#105 - Sand as Batteries,Lab-Grown Fats, and North Korean Sci-fi
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In the News
🌇 VC’s and wealthy techies are making headway on a new city 60 miles north of SF that aims to be as hip as the West Village, but most folks are skeptical it will work out.
⏳ Some municipalities are using vats of sand as batteries
🔚 AI is rendering CAPTCHAs obsolete - with some computer vision algos outperforming humans by as much as 15%
🥦 The World Food Programme released its 2022 report on the number of children receiving free meals at school, which is one of the largest social safety nets in the world, and that number is now exceeding pre-pandemic levels.
Opportunities
Tandem helps patients get their medicine as quickly and cheaply as possible, particularly those with complex conditions like autoimmune diseases, cancers, and chronic migraines. When dealing with serious health issues in the US, you have no choice but to waste your energy battling the system to get what you need. Tandem is changing this, starting with prescriptions: they’re using AI and changes in healthcare data access to handle all the complexity of insurance, financial assistance, and pharmacy supply issues. They’re already live and helping patients and their doctors today with their initial product. They’re hiring for software engineers and ops roles, and the company was founded by good friends of ours.
Hoxton Farms is creating lab-grown fats to replace plant-based fats, which are good (and certainly better for the planet than fats made via factory farming), but not as tasty or stable as animal-based fats. They’re looking for a software engineer to join their team and build a cruelty-free future. This position is based in London.
Speaking of a cruelty-free future, The Humane League is hiring for a tech generalist to be their Digital Mobilization Specialist. The Humane League (THL) is a global nonprofit ending the abuse of animals raised for food. THL fosters a high-energy culture of teamwork and mission-driven problem solving, and they have earned recognition as Top Charity from Animal Charity Evaluators for all of their rating periods. Over the past few years, they’ve grown to a staff of 90+ talented individuals dispersed across the USA and around the world. Apply to join them and tell ‘em Impact Labs sent you!
IDinsight is a mission-driven global advisory, data analytics, and research organization that assists global development leaders in maximizing their social impact. IDinsight tailors a broad array of data and evidence tools, encompassing randomized evaluations and machine learning, to aid decision-makers in devising effective programs and conducting rigorous testing of successful approaches to community support. They collaborate with governments, multilateral agencies, foundations, and innovative non-profit organizations in Asia and Africa. IDinsight's engagements cover diverse sectors such as agriculture, education, health, governance, sanitation, financial inclusion, and more. They’re currently looking for a junior data engineer and a front end engineer.
What We’re Reading
North Korean sci-fi is sometimes surreal, but always political.
Here’s the paper going into the technical details about the outperforming CAPTCHA AI models we referenced above.
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell has captured our hearts. Read it and resist.
Quotes We Love
“If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows them like a never-departing shadow.”
― The Buddha
That’s all for now! See you in your inbox in another 2 weeks!