Hacker Houses

Jeremi looks for housing; Luca decides on housing

Luca: Moving in

Since last week’s newsletter, I spent two days in Budapest, two days in Genoa (with a day trip to Portofino), and got to Cannes on Thursday. I’m here in the south of France for about a week, spending time with Jacob and two other friends (Tristan and Oisín).

Reading Jeremi’s piece this week, which he wrote before me, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about where I’ll be living this summer and next year.

As you all know, Jeremi lived at a hacker house in Berkeley last summer and had an incredible experience. He introduced me to the house when I was back from New York, and I ended up spending a lot more time there and with the people who live there over the course of the fall semester.

Erik, who I just visited in Copenhagen, joined the intramural ultimate frisbee team I’m a part of. I joined him, Marmik, and Finn in their quantum field theory class, which turned out to be way over my head… And Rome and I would occasionally get lunch and shoot business ideas around—for the last couple months, we’ve actually been working on an exciting project together, which I’ll share more about later.

The people in the hacker house are certainly some of the smartest I’ve met at Berkeley. But the bigger thing is just their contagious excitement to learn. The hallmark experience of going over to the house is having a white board pulled out to teach you anything from theoretical physics to topology to mechanistic interpretability.

The environment there is one that is very conducive to becoming more technical, which is something that I definitely want to do. Jeremi and I were just talking about how it’s often more exciting to self-study concepts rather than taking a structured class, and I think that is both enabled and realized at the hacker house.

So anyway, my current lease was expiring and I decided that moving there would be the best way to round out my four years at Berkeley. It aligns with the novelty I’m seeking this year and it places me in a room where I often feel the dumbest, the corollary being lots of growth and learning.

I initially hesitated about this, wondering if I’d somehow be taking away from Jeremi’s experience, but I think it’s actually really special that we can share these experiences and friends and so on, and I’m certainly grateful for that.

Cannes, France

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Jeremi: On the hunt

It’s been a busy week!

I had a call with Mackay, who runs a hacker house in San Francisco. I’m figuring out where I’m going to live this summer. I had such a positive experience last summer in Berkeley that my immediate preference is to live in the same (or a new) hacker house.

Only tricky thing is: the startup I’ll be working for is based in Mountain View, CA. It’s probably a 2 hr public transit commute each way from the Berkeley house, and a 1hr 40 min commute from the SF house to Mountain View.

It’s helped somewhat by the fact that I can take the train, and get some work done on WiFi. Still—I have to balance the tradeoff of a house that is energizing and a commute that is draining.

In other news, I’ve started writing the rough drafts of a paper on my robotics research. Given how long I’ve worked on this project, I shouldn’t be surprised by how difficult it’s been to write about it concisely. There are so many moving parts, so many nuances. A lot of assumptions that I take for granted in the research need to be spelled out clearly. At this point, it feels like the first sentence should be: “let me start at the very beginning…”

On one hand, I’m excited to show friends and family something concrete that they can read and understand, instead of just listening to me talk about some abstract idea that’s difficult to relate to. On the other hand, I’m nervous! I don’t know how it will turn it out. It’s hard to imagine what the paper will look like when it’s done.

When I hit a wall in writing or running experiments on this, I explored other research ideas. Partially for a breath of fresh air to work on new problems. And partially because I wanted some quick wins.

The second reason, of course, ended up being unrealistic. While it was easy to get some quick signals on these ideas and validate that they are worth pursuing, it certainly wasn’t a 1 week project to get a clean finding.

Instead, I was taught the same lesson my robotics research continues to tell me: nothing meaningful is really that simple or easy.

Trying to keep in a rhythm with all these things while midterms come and go, some easier than others. At times the progress on all these fronts can feel slow, and I have to remind myself to just put one foot in front of the other.