Outlawing AI CSAM is basically outlawing people from having certain types of sexual thoughts and feeling. In the case of materials that produce pedophilic sexual thoughts and feelings, I think it is legitimate to outlaw them.
Certain materials are designed to produce sexual feelings. And I am not saying that having the thoughts is or should be a crime, though I think that having them is morally wrong.
Outlawing materials that are designed to produce pedophilic thoughts and consistently do so for some people is a way for society to say that such thoughts are wrong. I think part of being a responsible human being is controlling ones own thoughts to some ways.
Some materials aren't designed thus yet produce sexual feelings anyway. Some materials produced to generate sexual feelings produce disgust instead. This reasoning is why we have always seriously questioned the banning of anything.
A problem with long articles is there are so many important topics to be informed about today, and if I spend an hour on one, then I don't have time for others.
Human general intelligence is physically based on cells that have a sort of cellular intelligence, due to their anatomical and chemical construction.
This is on contrast with artificial intelligence, which down at the atomic and microscopic level has a radically different design. The question is if artificial general intelligence is possible with that sort of atomic and microscopic design. I say no.
Correct. Books talk as if atomic theory was accepted from early on in the modern era, but actually through the 19th century many prominent physicists and chemists considered it to be unproven speculation, and one reason is the theory lacked specific sizes and masses for atoms. Einstein's analysis persuaded people because it provided these and furthermore numerical predictions that fit the observed data.
Some people here are defending Mullvad's political position. But the point is that a project devoted to free speech as such shouldn't be associated with a political, ideological group that favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another set.
The danger is that if the Tor network gets very dependent on Mullvad, then Mullvad might pressure it to make the network censor ideas it doesn't like.
> Some people here are defending Mullvad's political position.
It is not Mullvad's political position. It is the political position of one of its co-founders, using his own money. The other co-founder openly disagrees with that position.
Personally, I feel _much_ better about relying on a company whose two co-CEOs have diametrically opposed political stance, than I would about a company with a singular one.
> ... a project devoted to free speech as such shouldn't be associated with a political, ideological group that favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another
Just think this through: Since its beginning, the Tor Project has heavily relied on US government funds.
The U.S. government trivially favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another. That is not a bad thing. Just ask them about Al-Qaeda.
It would be an unlikely luxury if all of one's donors were ideologically aligned with one's project. Now, some people want every important employee of every donor organization (or just Mullvad?) to be ideologically aligned as well.
This becomes more complex the further down the relationship tree you go.
The whole current PR campaign (it at least feels like a campaign) against Mullvad rests on absurd double standards as a method.
Problematic opinions at the top of Apple, Google, Microsoft? That's all fine. Problematic opinions at the top of some dissident tool? Sin! If they are not heaven they are hell! We must never stop pushing.
You don't deny that if a donor is ideologically oriented, then there is a danger that it will pressure Tor to engage in censorship. I assume that is because you know you don't have any good arguments that this would not happen, just that it is difficult to avoid having ideologically-oriented donors.
I am curious: Why would you assume that I am intellectually dishonest? Why not assume good faith?
As for the actual argument: There are no ideology-free actors. Therefore, the best way for an organization to become more independent is to reduce its reliance on a single source (or cluster) of funding by diversifying its financial backing.
The more backers who are not closely aligned between each other, the more independent the organization is. Conversely, the more the backers share the same alignment, the more they tend to act similarly, reducing the benefit of the split.
> The danger is that if the Tor network gets very dependent on Mullvad, then Mullvad might pressure it to make the network censor ideas it doesn't like.
glances over at their supporters page [0]... I mean, that's not literally impossible.
While it is true that Mullvad supports at "Shallot Onion" -and has since mid 2023- [1] and "Shallot Onion" is Tor Project's highest support tier, we don't know how much Mullvad is paying. Six years ago, the smallest amount one could donate to get into that tier was 100k USD [2]. In contrast, just one of their eleven (or twelve, depending on how you count the two listed US State Department entities) supporters provided 500k USD per year in 2022->2024, and "committed" to providing 750k USD per year in 2025->2027... until -one assumes- DOGE canceled that grant in its "efficiency" sweeps.
FUTO is another of the eleven-ish entities on that page. While FUTO doesn't seem to mention how much it granted to the Tor Project, their grants page [3] claims that they've granted five million USD to twenty entities in their "Legendary Grants" -er- program, for an average of 250k USD per entity.
There's a lot that we don't know about the details of the financial situation of the Tor Project... but while it's possible that they become captured by Mullvad's money, it seems unlikely to me.
Oh, rad! I had forgotten that that information would appear on publicly-accessible tax documents. Thanks for digging that up. How did you locate it? Punch in something like "Tor Project 990 2025" into a search engine, or were you already aware of this GuideStar organization?
I see that the 1.5 million USD State Department grant is listed on that return. I do hope that they weren't obligated to return that. The Award History section here [0] suggests that they were, but I don't know much at all about how these sorts of grants work.
Anyway. This is where Tor Project seems to officially publish their tax documents [1], but I can only find docs up to 2023->2024...
Notable is that in 2023->2024 (the year prior to the document you link to) Mullvad's funding was 1.4 million USD, whereas in 2024->2025, Mullvad's funding was 306 thousand USD. In that year, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency provided nearly twice the funding that Mullvad did! Perhaps Mullvad donated a enormously large amount of money in 2025->2026, but, yeah, the numbers don't support the "the Tor Project will start censoring because Mullvad is paying them so much" story.
> How did you locate it? Punch in something like "Tor Project 990 2025" into a search engine, or were you already aware of this GuideStar organization?
I searched "tor 990", found the same [1] you did with stale data, and knew from past experience I could find the latest on GuideStar. 990s are really useful when doing due diligence on non-profits before making donations. In an ideal world, they'd be easy to find directly on irs.gov, but, alas.
That's very interesting. But am I right that means when you start out, you don't whether you are going to end up with a big excess of left or right, just that it will be one of them?
I once read an article by a fellow from China who said that for many centuries the country had a set of social norms from Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture. But he said this was all abolished during the Cultural Revolution. An example was traditional values stressed piety toward ones parents, but during the Cultural Revolution children reported their parents to the government, which often punished them harshly.
The fellow said that when the Cultural Revolution ended, the culture never went back to the old values, and didn't have anything to replace them. so since then it has been every person, or at least every family, for itself.
Modern architecture, like modern art and modern classical music and jazz, is supposed to be ugly. That's because it is based on existentialist philosophy that believes that life is meaningless and what ordinary people consider a good life is an attempt to escape this alleged truth. The purpose of the arts is supposed to be to push the ugly truth into people's faces so they can't ignore it.
