I still believe it's a high effort parody and have never been able to find proof otherwise, but I guess most people stop caring about truth if something is entertaining
Looping over a canvas's framebuffer is a similar experience, just obviously a lot less performant. You also get easy access to the rest of your code's state/memory compared to a GPU shader, which can't have its own persistent state and needs variables explicitly allocated and passed into it.
The article already acknowledges that anyone with bad intentions will circumvent any measures like this, and any kind of mandated audio filter would likely just be parsed by people as a connection issue, especially over the phone with a bunch of VoIP compression already. If anything, I think requiring an actual spoken disclaimer that you're talking to an AI with an AI generated voice, like requirements most states have for disclosing calls being recorded, would make more sense.
Once you've stared at them enough, the default PBR shaders in both Unity and Unreal combined with their environment/post-processing defaults make it very easy to spot.
Functional but looks nothing like Windows 2000 beyond the titlebar gradient. His name was also Clippit, never Clippy in any Office product (MS started calling him that after he was removed, since everyone else was getting it wrong)
Pedantic, but the Pico is a microcontroller that'd be running a very thin emulator and would have no operating system, so no concept of applications, "full screen" or video output at all. A Pi Zero would be great for that purpose, though.