To me this is one of the purist expressions of the hacker ethos. I work at Google, and our ethos focusing on doing things the right way, e.g. well engineered, scalable, etc. This works, but is often expensive and slow to execute, and the result may last longer without having to be rebuild from scratch.

But when you're hacking, you use whats available, often outside of the intended purpose of the components. You make the impossible, possible, today, rather than years from now.

So Cromemco was selling a totally non-consumer friendly item, but they made prosumer digital photography available 12 years before anyone else, and while this didn't benefit a huge number of people, this kind of early exploratory product creation can influence lots of other people to do things with it, that eventually spawns off industries.

I think the first real AI breakthrough, or what we think as SciFi style AI, might come not from researchers or large companies, but from some hackers mashing up a ton of techniques and approaches that make no logical sense to combine, and can't be fully explained, but somehow "work".