He seems to be quite above average, the issue is the ratio hubris / math skillz still seems improperly balanced.
If my sunday psychology profile is correct, he seems to be passionated and fast to hack around and displeased by big corporations business model + slowness + suboptimality. Thus trying to dig diagonally on his own without the enterprise cruft. So far so good, the issue is that it seems he's lying about his abilities. He managed to do 20% and spins it as 70% claiming he'll be at 100% before everybody else. Without independant testing and legislation of course.
Cruise had lane following and smart cruise control, which everybody in the industry has and can be bought as an option on many high-end cars right now. They hyped this heavily and GM bought it.
That was surprising, because GM had a good self-driving effort with CMU, and had progressed to driving in Washington DC traffic autonomously.[1] That was way ahead of Cruise, and working in 2013. Then, somehow, GM totally blew it and lost that project, with the people going elsewhere.
Every Toyota comes equipped with lane following and smart cruise control. They call it Toyota Safety Sense, and even the lowest priced, $18k Corolla has it.
That's great for software that runs on your computer, it's not so great for software that runs on a car and can kill people. Regulatory bodies exist for a reason, onerous though they may be.
Edit: I'm actually curious now that I think about it. Are there any good examples of hacker projects (or specifically projects that aren't intended to make money or pay people's salaries) that had to deal with any sort of regulatory hurdles?
This is a depressing comment. I'm assuming the parent comment is talking about GNU, Linux, the variety of userspace software from Unix times... not node.js template systems.
Linux didn't become particularly useful or relevant until folks spent a whole lot of very businessy time and money on it. That's why RedHat even exists (not that they were alone, but they survived).
GNU wasn't hackers in the meaning of 2010s hackers. It took smart individuals and years to come up with something tangibles. Same for Linux.
I cannot compare anything in the casual software world, no matter how complex it is, to driving a car in streets. It's bridging physics and AI. Maybe hotz has a point and other SDV module vendors are as fake but that's irrelevant.
If my sunday psychology profile is correct, he seems to be passionated and fast to hack around and displeased by big corporations business model + slowness + suboptimality. Thus trying to dig diagonally on his own without the enterprise cruft. So far so good, the issue is that it seems he's lying about his abilities. He managed to do 20% and spins it as 70% claiming he'll be at 100% before everybody else. Without independant testing and legislation of course.