AI tools can be deterministic by setting the temperature to 0. This does allow it to behave as a high level programming language, contrary to what the article claims.
As long as one didn't have to downgrade X11, they were straightforward to install. You are right that upgrades was a pain, but I believe the drivers themselves were on-par with the Windows drivers.
NVIDIA created quality (but proprietary) drivers for Linux early on, when supporting Linux at all was not a given. They should get at least a tiny bit of credit for this.
Some skills are easy re-pick-uppable, like bicycling. Mathematics is probably more challenging. Not sure about programming, especially "borint" business-like programming.
It's also very easy to dismiss everyone falling into the "AI trap" as being mediocre in the first place, though. But one just can't know this without having seen their work pre-AI.
Having long time perspective, seeing the wider context, talking to people, having vision and taste. Curating and sanity-checking the results. Security and trust.
I believe that the assumption that customers reviewing the output artifacts is "the final boss" is wrong. If AI use spreads, customers are also likely to use AI to review the artifacts. Vision, taste and curation remains, though.
Calculators and computers are creating engineers that can't think without them either. There are many problems with AI, but from my point of view, the title has not thought things through.
OpenAI has "open" in the name without being anything similar to "open source". Additionally, they have not rejected using their technology for automatically killing people and for mass surveillance. I deleted my OpenAI account, and it felt good. Recommended.
Referring to "the normal people you know" is purely anecdotal evidence and can't be used to infer anything at all about "side-ideology". Perhaps you only know people that don't care about the environment?
Yes, but cencorship is also politics. What happens if someone just tries to stay apolitical and "work safe" and are still cencored? Any attempt at fighting this will be categorized as "political", "difficult" or worse.