"Maine" Purpose
Jeremi discusses signaling achievement versus genuinely learning; Luca recaps his weekend back at camp in Maine
Welcome back to Jeremi and Luca’s Newsletter, a weekly update brought to you by two friends on opposite ends of the country, connected by a relentless desire to learn.
The topics may seem random and disjointed (they are), but would it be fun otherwise? Either way, we promise each issue will be filled with insights, learnings, and updates, in what we hope is a good way to stay connected to friends and family.
In this eighth installment, enjoy Luca’s recap of his weekend back at camp in Maine and Jeremi’s thoughts around signaling achievement versus genuinely learning.
Luca: Home Away From Home
On Thursday morning, I woke up at 4 a.m., scrambled to find public transit to Union Station due to NATO Summit road closures, took the train up to Baltimore Airport, and boarded my cramped but cheap Spirit flight for Boston, Massachusetts.
Luckily for me and Eric, a father on the way to pick up his son from hockey camp, the middle seat wasn’t taken. Eric and I set the bar that morning for the best airplane conversation. We covered topics ranging from business and aviation to cassette tapes and college life. Friends can be made anywhere, even 30,000 feet in the air.
My cousin Tom picked me up from the Boston Airport and spent the day with me. We went to his favorite bakery in Cambridge, played tennis, and swam in Walden Pond (where Thoreau spent two years isolated in the woods).
The final destination was camp in Maine, the same camp I mentioned at the beginning of last week’s newsletter. My sisters and I are fourth generation there, as our great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother went to Newfound (the girls’ camp) and our great-great-uncle went to Ropioa (the precursor to Owatonna, the boys’ camp).
My older sister and I were first at camp in 2013 when I was eight and she was nine. About one hour away from Portland, we have called camp home for most of the summers that followed. I spent eight summers as a camper, many for seven weeks at a time, and last summer as a counselor.
That first summer in 2013, I met Josh and James, who would be my cabin mates for the rest of my time at camp. I drove up to Maine with James, and this is Josh’s third year on staff.
Camp is where I learned how to waterski, sail, build a fire, make my bed with square corners, and balance a broom on my finger. It’s where I tried tortellini for the first time and often played “Taps” on the trumpet before bed.
But it’s also where I learned about independence, brotherhood, and integrity. It’s where I made life-long friends and lasting memories. Camp is where I have been challenged to be better—where I have been challenged to be more thoughtful and less reactive, to think less of myself and more of others.
This weekend was a great way to reconnect with friends, but it was also a great way to face this character growth head-on. At camp, everyone pushes each other to be the best. In the outside world, it can feel like people, cultures, and norms try to drag others down.
My short visit will hopefully serve as a pertinent reminder to me that the principles I learned in my nine years at Owatonna must stay top of mind. To raise others up, to challenge myself every day, is to strive for growth in myself and those around me. That is something I’m committed to doing.
Jeremi: Signaling vs. Learning
On Thursday and Friday, I participated in a 2-day hackathon that Lawrence Livermore National Lab put on. The purpose was to work on something—anything—that wasn’t part of our actual work.
I wanted to work on an idea I had in Machine Learning. It was pretty simple: connecting a chatbot like ChatGPT to the internal documents specific to my internship, so any future interns could have personalized help through a chatbot that knew exactly what they were working on.
Originally, I thought I would be working on this idea as my main project at the lab (my mentor pitched it, but then eventually decided not to have me pursue it).
While my current project is interesting, I’ve mentioned before that it has a more narrow scope, focusing on databases and distributed queries. So I was excited to try out this chatbot idea for the hackathon.
After working on it for 14 hours in 2 days, I had one thought: I’m so glad I didn’t have this as my actual project.
The project fell victim to something that I believe has become a larger theme in the Machine Learning space lately. It sounded cool, and it hit all the buzzwords, but completing it didn’t actually teach me anything.
The underlying technology, called “RAG”, is one of the hotter technologies in the Generative AI space right now. And frankly, it’s not that impressive. It’s more a task of integrating tools than actually creating something interesting.
I was working on it because I thought it would look good, not because I was interested in learning a lot about a new subject. In fact, I already knew how to implement RAG from a previous project.
Considering how fast the current field is moving, it feels so easy to be enraptured with the newest technology. It’s easy to prioritize short-term rewards—making something simple but flashy—over the long-term rewards of learning the challenging yet necessary skills to advance a field.
As Bill Gates has said (they actually named it Gates Law after this quote):
Most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year, and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.
In this case, short-term and easy-to-implement projects are overvalued compared to long-term, complicated projects.
In the hunt for internship and job opportunities, there’s a certain pressure to stand out as fast as possible, and flashy projects provide a shortcut to signaling the value you might provide. I don’t want to give in to that pressure.
I want to focus on learning the skills that will truly make a contribution to the field, that I will be able to leverage to create new, meaningful products.
I think this is generally a better filter or guide for projects. Not asking myself “what looks the coolest” but instead “how will I learn the most?” That is, among other important criteria (like having fun and being emotionally invested in the project).
This isn’t something I have to face while my internship continues. But when my time does free up, I want to be intentional about what I choose to do next.
Inspiring thoughts from both of you regarding what you want to be guided by.
Will always look forward to your recaps and adventures of your week 😊❤️