Nvidia Purchases New Office Water Cooler Startup
Also, a Laptop Got Sent Back and Zig is Doing X Windows Now.

The Quarterly Acquisition: When an IP License Costs $20 Billion

Nvidia, the company that now prints its own money in a private data center, has decided to spend approximately $20 billion in cash on an obscure office supply: Groq’s intellectual property, key employees, and low latency architecture. This is not an acquisition of the entire company, mind you, but rather a surgical extraction of the good bits, like leaving the stale chips in the vending machine bag.

The firm is specifically interested in Groq's high speed LPU design for AI inference, which means they bought the talent that makes chatbots answer questions faster. Groq founder Jonathan Ross and President Sunny Madra will join the new parent corporation. For $20 billion, which is Nvidia’s largest purchase to date, they are getting the best new paperclip technology on the market while Groq Cloud will continue to operate independently with Simon Edwards now running the show. This is what we call an organizational chart restructure via a giant cash injection.

Framework 16: The Do-It-Yourself Laptop That Requires Too Much Doing

The great promise of the Framework 16 laptop was complete user control. The unfortunate reality is that "user control" is actually code for "mandatory user testing." One prominent user, Yorick Peterse, has decided to return the modular machine because the $2,000+ device ultimately became a heavy distraction from his actual work.

Complaints range from wobbly spacers to mushy keycaps to a concerning propensity for the computer to hard lock up when a port module is swapped. The concept of infinite repairability seems to have introduced a culture of constant fixing, an unintended side effect that turns a premium laptop into a perpetual hobby project. This is a crucial lesson in corporate product strategy: giving the user control means giving the user all your quality assurance debt.

Project Phoenix: Rewriting X Windows So It Can Be Wayland Without Being Wayland

In a classic open source move, a developer has decided the best way to move forward is to look backward, only cleaner. Phoenix is a modern X server written from scratch in Zig. We already have Xorg, which is old, and Wayland, which is new, so naturally the only solution is to introduce a third, incompatible option that borrows features from the new one.

Phoenix's main goal is to be an X server that acts a lot like a Wayland compositor, merging the display server and manager and dropping most of the legacy protocol baggage. The general attitude in the department is that we cannot simply fix the old thing, nor can we embrace the new thing, so we must instead construct a complex and highly specialized bridge out of the hottest programming language of the week. Progress is not linear; it is a complex, multi dimensional spiral of competing dependencies.

Briefs

• Ubiquiti's New Expense Report Item: The company announced a UniFi Travel Router. All business travel has been authorized under the assumption that hotel WiFi is an inherently hostile network managed by a bored teenager, a statistically sound premise.
• Microsoft and The Tab Key: An engineer penned an open letter imploring Microsoft to fix their tab autocomplete feature. This is the exact kind of high priority, low effort problem that keeps IT awake at night; a tiny bug that causes disproportionate existential dread.
• Required Reading: Vladimir Nabokov’s guide for learning Russian has somehow made it onto the front page, suggesting that a significant portion of the tech workforce has already clocked out for the holidays and is pursuing more productive, non code related activities.