This is the best publicity they could ever have and it didn't cost them a penny.
There's probably 10 year olds in their bedrooms light years ahead of these guys, certainly from we've seen it's definitely nothing to write home about, but it's all about the marketing and hype, convincing the mass media they've invented the next Terminator.
> There's probably [amateurs] light years ahead of these guys
This is not an 80s hacker movie and amateur hackers can get into the DoD computers using a public phone or whatever. This is actual research funded with millions of dollars done by people with years of experience in the field. I find this whole meme in the programming world of some random programmer being able to work miracles and be super advanced kind of dumb.
Is it a meme in the programming world? I've only encountered it in Hollywood and TV. It's like how every on-screen computer beeps and boops on every interaction: it's a dramatic device. No one does that IRL because it would drive you bananas in like ten seconds.
Yeah, I've had a few CS friends and internet people say things like that, like there is probably some programmer who solved the NP problem but no one knows it and of course there's the elite hacker who can do anything he wants thing; not really seriously but enough that it seems to be a meme in the CS world.
There's probably 10 year olds in their bedrooms light years ahead of these guys, certainly from we've seen it's definitely nothing to write home about, but it's all about the marketing and hype, convincing the mass media they've invented the next Terminator.