I am not familiar with either Alan Watts or Stephen Chboski. But I searched that quote and didn’t find any reliable information about who said it: DDG produces only 2 results; Google produces a handful more, most of which are it being used on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, and one being a Reddit post on an Alan Watts–related community in which the users don’t think it belongs to him.

So, yes, it gave you the wrong source, but if the source is unknown or obscure to being with, that’s hardly surprising. It can summarise and refactor text, not produce information out of the blue.

I have not, but from screenshots it seems only a minor reskin.

There was a Linux client I saw a while ago—Spring Mail or something like that?—which first downloaded your email from your provider onto their own servers, then your local client got them from their server. This additional cloud step is what I want to avoid.

If you have access to a Mac, use the Apple AAC encoder. It will give you better results than libfdk_aac, which itself is much better than the ffmpeg built-in aac encoder.

The author does a pretty good job of explaining the potential problems this technology could cause. Scroll down to Why Attestation Is Bad.