Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Oregon forecast includes stronger growth, lower deficit – Portland Business Journal
The new forecast includes a $63.1 million deficit for the 2025-27 biennium, down from $372.7 million in the previous report. The improved numbers are due to a $266.9 million increase in projected corporate tax collections and a $48 million improvement in personal income tax collections.
Let’s Build with A.I., Tue, Dec 2, 2025, 1:00 PM | Meetup
Join us for a relaxed, co-working style session where you’ll have three hours to explore AI building with other curious creators. This isn’t a structured workshop – it’s a supportive space where you can experiment, tinker, and see what happens when you start playing with AI tools.
‘Calvin and Hobbes’ at 40: Bill Watterson’s comic strip transmogrified everything : NPR
Adventures of the beloved duo lasted just a decade. Their creator — cartoonist Bill Watterson — walked away from Calvin and Hobbes at the height of its popularity. Watterson — who has given few interviews — seamlessly combined the silly, the fantastic and the profound in his strip. That slightly demented quality captured editor Lee Salem, who spoke with NPR’s Renee Montagne in 2005.
“We’re in an LLM bubble,” Hugging Face CEO says—but not an AI one – Ars Technica
“I think we’re in an LLM bubble, and I think the LLM bubble might be bursting next year,” he said at an Axios event this week, as quoted in a TechCrunch article. “But ‘LLM’ is just a subset of AI when it comes to applying AI to biology, chemistry, image, audio, [and] video. I think we’re at the beginning of it, and we’ll see much more in the next few years.”
Aging Out of Fucks: The Neuroscience of Why You Suddenly Can’t Pretend Anymore
After thousands of interactions where you’ve monitored and managed your authentic responses to maintain social harmony, something in your system starts breaking down. Not because you’re broken, but because the system was never meant to run this way indefinitely.
Portland Startup Pioneers Cryptographically Unique Email Signatures with 512-Bit Security – Technology Today – EIN Presswire
Developed by founder Ashwin Spencer, a Georgia Tech-educated engineer with experience at Intel and Raytheon, the signatures are powered by the proprietary Clustrolin™ engine. This technology generates animated designs through a 512-bit cryptographic seed, blending subtle variations in typography and visuals. Each Elite signature includes a Certificate of Authenticity, verifiable like a digital signature, with potential applications in NFTs and digital art.
