In bash, & just starts the program in the background, so all of the commands are run in parallel. You're probably thinking of &&, which runs the command on its left, checks its return code, and then decides whether run the command on the right.

Although, in this case there are no 'commands on the right' since all the commands are on separate lines. You'd need to backslash the commands together, something like

pip install "$1" && \
easy_install "$1" && \
...

Not a typo, just an old formulation that's sometimes used. See https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52596/proper-usage-origin-of-the-generic-phrase-action-phrase-does-not-a-noun-mak for some discussion.

"don't care for" is just a polite way to say "don't like". The author does care, at least enough to write a fairly lengthy blog post, they just don't like Gnome and expressed in in a somewhat dated manner. You of course don't have to care, and as the blog says, if you like Gnome, you do you.

Out of curiosity, was there anything in the post that resonated with you? "Oh yeah, that could be better" or "that does annoy me", something along those lines?

Could you post a link to what you're referencing? I think I've read it before but I can't seem to find it via web searches anymore.

Does lsblk not work? I checked on my machine and it shows the correct path, assuming you know your stick is sdb or whatever. Something like lsblk -o MODEL,MOUNTPOINT is (generally) a bit more clear but admittedly getting into the 'pain' territory.