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Chapter 1

Looking out of her bedroom window across the garden, young Marianne Elridge felt at peace. Her life was one of ease and beauty, her heart was at rest, and everything had purpose and meaning. As of yet.

Her father, Sir James Elridge of York, was away on important business. Her mother, Lady Diana Elridge, was downstairs entertaining some barons and a Countess—these were people she knew from her days as a baron's daughter herself.

Marianne was different from her mother. She preferred her shortened name, Mary, and she considered socialising a vexing inconvenience. Mary was hiding away upstairs, waiting for the evening to end so she could have her supper and maybe practise her piano forte in the assembly room.

not boring By Packy McCormick

Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it's rapidly gaining ground.

That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.

As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.

Simply put: anything that can go electric will.

Or rather, anything that can go electric economically will.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Entropy

Few concepts in physics provoke as much confusion — and as much wonder — as entropy. Mention it in casual conversation and you might hear that it is "disorder," or "randomness," or even "the arrow of time." All of these descriptions contain a grain of truth, but none of them fully captures what entropy actually is. This chapter sets out to build a rigorous yet intuitive understanding of the concept from the ground up.

At its core, entropy is a measure of the number of microscopic arrangements that are consistent with a system's observable, macroscopic state. A system with many possible microscopic arrangements has high entropy. A system with few has low entropy. That single idea — deceptively simple — underlies much of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, information theory, and even cosmology.

Recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory and gated recurrent neural networks in particular, have been firmly established as state of the art approaches in sequence modeling and transduction problems such as language modeling and machine translation. Numerous efforts have since continued to push the boundaries of recurrent language models and encoder-decoder architectures.

Recurrent models typically factor computation along the symbol positions of the input and output sequences. Aligning the positions to steps in computation time, they generate a sequence of hidden states.

Today's lecture introduced the concept of scarcity, which is the fundamental economic problem that arises because resources are limited while human wants are virtually unlimited. The professor explained that every individual, business, and government must make choices about how to allocate scarce resources, and these choices involve trade-offs.

We then discussed opportunity cost, defined as the value of the next best alternative that is given up when making a decision. For example, if a student spends an evening studying for an economics exam instead of working a part-time job, the opportunity cost is the wages they could have earned. Understanding opportunity cost helps explain why rational decision-making requires evaluating both the benefits and the costs of different options.

The lecture also covered the Production Possibilities Frontier (PPF), which illustrates the maximum combinations of two goods that an economy can produce using all available resources efficiently. Points along the curve represent efficient production, while points inside the curve indicate underutilized resources. Points beyond the curve are unattainable with current technology and resources. The professor emphasized that moving along the PPF demonstrates the trade-offs between producing one good versus another.

Finally, we examined the distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics focuses on the behavior of individual consumers, firms, and specific markets, while macroeconomics studies the economy as a whole, including inflation, unemployment, economic growth, and fiscal policy. The professor noted that although these fields analyze different levels of economic activity, they are closely connected because individual decisions collectively shape broader economic outcomes.

The main takeaway from today's class is that economics is fundamentally the study of how people make decisions in a world of limited resources. Concepts such as scarcity, opportunity cost, and trade-offs provide the foundation for understanding both individual behavior and the performance of entire economies.

On an early morning in July 2021, Tekedra Mawakana walked into Waymo's headquarters in downtown Mountain View, California. Scanning the office floor, Mawakana noticed mostly empty desks—Waymo employees had just begun returning to in-person work from the COVID-19 pandemic. It was her third full month on the job as co-CEO.

Mawakana was named co-CEO alongside Dmitri Dolgov in April 2021. She previously served three years as Waymo's chief operations officer (COO), and Dolgov was chief technology officer (CTO) and a longtime engineering leader at Waymo. A pioneering company in the autonomous vehicle (AV) space, Waymo was a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. (Alphabet), a holding company and parent to Google.

Waymo had debuted several notable AV innovations, including fully autonomous driving software; a commercial ride-hailing service in metro Phoenix, Arizona; partnerships with well-respected car manufacturers like Daimler AG, Nissan-Renault, Jaguar Land Rover, and Volvo; and an autonomous trucking and last-mile delivery pilot service in test markets in three US states. All together, these varied initiatives put Waymo in a market-leading position in the race to automate driving.

As a graduate of Columbia Law School, Mawakana had senior leadership experience in regulated industries well before her tenure at Waymo. She had served in vice president of public policy and deputy general counsel roles at eBay, Yahoo!, and AOL. Her promotion to chief executive at Waymo was groundbreaking on several fronts; Mawakana became Waymo's first black and first female CEO.

Chapter 1

Looking out of her bedroom window across the garden, young Marianne Elridge felt at peace. Her life was one of ease and beauty, her heart was at rest, and everything had purpose and meaning. As of yet.

Her father, Sir James Elridge of York, was away on important business. Her mother, Lady Diana Elridge, was downstairs entertaining some barons and a Countess—these were people she knew from her days as a baron's daughter herself.

Marianne was different from her mother. She preferred her shortened name, Mary, and she considered socialising a vexing inconvenience. Mary was hiding away upstairs, waiting for the evening to end so she could have her supper and maybe practise her piano forte in the assembly room.

not boring By Packy McCormick

Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it's rapidly gaining ground.

That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.

As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.

Simply put: anything that can go electric will.

Or rather, anything that can go electric economically will.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Entropy

Few concepts in physics provoke as much confusion — and as much wonder — as entropy. Mention it in casual conversation and you might hear that it is "disorder," or "randomness," or even "the arrow of time." All of these descriptions contain a grain of truth, but none of them fully captures what entropy actually is. This chapter sets out to build a rigorous yet intuitive understanding of the concept from the ground up.

At its core, entropy is a measure of the number of microscopic arrangements that are consistent with a system's observable, macroscopic state. A system with many possible microscopic arrangements has high entropy. A system with few has low entropy. That single idea — deceptively simple — underlies much of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, information theory, and even cosmology.

Recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory and gated recurrent neural networks in particular, have been firmly established as state of the art approaches in sequence modeling and transduction problems such as language modeling and machine translation. Numerous efforts have since continued to push the boundaries of recurrent language models and encoder-decoder architectures.

Recurrent models typically factor computation along the symbol positions of the input and output sequences. Aligning the positions to steps in computation time, they generate a sequence of hidden states.

Today's lecture introduced the concept of scarcity, which is the fundamental economic problem that arises because resources are limited while human wants are virtually unlimited. The professor explained that every individual, business, and government must make choices about how to allocate scarce resources, and these choices involve trade-offs.

We then discussed opportunity cost, defined as the value of the next best alternative that is given up when making a decision. For example, if a student spends an evening studying for an economics exam instead of working a part-time job, the opportunity cost is the wages they could have earned. Understanding opportunity cost helps explain why rational decision-making requires evaluating both the benefits and the costs of different options.

The lecture also covered the Production Possibilities Frontier (PPF), which illustrates the maximum combinations of two goods that an economy can produce using all available resources efficiently. Points along the curve represent efficient production, while points inside the curve indicate underutilized resources. Points beyond the curve are unattainable with current technology and resources. The professor emphasized that moving along the PPF demonstrates the trade-offs between producing one good versus another.

Finally, we examined the distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics focuses on the behavior of individual consumers, firms, and specific markets, while macroeconomics studies the economy as a whole, including inflation, unemployment, economic growth, and fiscal policy. The professor noted that although these fields analyze different levels of economic activity, they are closely connected because individual decisions collectively shape broader economic outcomes.

The main takeaway from today's class is that economics is fundamentally the study of how people make decisions in a world of limited resources. Concepts such as scarcity, opportunity cost, and trade-offs provide the foundation for understanding both individual behavior and the performance of entire economies.

On an early morning in July 2021, Tekedra Mawakana walked into Waymo's headquarters in downtown Mountain View, California. Scanning the office floor, Mawakana noticed mostly empty desks—Waymo employees had just begun returning to in-person work from the COVID-19 pandemic. It was her third full month on the job as co-CEO.

Mawakana was named co-CEO alongside Dmitri Dolgov in April 2021. She previously served three years as Waymo's chief operations officer (COO), and Dolgov was chief technology officer (CTO) and a longtime engineering leader at Waymo. A pioneering company in the autonomous vehicle (AV) space, Waymo was a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. (Alphabet), a holding company and parent to Google.

Waymo had debuted several notable AV innovations, including fully autonomous driving software; a commercial ride-hailing service in metro Phoenix, Arizona; partnerships with well-respected car manufacturers like Daimler AG, Nissan-Renault, Jaguar Land Rover, and Volvo; and an autonomous trucking and last-mile delivery pilot service in test markets in three US states. All together, these varied initiatives put Waymo in a market-leading position in the race to automate driving.

As a graduate of Columbia Law School, Mawakana had senior leadership experience in regulated industries well before her tenure at Waymo. She had served in vice president of public policy and deputy general counsel roles at eBay, Yahoo!, and AOL. Her promotion to chief executive at Waymo was groundbreaking on several fronts; Mawakana became Waymo's first black and first female CEO.