>“Dude,” he says, “the first time it worked was this morning.”
I can't tell if this is a joke or unbridled hubris. Either way, self driving cars seem like a new hacker space.
I'm sure he has a good handle on the tech running the car, he's at least looked at licensing it to test on the freeway (learning from the backlash on the Jeep Hack), and he had tested the car extensively before inviting a reporter with children to test it at 70mph on the freeway.
If you include these details and less of the sassy dialogue and flourishes of panache [1], you get a less interesting article.
Bloomberg goes for sexy. Take their reporting with a grain of salt. It's more art than facts-based.
[1] At one point, the virtual-reality company Oculus Rift failed to man its booth at a job fair, and Hotz took it over, posing as a recruiter and collecting résumés from his fellow students. None of this was enough to keep him interested. “I did two semesters [at CMU] and got a 4.0 in their hardest classes,” he says. “I met master’s students who were miserable and grinding away so that they might one day earn a bit more at Google. I was shocked at what I saw and what colleges have become. The smartest people I knew were in high school, and I was so let down by the people in college.”
I think it is more about the reporter's writing style. The reporter -- Ashlee Vance -- is also the author of a recent book on Elon Musk.
I stand by my assertion that Bloomberg goes for sexy. You can see it in their design, marketing, choice of topics, and choice of contributors. That's not to say they don't put out great and entertaining articles. Just that it always pays to think about who is backing, writing, and profiting from the publicity of the article.
Good luck to him understanding how to fix corner cases: he's built a black box.