Depends on the environment - in that book for example, Arctic wolves were not the cause of large (in physical size - the caribou) prey animal population decline, even though the "feelings" of the average person was that they must be the reason.
Outside of fiction, wolves are not ravenous beasts that hunt everything and anything in sight.
Predators do tend to go for the weak/sick, older or younger/inexperienced targets - they aren't stupid.
By that logic - every living being on the planet is - or can be prey for something else - and I am not disagreeing with that.
But that 5,000 foot view of mine is more related to the original blog author using predator/prey as an analogy - it breaks down quickly when applied to humans.
Nice comment! (I used to hunt - but not as intimately as your experience - you have a very skilled and serious background)
> You're looking at the problem from the 5,000 foot view.
As they should be. Because the analogy between wolves and Gypsies on the level of predator-prey is clearly completely broken (Gypsies are not predators and the majority population is not prey). And the only level where it works is the irrational fear far beyond their real threat that both wolves and Gypsies instill in some members of the society. Which has lead to near extinction of wolves - damaging ecosystems that depend on them - and (among other things) a genocide of Gypsies.
I have found that if you harsh blacklist from most countries you'll never communicate from you'll save a lot of spam.
I blacklisted pretty much all of africa and arabic nations and china on the IP level, ( ensure you get the bgp routed datacenters in those nations too) and not only did i get less spam, but less automated bot attacks on my webserver.
The reason people talk about the blacklist is because its just so damn effective.
I see an obvious link, the last 6 months a few countries have required age verification and certain credit cards can't be used for pornographic purposes.
I see more of it like cannibals sitting around a fire, trying to decide where they get their next meal from while side-eying their neighbors body fat percentage.
In my professional life, I've been told that documents I wrote in 2016 sound like they were written by AI. I put significant work into getting my message across clearly and then to have it dismissed was rough.
I no longer put a lot of effort into ensuring documents feel right when writing them.
It just adds another layer of editing. For me, writing is always a multi-step process, even when many steps are condensed (in quick comments or IMs). First, dump the thoughts quickly in a rough form. Then settle the basic order of points and paragraphs. Fix the grammar. Simplify where needed. Fix the grammar again, then work on wording/phrases/metaphors if needed. Decide the final shape of the text, and do the last correctness pass. Before LLMs, I was done at this point. Now I need to also de-LLM the text before publishing/sending.
The problem is that the word "just" in the first sentence above does a lot of work. You want to get rid of even slightly LLM-adjacent phrases, just to be sure. And you have to do that pass always, for any writing that somebody else can read. It's less of a problem in larger texts, but the "de-LLM-ing tax" is pretty substantial on quick Slack messages. I think the time between typing the last dot and hitting Enter has easily doubled for me over the past 2 years. For now, most of the motivation is still just my care for the written word, but it is increasingly expected as a signal that I'm not letting an LLM write for me. I don't like where this is going, to say the least...
If you honestly believe what you're saying you're going to have a REALLY BAD TIME in the wild.
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