sounds like it's 3 hours of coding / day + 5-10 hours a day preparing for and thinking about the problem.
that's 7-12 hours / day if you add in an hour's worth of breaks.
sounds billable to me!
Do you think the card catalog down at the local library is sentient?
Maybe that's not enough data, though!
Is the card catalog for NY Public Library sentient?
Maybe that's still too local.
Is Google sentient?
Everyone with a clue would admit these are all examples of "knowledge"
It's the same parlor trick, with fancier algos. It's not intelligence. It won't produce a human-level AI.
Period.
Everyone I knew ran Linux in the late 90's, I chose to run FreeBSD.
I guarantee you Linux was very influential. Solaris was its only real competitor after a while, and Sun went all Java and screwed up its OS.
If you're working in software development already, all decent employers should encourage you to constantly learn, even if it isn't directly related to the job at hand.
If this isn't the case, it's a huge red flag.