Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Lytics founder’s new startup is Antfly, AI-powered search – Portland Business Journal
“Our idea was like, ‘Hey, people need access to this kind of dark data, this multimodal data,’” McDermott said. “(And) we should build all these capabilities into the database. So let’s make one kind of unified system to index and retrieve all this information that your (AI) agent will need to make a good answer. And let’s build an entirely new system that’s designed natively for these AI use cases.”
New Washington law bans noncompete agreements | The Seattle Times
The measure, spearheaded by state Rep. Liz Berry (D-Seattle), outlaws noncompete agreements: in general, contracts that let employers forbid workers from creating or joining a competing business for a set amount of time.
School’s Out for Seattle’s Rec Room
Over the past decade, Rec Room grew into something amazing, reaching over 150 million players and creators along the way. Players made over half a billion friends on the platform. In total, people all around the world spent a cumulative 68 thousand years in Rec Room. The top UGC rooms saw over 500 years of play time each. That’s a lot of people having a lot of fun.
Vulnerability Research Is Cooked — Quarrelsome
Within the next few months, coding agents will drastically alter both the practice and the economics of exploit development. Frontier model improvement won’t be a slow burn, but rather a step function. Substantial amounts of high-impact vulnerability research (maybe even most of it) will happen simply by pointing an agent at a source tree and typing “find me zero days”.
Spotlight: Alejandro Queral, Executive Director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy — Oregon Journalism Project
Many Oregonians don’t realize it, but this state has a couple of small but influential policy shops quietly trying to shape the debate over taxes and the role of government. On one side is the Cascade Policy Institute, a conservative, libertarian think tank that argues for smaller government and market-driven solutions. On the other is the Oregon Center for Public Policy, where executive director Alejandro Queral and his small team produce a steady stream of research aimed at reshaping Oregon’s economy toward what they describe as “economic justice,” with a particular focus on low-income Oregonians.
The AI Bubble Is Nearing Collapse, Another Bubble is 80% installed. | by Tech Teacher | Activated Thinker | Medium
Large language models do not understand the world. They statistically approximate it. That approach has limits. You can smooth a curve forever, but you cannot turn correlation into comprehension through brute force alone.
A Mirror Test For LLMs — LessWrong
What we want is an experimental paradigm that obscures the Assistant tag cues that normally segment it off and affords an LLM the opportunity – but does not directly instruct it – to distinguish itself from the environment through actions (token outputs) specifically chosen to identify itself. Such a paradigm should be far out of its training distribution, and success should require novel insight.
The State of Consumer AI. Part 3: Time is Money
Bottom line up front: I think the advertising revenue opportunity for leading consumer AI apps may be larger than the subscription opportunity. The reason is simple: consumer AI is accumulating the same raw material that powers the largest internet businesses, time and attention.
The Largest Recent Seed Rounds Are All For AI Companies
The stereotypical seed-funded company may be a scrappy startup with a shoestring budget. But in the age of AI, that’s not where investors are concentrating their bets.
Portland explores vacancy tax on commercial, residential space – Portland Business Journal
The idea, introduced by councilors Jamie Dunphy and Sameer Kanal, is to impose a fee on landlords of buildings with available space. The fee amount would be determined by the length of time the space had been vacant.
Xcelerate Membership
Xcelerate Membership is designed for existing women-owned businesses with a product/service that’s been on the market for at least one year and is already generating revenue or demonstrating traction.
OpenClaw: The complete guide to building, training, and living with your personal AI agent
You’re interested, and a little scared. I was too. But the idea of a dedicated personal assistant that could help run my life and businesses was so appealing that I had to dig in. The more I play with OpenClaw, the more convinced I am that it is one of the most powerful AI tools for personal use, and a sign of where these tools are going.
Engineering for Agents That Never Sleep – by Nader Dabit
Once you see it that way, the prompt is the bottleneck. The alert, the failing test, the approved spec, any of these can kick off an agent directly. The engineer’s job becomes designing the system of triggers, constraints, and quality gates that let agents run reliably on their own.
Vibe Maintainer. Some attendees at an AI Tinkerers… | by Steve Yegge | Mar, 2026 | Medium
Why is it so important for me to tell you how I deal with a storm of AI-generated PRs? Because I’m beginning to believe that my “vibe maintainer” workflow, crazy as it might sound, will be what a lot of you are doing before long. Everyone who works on successful OSS will soon have to deal with PR storms.
