It certainly feels that way. Some tells:

"Precision, for LEGO, isn't an engineering choice, it's a brand promise." - The classic "It's not just x, it's y", just minus the "just".

"One philosophy optimizes for cost, the other for perfection." - Again we see the x/y structure; AI writing often features these forms, eg comparisons (x vs y), conversions (x into y), negated emphasis (not x, but y), etc.

"When you have multiple parts in an assembly, use statistical analysis for tolerance stack-up rather than worst-case math. Traceability matters. Track your defects so feedback turns precision into reliability." - More x/y followed by a short stinger ("Z matters"), and the closing sentence again follows the "x/y" pattern.

For funsies I tossed the whole thing into a purported AI detector and it said 90+% confidence of AI. I don't trust those types of things very much and suspect they have high false positive rates, but I have read that AI writing generally has measurably lower entropy, so maybe it's plausible, and in this case it aligns with my existing beliefs, so it obviously must be true.

Specifically the Ursula K. LeGuin translation :)

Tell Donald Knuth that: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...

"To order, to govern,

is to begin naming;

when names proliferate

it’s time to stop.

If you know when to stop

you’re in no danger."

Fascinating interview - hearing two women of Chinese extraction working in the West candidly discuss their cultural origins and its effect of their mental state (dynamism vs scorn for weakness, the anxiety of stagnation), the specifics of Chinese worker culture (shamate, factory towns), and the inside view on "Belt & Road" in practice (empty sloganeering, lack of investment experience, etc) all really expanded my view of China. It's easy to get lost in the Western, pseudo-propagandized perception of China, and hearing the views of people who've truly seen both sides is a rare and valuable experience. Worth reading in its entirety, and I intend to watch the film now, too.