Now you have to opt-in (in theory, according to Microsoft, who historically aren’t terribly trustworthy about such things).

When the feature was first created, and released to a group of end-users who have opted into the “insider program” to get new features earlier than most people, it wasn’t opt-in

I imagine he means things like Chromebook, rather than Chromebook itself. Mass-market consumer hardware which comes with Linux by default

The safety designed into Rust is suddenly foreign to the C family that I’m honestly not sure you can do that. Even “unsafe” Rust doesn’t completely switch off the enforced safety

Those two things aren’t being claimed by the same people.

There are people with functioning brains, who are aware that AI is shit at programming, and there are managers who have been sold a sales pitch and believe that they can replace half of their software engineers.

AI doesn’t actually need to be effective to cost a bunch of jobs, it just needs to have good salespeople. Those jobs will come back when the businesses which decided to rely on AI discover the hole they’ve dug for themselves. That might not be quick though, because there’s no rule saying that major businesses will have competent leaders with good foresight.

There are a million ways to back data up, many of them are as simple as “copy it to removable media”, and don’t require any clever operating system features at all.

What removable media you can use depends on the quantity of data, and how long you need the backup to last. Maybe DVDs, or USB drives. If the data is valuable enough, you can also pay for cloud storage and upload it