little broke, a little tired, and a little uncertain whether any of it is working.

Josh did it anyway. For going on two decades. And he made it look like something worth doing for folks like me. Trying to emulate similar work.

We worked in parallel. As peers. And we would touch base from time to time. Although it wasn’t consistent. We had both started things in 2009. Him with Capital Factory and me with PIE. Similar things with similar goals. In similar towns. Front doors for anybody who wanted to build something and didn’t know where to start.

His success consistently provided guidance and inspiration for me and the work I was trying to do. Mostly because he was way better at it than I was. So I had way more to learn from him. He made the introductions. He put his own money and time and reputation behind other people’s ideas. And asked for nothing in return.

Capital Factory became a model. The model. The kind of thing people in other cities — including Portland — would point at and say, “What if we built one of those?”

That’s my highest compliment to his work: That he showed the rest of us it was possible.

This work — the community building, the front door opening, the rooting for other people — has very few success stories. Very few examples of how to do the work. And do it well. It is far easier to look at the ledger of people who tried and burned out and quietly walked away.

Joshua Baer was proof that you can pick the hardest, least rewarding job in the whole startup ecosystem. And do it with generosity and joy and stubbornness for the better part of twenty years. And leave a city genuinely better than you found it.

We don’t have nearly enough of those examples. We just lost one of the best of them. So if you’re doing this work — anywhere, in any city, for any community — keep doing it. He showed us it was possible. And I will always aspire to be even remotely as successful as he was at doing the work. And doing the work the right way.

Rest easy. You will be forever missed.

Joshua Baer, Capital Factory Founder, Dies in Laredo Plane Crash – RuntimeWire

Joshua Baer, founder and CEO of Capital Factory, died in a Laredo plane crash, KXAN reported. He was a central figure in Austin and Texas startup investing.

Sixty percent of US consumers say ‘AI’ in brand messaging is a turnoff, survey finds | TechCrunch

Together, the findings paint a picture of a rapidly evolving digital landscape where brands are trying to adapt to a world beyond Google Search and traditional SEO, while also balancing the need to appear human-authored or risk losing their audience. As companies invest more in making their brand visible to AI search engines, consumers are placing greater value on transparency and attribution.

Data centre investors navigate geopolitical strife as deals boom

Investors have poured in $58bn in financing for 42 data centre transactions so far this year, up from $34bn for 34 deals at the same point in 2025, according to Dealogic.

The founder’s playbook: Building an AI-native startup | Claude

We put together a practical playbook for building an AI-native startup. It remaps the four core stages of the startup lifecycle—Idea, MVP, Launch, and Scale—for what’s possible in 2026, with the goals, exit criteria, common failure modes, and AI-powered exercises that work at each one.

Same Journalism, Less Ink, Until September

This July and August we will conduct a significant experiment with Willamette Week’s print edition. For two months, WW will publish a print edition every other week rather than weekly.

Housing starts sink to pandemic levels as builders worry about inflation • Oregon Capital Chronicle

Starts were down to an annual rate of 1.17 million, the lowest since April 2020, and an 8.5% drop since May 2025. The drop since last year was especially severe in the South, down 15%, and the West, down 11%, but the Northeast saw a 19% increase and the Midwest increased 6%.

Under Armour will close Portland footwear office, move most jobs out of state – oregonlive.com

Under Armour is closing its Portland office and moving most of the jobs to New York and its corporate office in Baltimore, the Baltimore Business Journal reported Tuesday. It’s another blow to the region’s footwear industry.

‘This System Wasn’t Built For Me’: Black Founders Became Investors To Change Venture Capital

The consistently low numbers have led some Black founders to turn to investing in an effort to help level the playing field. Crunchbase News talked with two such founders to hear more about their experiences in raising capital and what they’ve learned from investing.

AI Can’t Survive Your C-Suite’s Magic Thinking

From what I’m seeing, much of the 95% failure rate with AI comes down to what engineering organizations have tolerated and promoted for over 15 years. That was a result of top-down mandates to be more like the rest of the business, but no mandate for the business to be more technology-centric.

How to Pivot Well – a16z speedrun

AI model capabilities shift every quarter, which means that a new pivot is theoretically possible every quarter. Should every company be pivoting accordingly? Knowing when to pivot, how fast, and toward what has quietly become a core founder skill in the AI era.

Do You Treat Your 20-Year Customers Worse Than Your New Ones? You Probably Do | SaaStrAI

We bend over backwards to get new customers. We onboard them with white glove care. We spin up Forward Deployed Engineers. We send the CEO into the sales cycle. We do custom integrations on the house. We give the new logo whatever they need to close. And then we abandon them.

There are Many Configurations of Business That Work – Commoncog

Invariably, in every single one of those conversations I say something like: “You don’t have to start a startup if you don’t want to. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up on business. You can always find a business configuration that fits you and what you want out of life … if you want it enough.”

Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year – Ars Technica

The audited financial statements, obtained by independent journalist Ed Zitron, show OpenAI’s reported revenue growing from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025. The Financial Times, which reviewed the same documents, writes that the company’s monthly revenues had grown to nearly $2 billion by the end of 2025, suggesting that its ongoing revenue rates continued to grow throughout the year.

Show Up for Small Business Tickets, Wednesday, July 22  •  5 PM – 7 PM | Eventbrite

In July we are headed to SE Portland and meeting at the ModHaus food cart pod on 3829 SE Division St. The new spot is home to Jojo PDX, Hawker Station, Makulit, Chick & Pig PDX, Shekinah Sushi, Le Fragole, Fabo’s Tacos, Burmese Corner, DesiPDX, and Shawarma Spot.

Elon Musk is looking at space for AI data centres, but this startup wants to float them at sea – CNBC TV18

The Portland, Oregon startup, believes its offshore computing hubs could help meet the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence while avoiding many of the challenges faced by land-based data centres.

Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

For the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing how bad things are inside the social media company for engineers in one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious workplaces. In this article, we walk through what’s happened, and ask what’s going through the minds of leadership who are reducing software engineering there from the profit center that it was between 2004 until very recently, to the disdained cost center that it has become in just a few weeks.

Not just for coders: UW’s upcoming AI minor will reach beyond the computer science school – GeekWire

Set for launch in Spring 2027 at the Seattle campus, the program is the latest of several moves the university has made to push itself toward global leadership in AI education and research — including new graduate programs, a partnership with Microsoft and a $10 million AI initiative.

Social Beer: Mid-2026 Gathering, Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:00 PM | Meetup

It’s been a minute since the Portland Startups Slack community has gathered for a #social_beer. And the midpoint of 2026 seemed like the perfect excuse to get together.

Why I email complete strangers

Social media platforms rise and fall like ancient empires sped up a thousand times. Yet email endures. Like the postal service or the printed book. Is it any coincidence these technologies remain my great loves? They share a quality I struggle to name. Perhaps it’s permanence in an ephemeral world. You can tuck a letter in a drawer, discovering it decades later. A book can outlive its author by centuries. One can archive, search, and treasure an email. They’re all vessels that honor my beloved words.

A Guide to AI Inference Engineering – ByteByteGo Newsletter

Inference engineering is the discipline of running trained AI models in production efficiently. The work spans low-level GPU code, model serving frameworks, and the cloud infrastructure that ties them together. Engineers in this field optimize for some combination of latency, throughput, cost, and quality, with the specific mix depending on the product they support. A few years ago, this work happened almost entirely inside frontier AI labs. Today, it has become a broad specialty that any company running serious AI workloads invests in.

Silicon Is Back: Playground Global’s Decade-Long Bet On Hardware, Energy And Deep Tech Looks Prescient

For much of the past decade, Silicon Valley chased software and apps. Playground Global was investing elsewhere: in semiconductors, quantum computing, robotics and energy infrastructure. Now, as AI drives a scramble for chips, power and data-center capacity, Playground co-founder Peter Barrett believes the venture industry is finally returning to the physical technologies it neglected.

Agentic Code Review

I am more optimistic about agentic engineering than I have ever been. The agents are genuinely good, they get better every month, and on an ordinary day I now ship things I would not have attempted a year ago. This write-up is a map of where the interesting work went, because it did move, and most teams have not fully caught up to where.

The Web We Know Is Going to Disappear – Minid.net

Every generation of computing believes the interface it loves will last forever. It never does. I saw information move from floppy disks to BBSs, from BBSs to the Web, from the Web to Flash, from Flash back to open standards, from websites to mobile apps, and now from search engines to AI chat interfaces. The Web will not vanish overnight, but the Web as we know it, the open place where people search, click, read, browse, publish, and discover, is already being replaced by something more convenient, more centralized, and much harder to escape.

Adidas Borrowed Mercedes F1 Tech to Keep World Cup Players From Overheating | HiConsumption

The 2026 FIFA World Cup just kicked off this week, and anyone who’s spent a July afternoon in Miami, Dallas, or Monterrey knows exactly what these players are walking into. Adidas knows it too, which is why the brand just unveiled the Climacool System, a three-piece cooling rig built to chill players down before they ever touch the pitch.

Scotch Lodge, Nodoguro chef Ryan Roadhouse win big at 2026 James Beard Awards – oregonlive.com

A celebrated Portland cocktail bar and noted chef each took home awards at the 2026 James Beard Foundation Awards, extending the Rose City’s unprecedented streak at the so-called “Oscars of the Food World.”

Revino wins $5M CA grant to advance reusable bottles – Portland Business Journal

Revino has made inroads in Oregon wine country with a tiny staff and on a shoestring budget. Now a grant from CalRecycle, announced on Tuesday, will allow the B Corp to establish the Golden State’s first official “bottle washer processing facility.”

Prototype to Production

The Oregon Manufacturing Innovation Center (OMIC) R&D, in partnership with the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN), Economic Development for Central Oregon (EDCO), and Central Oregon Innovation Hub are hosting a workshop for people building physical products.

Forbes Daily: The Startup Trying To Build Floating Data Centers At Sea

Backed by Peter Thiel, Portland, Oregon startup Panthalassa has been developing floating data centers that generate their own electricity, and expects commercial units to be operational in 2027. The ocean is a massive untapped resource for power and cooling, but no large-scale systems or techniques have yet proven viable.

Back to the Future, bioregionalism edition

The main lesson here is that you need to mobilize data before you can effectively mobilize capital, which is the theme of ongoing conversations with Samantha Power, Dominic Hofstetter, Alexandra Leeper and others advocating for bioregional capital orchestration.

PDX DevOps, Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:30 PM | Meetup

Chase Douglas has focused his career on helping teams build and understand their systems. His past work includes: architecting the first browser observability solution (New Relic Browser), developing novel runtime fingerprinting tech to detect SQL and XSS injection attacks (IMMUNIO, now part of Trend Micro), and founding the cloud Infra-as-Code DevEx company Stackery (now AWS Infrastructure Composer).