[nisten]

no they're just becoming dumber.

i.e. the age of the average linux kernel maintainer is rising to what now 50s ?

There's too many factors to judge this right but my feeling that a combination of lack of work ethic, depression, media bs has led people to believe that they don't need to be competent in what they're doing because of x reason.

The answer couldn't be farther from the truth. Actually implementing AI requires you to understand and troubleshoot hard problems anywhere on the stack from the emotions of user experience to the scale of electrity.

[r14c]

I'm 33 and I have a competitive skill set that includes osdev, and application programming, among other things.

I'm just not interested in contributing to Linux. I understand that quality matters and that Linux is an important piece of software, but I'd rather spend my time studying/contributing to seL4 and Genode or Plan9 or Inferno, one of those silly alt-kernel operating systems, or even Haiku. Even for Linux projects like NixOS, I'm more interested in ports to a BSD than working on the main project.

I've seen similar sentiments among a lot of people my age and younger, the problem isn't that we're stupid, we just have different ideas about what's worth contributing to.