52 pointsby colesantiago6 hours ago7 comments
  • roflcopter696 hours ago
    Tbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one.

    Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a python-like language instead of trying to come up with something better from first principles. I know, the promise of Mojo eventually being a Python superset has been taken back, which I think is the right move, and I understand why Mojo's initial motivation for being close to Python was to attract ML folks, but I'm getting counterfactual regret just by thinking about what Chris Lattner could have achieved by making a new programming language truly from scratch and not letting some undesireable pythonisms muddy the language.

    Anyway, sorry for rambling. Congrats to the team at Modular!

    • samuell4 hours ago
      I'm actually mostly worried about the future of Mojo at this time.

      Though hopefully it will be fully released open source still, but I feel there are question marks around whether it will be a priority to continue to develop by Qualcomm, or if they are mainly interested in the AI compute stack?

      Time will tell I guess, but a lot feels to be up in the air.

      • samuell3 hours ago
        Maybe Chris was a little unhappy about where Mojo ended up, and sees this as an opportunity to start anew on a properly designed language from scratch :D
        • roflcopter692 hours ago
          Can you please provide a source for this claim?
          • samuell2 hours ago
            No, this was pure speculation based on what seems like a popular view on where Mojo ended up, where the initial Python-focus don't seem to help it that much anymore.
  • bobajeff4 hours ago
    It's kind of funny that Modular is getting acquired by a hardware company considering what it's founder has said repeatedly in interviews and articles about how those companies fail to make AI stacks.

    * https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-ai-compute-part-9...

    • surajrmal4 hours ago
      Could be the reason that Qualcomm decided to buy them out. Hire someone who knows how to fix the problem.
  • melodyogonna5 hours ago
    Related, Reuters reported the deal a few days ago, valued at $4b: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/qualcomm-nearing...
  • bit_economist3 hours ago
    It's interesting that acquire.fyi data shows tech M&A deal volume is down 11% year to date, but total deal value is up 40%. So, fewer deals are closing in tech, but the deals that are closing are much larger. I wish we had the deal value for this one.
  • melodyogonna5 hours ago
    Qualcomm has acquired excellent engineering talent here, the infrastructure I've seen Modular build in the 3 years I've followed the company is insane.
  • revengerwizard2 hours ago
    Oh, that is unexpected... I tried applying for a position at Modular a few days ago.
  • samuell2 hours ago
    As a meta comment, I'm surprised such a news is not reaching the frontpage already.