[HN Gopher] Buttplug (Sex Toy Control Library) Hits v1 Milestone
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Buttplug (Sex Toy Control Library) Hits v1 Milestone
Author : qdot76367
Score : 177 points
Date : 2020-12-28 18:01 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nonpolynomial.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nonpolynomial.com)
| ww520 wrote:
| Is manual fallback the only option in the case of a unrecoverable
| exception?
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Turns out that rust's "panic" has a completely different
| context when applied to this context. :|
| ExcavateGrandMa wrote:
| terrible hacking :D
| miohtama wrote:
| We never got desktop Linux, but 2021 will be the year of open
| source kinkware.
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Buttplug Project lead here! AMA.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| What motivated you to do this? Is there some financial gain to
| be had? How is adoption?
| [deleted]
| lordnacho wrote:
| What's the security model? Are there multiuser devices?
| qdot76367 wrote:
| This is a really difficult to answer question because of the
| place in the stack this library inhabits. Buttplug _only_
| cares about accessing hardware, so while it may sound like a
| cop-out, our security model is "whatever the hardware gives
| us". Multi-user control systems would be built on top of the
| library, and that's where a good bit of the security work
| would happen.
|
| That said, there are some security/privacy features built
| into the architecture to reduce metadata dissemination, I'll
| be outlining those in the developer guide at some point.
| codefined wrote:
| Do you feel the progress of the project is hindered /
| benefitted / not effected by any stigmatism in western society?
| Do you ever find it hard to talk to friends / family /
| colleagues / strangers about this project?
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Oh, definitely hindered, but it's kind of a network effect
| deal. Sex education isn't a high priority, so most people
| barely know sex, much less sex + tech, which is very much its
| own thing. That makes building technology like this extra
| fraught, because of the amount of thinking I have to do up
| front in order to try and guide things in as safe-ish a
| direction as possible.
|
| As for talking to people about the project, I've been a
| public face for the field of sex tech since like 2005, so by
| this point I'm pretty used to it. It's on my resume, I have
| academic publications and book chapters on the subject, I've
| spoken about it at all sorts of conferences around the world,
| so I've kinda settled into being "The Buttplug Guy".
|
| It took a ton of hard work and image building to get here
| though, so it's a cliff I don't really recommend anyone else
| try to climb without realizing how much work it is.
| giantrobot wrote:
| There's _way_ worse stuff than being "The Buttplug Guy"!
| [0]
|
| [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A85ipUgy5B4
| zamalek wrote:
| What you are doing is important work, not because of butt
| plugs, but because it is helping normalize talking about
| sex, and "niche sex," in the tech community (also YouPorn
| engineering!). Having engineers in the west be open about
| sex is far better than having nobody open about it.
|
| Openness about sex really is one way to improve the health
| of the societal zeitgeist.
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Thanks! This is why I say the project is as much social
| as it is technical. The technical topics are definitely
| important, but the project as a whole invites scrutiny
| not just from developers, security engineers, etc, but
| also from those interested in or critical of how consent
| and control work in technical means, what it means to be
| intimate over remote mediums, etc...
|
| As an example, one of the things I was working on right
| before COVID-19 hit was a book chapter on digital
| proxemics, i.e. how we map and relate personal space in
| digital realms. This project and how it's been utilized
| to augment online intimacy was a big part of that, and I
| turned in the book chapter to the publisher the week
| COVID-19 lockdowns started to hit in the US (still no pub
| date tho :( ), so it's been a lot of seeing how those
| ideas play out in large scale since.
| errantspark wrote:
| I very much appreciate STPIHKAL helping me get started
| exploring this stuff. I'll admit that the library itself was a
| bit intimidating. I ended up not using it and just wrapping the
| protocol for the particular toys that were of interest to me in
| about 40 lines of JS in order to implement chrome's
| experimental `writeValueWithoutResponse`. I'm pleased to report
| has a dramatic effect on latency. I wish I could contribute
| back but the code is just over-my-head complicated.
| qdot76367 wrote:
| This is something I'm trying to figure out how to better
| communicate about the project, and there will be another blog
| post on this soon. Buttplug is both a floor cleaner AND a
| dessert topping, and that can really be detrimental to the
| initial developer experience.
|
| There's a dichotomy in this project that's difficult to
| resolve:
|
| - Community wants sex toy access because there isn't much
| else out there that does this.
|
| - I wanna learn new stuff and also have a weird "LET'S PUT
| DOOM ON IT" mentality of having the library support
| everywhere.
|
| So we end up with support for lots of toys, but it's on top
| of a complicated, violently async rust library that is in
| some cases compiled to WASM, which is a whole stack of
| technologies not a lot of people are familiar with.
|
| To torture another metaphor, I've ended up building the
| hulking game engine for sex toys, when a lot of people would
| be fine with some Atari 2600 games that vibrate. Lots of
| people are going to have 1 toy they want to control with 1
| simple interface, where my interest lies in "how does someone
| release a game on Steam that seamlessly supports whatever the
| user shows up with".
|
| The updated developer guide (https://buttplug-developer-
| guide.docs.buttplug.io) is my first crack at trying to cater
| to all audiences, but it's got a long way to go, and the only
| way to test documentation is to hopefully wait for feedback
| from people who read it.
|
| But that's why try to I keep both the protocol and reverse
| engineering documentation up to date. I don't _want_ people
| to have to go and reimplement things, but if it has to
| happen, I want to make it as easy on them as possible.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Any plans to do a panel on sex toy development at post-covid
| furry cons?
| qdot76367 wrote:
| God, it's been a while, hasn't it?
|
| We'll see if I get any invites. Seems like a very BLFC kinda
| panel.
| j1elo wrote:
| Would you say that collecting all protocol specs from each
| individual device is where most of the work lays behind this
| library?
|
| Otherwise, could you tell us about where is/was the 80% effort
| to build what the library does, and what would be the next 20%
| / last mile to consider it "done"?
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Protocol specs are actually pretty easy. The protocols aren't
| that complicated, and there's some pretty simple ways to
| figure them out. It's usually an hour or two per new device,
| at most.
|
| Everything that v1 rust does right now, our C#/JS versions
| did before, so the technical work there was mostly fitting it
| from gc'd runtime'd languages into Rust. I'm much better at
| Rust now though!
|
| The majority of the work technically AND design-wise (for me
| at least) is the haptics abstraction. Our protocol is built
| on a system of "verbs" at the moment, i.e. "vibrate",
| "rotate", "stroke" (though we call it linear because it only
| goes one direction at a time), etc... I'm writing a larger
| blog post on this, but to summarize, it's REALLY hard to
| build a language around this that's general. For instance,
| the Lovense Max (a onahole style toy) has an air bladder that
| inflates/deflates. It's about the only thing that has that.
| So do I just make a new verb called "inflate"? Do I try to
| match it to other toys with constriction like systems and
| call it "constrict"? Does it even matter?
|
| But, that's an ongoing problem. In terms of "done", I think
| the next _big_ milestone will be mobile app support. We work
| on mobile web browsers in a couple of different ways, but
| Buttplug still needs app support, both native and for things
| like cordova /react native/etc... The biggest issue there at
| the moment lies in our bluetooth library (btleplug,
| https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug), because getting the
| FFI via JNI to android is going to suck (even though I can
| crib off Servo's WebBluetooth impl, which worked on Android).
| raldi wrote:
| What are some of your dream ideas for how this one day might be
| used?
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Seeing the uptake in VRChat has been pretty awesome. For the
| record, I grew up on MU*s, built the first Second Life sex
| toy interface in 2005, which ended up with me working at
| Linden, so I have a special place in my heart for virtual
| worlds.
|
| Otherwise, I am always really interested in ways people build
| for themselves that they're willing to share with others. So
| the answer to this question tends to be "my dream ideas are
| the stuff I can't possibly dream of" :)
| caeril wrote:
| Glad to see HN really interested in the technologies that will
| truly advance humanity to the stars, rather than those that
| encourage distraction by our limbic systems.
|
| I'm sure that climate change and other existential risks will
| wait until after we're done with our sex toys to wipe us out.
|
| edit: Brilliant response, "Hacker News". Maybe if you cum enough,
| we'll be able to grow enough cereal crops to feed 8 billion
| people in 102 degree weather, after potash is a thing of the
| past.
| codefined wrote:
| You might want to read up on 'Fallacy of Relative Privation' to
| see why this point of view is likely to not be helpful. A good
| starting point is this[0].
|
| [0] https://academy4sc.org/topic/fallacy-of-relative-
| privation-a...
| davidkuhta wrote:
| You think 'The Fallacy of Relative Privation' is bad? What
| about the 'tu quoque' fallacy. Wouldn't you consider that a
| bigger problem?
| caeril wrote:
| Thanks for the rare thoughtful reply, but the fallacy is,
| itself, a fallacy. IQ/g-factor/ability to reason about
| systems is unevenly distributed - and, critically, a zero-sum
| game. For every +2 SD IQ engineer devoted to making humans
| orgasm, there is one fewer +2 SD IQ engineer devoted to other
| pursuits, N% of which would have been positive for humanity's
| progress.
|
| Unfortunately, you can't really get around this without
| heroic efforts to shift the bell curve to the right.
|
| edit: Looks like I'm wrong again! Looking forward to HN
| pointing me to the magic fairy dust that miraculously
| conjures up raw intellectual talent from the ether.
| michaelt wrote:
| Aw man, you are going to be so mad when you find out the %
| of software developer effort that goes into adtech and
| entertainment.
|
| Because I guarantee you, for every developer working on a
| sex toy there a thousand working on selling lootboxes to 12
| year olds, and ten thousand working on showing adverts to
| people who'd rather not see them.
| aprescott wrote:
| I have no real opinion on the project in question but
| devotion is not a fungible, generically applicable resource
| you decide to apply to one issue or another. Run a test for
| whatever "IQ/g-factor/ability" handwave you're referencing
| on someone that loves their work and someone that doesn't.
| caeril wrote:
| I think the research is pretty clear on the matter that
| "passion" is largely derivative of competence and the
| values of the environment. A society that chooses to
| elevate meaningful accomplishment and value training
| people to pursue it is likely to be markedly different
| than the instant gratification culture we are currently
| swimming in.
|
| edit: Whoops, factually wrong again, apparently! Perhaps
| this den of rationality that purports to follow the
| science and research will cite literature contrary to the
| overwhelming evidence that human interest derives from
| competence and acquired values. Maybe it's actually from
| unicorn farts and kitten snuggles?
| not_knuth wrote:
| I can not help but detect a condescending tone in your
| comments (if such is not the case, my apologies - Poe's
| Law and all) and find it interesting that you have not
| provided sources to the "research" which your claims are
| based on.
|
| I think it would benefit everybody if you could share a
| couple of links to some "research".
| scpedicini wrote:
| No thanks, I'd rather make out with my Monroe bot.
| qdot76367 wrote:
| We'll hopefully have Monroe bot hardware support in an
| upcoming version of the library.
| henearkr wrote:
| Happy humans are less likely to wage war.
|
| So, lowering frustration and helping raising levels of
| serotonin and endorphins, even by using tech, is
| intrinsically good for the world.
|
| Also, it seems that an active sex life (be it with tech or
| not) is not dangerous for health.
|
| The only reserve could be the tech pollution of badly
| discarded toys etc, but that has solutions.
|
| PS: Also -- bodily happiness can improve creativity, thus
| actually indirectly helping advances in other scientific
| domains.
| morlockabove wrote:
| Are sex toys alone actually fulfilling to most people?
| Given the number of people on thw internet complaining
| about misery from sexual loneliness, it clearly isn't
| enough.
|
| Sex toys, porn, and enculturing cowardice stave off the
| war, I guess. You just get Elliot Roger instead.
| henearkr wrote:
| The connectedness of the new generation of toys, combined
| with worlds such as VRChat, are contributing to make the
| loneliness of "not skin-to-skin sex" a thing of the past.
|
| Also you start to see (unmanned) virtual characters
| sophisticated enough to trigger emotions of love, and in
| some case commitment. It is clearly still extreme and a
| bit too early, but in the near future I can see people
| becoming really in fond of their virtual AI character
| partner.
|
| We agree that not only immediate endorphins levels, but
| also mid and long term serotonin levels, are important
| for happiness, and I think that this connected tech is
| helping in the right way.
| morlockabove wrote:
| Sounds like hell. Nothing personal, but I really hope
| your enterprise fails miserably.
| henearkr wrote:
| It's what some people need.
|
| People who don't need it just won't use it.
|
| It's not a "smoker / passive smoker" effect, they will
| not disturb other people.
| morlockabove wrote:
| Some people need heroin. I'm against the war on drugs,
| but I still despise dealers.
| henearkr wrote:
| But in the case of heroin there are huge side-effects on
| health of the user and on the security of the surrounding
| people.
| qdot76367 wrote:
| VRChat via a few different plugins (that I should really
| link from my awesome-buttplug repo) makes up a BIG chunk
| of my users.
|
| Which kinda makes me sad because VRC is an absolute
| nightmare to work with. Can we please all move to NeosVR?
| :3
| asxd wrote:
| I think the reason you're getting downvoted is pretty much
| that you're trying to impose your ideals on others. Some
| people likely benefit from this library. Some people
| benefit from the latest video game. If we were all working
| on curing cancer, the sad truth is that there wouldn't be
| very many fun things in life.
| dazzawazza wrote:
| Having a life worth living is something a lot of people
| forget to do.
| morlockabove wrote:
| If we all worked on things as important as curing cancer,
| we could build god and live happily forever. Whichever
| generation manages this will 'win'. (Or they build a
| paperclipper and ruin the lightcone.)
| qdot76367 wrote:
| But I don't want to cure cancer.
|
| I want to turn people into dinosaurs.
|
| (https://imgur.com/YKaqaTH)
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Hashtag #Scalies?
| StavrosK wrote:
| > When working on Buttplug applications, something that should be
| at the forefront of your design thinking is:
|
| > Someone is going to fuck this.
|
| I love this project.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I was curious and tried working with this an a device about a
| year ago and the whole thing felt like a mess. There are browser
| components, electron cancer, web-to-bluetooth pieces. I think I
| could get my device to register/pair but couldn't get anything
| past that.
|
| I was looking through the docs and the only useful thing seemed
| to be the low-level code if I wanted o make my own applications
| on top of it.
|
| The reverse engineering work is important, but the tooling/UI
| needed work. I actually want to contribute to this to help, but
| it's a bit far down on the backlog of life.
| devwastaken wrote:
| What's wrong with web to bluetooth or web browser components?
| Electron is pretty standard for user facing cross platform UI.
| This is a sort of application that has the right to use more
| resources - because if you're 'vibin' I don't imagine you're
| really needing that other 150MB to run minecraft modpacks.
| Perhaps if you're in VR and only have 8GB of ram.
|
| You have to hone your expectations for free projects. Native or
| native-like UI toolkits are expensive on time. Time is the
| biggest problem with making free software for people. Now if
| this were a commercial product - yes I agree with the
| criticism. There's no reason at that point that they couldn't
| do GTK3, QT, flutter, etc.
| thatguymike wrote:
| Depends on the minecraft modpack ( deg [?]? deg)
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Yup, the way I'm trying to do things definitely may not be
| right for everyone, and that's fine! That's why the reverse
| engineering work is documented
| (https://stpihkal.docs.buttplug.io, but also check the github
| repo because I am years behind on updates based on issues now),
| so if people want to pick up protocols and try their own thing,
| they absolutely can. I want to learn from other people
| approaches to this too.
|
| In fact, that's exactly what xtoys has done:
|
| https://xtoys.app
|
| They're just using the reversed protocols my project
| documented, while building outside of my admittedly complicated
| library interface. It's been a great project to watch grow,
| because while I'm kinda hyperfocused on platform and hardware
| support, they're going breadth-first with user focused features
| on a WebRTC platform.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| How's the security of this? Do you do penetration tests?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| It's only a toy library.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Related: https://internetofdon.gs/
|
| (It's as sfw as a sex toy hacking site can be)
| snuxoll wrote:
| Groan, take an upvote.
|
| In all seriousness, many of the devices in this space are
| woefully insecure - this is just a library to control them
| using whatever native protocols they expose.
| dhsysusbsjsi wrote:
| This is something I could get behind
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Always a good idea to check it out for any back door access
| issues.at least we haven't gotten to hot code loading being
| a problem yet.
|
| I suspect that engineering of any kind has more perverse or
| pervertible terms than any sex toy industry.
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Not saying that I take constant advantage of that on
| twitter, but...
|
| https://twitter.com/buttplugio/status/1341958265475723264
| paul7986 wrote:
| yet not something you can get on top of or ?
| loceng wrote:
| This is what she/he said.
|
| Edit to add: a thread of sequential puns and then..
| keyle wrote:
| Off topic, I love that the good jokes still get upvoted on HN
| and it's not a bro-aehaeh-land like Reddit is.
|
| I wonder what the difference is, maybe just a more mature
| audience? Nerdier jokes?
| wut42 wrote:
| I played a bit last year building my own sex toy controller,
| using a lightweight RPi Zero, an Erlang server, and a
| nanoKONTROL2 controller. It was quite fun and I hope to find some
| time soon to resume working on it :-) Bluetooth isn't a fun
| protocol to deal with, tho.
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Oh that's awesome! Sounds like a real cool setup. :D
|
| We _do_ have our CLI server compiling for RPi0W if you 're
| interested, though I need to update that soon. This is well
| into the "no so documented" part of the project tho, so it's
| not super easy to use yet.
|
| https://github.com/intiface/intiface-cli-rs
| wut42 wrote:
| I decided to go custom because I love writing code, but
| thanks a lot for buttplug and its documentation: it's how I
| managed to get my code to work with Lovense's products. I'll
| surely try to give a shot at using Buttplug one of theses
| days :).
|
| To elaborate on the setup, it could manage four or five toys
| at the same time; all controlled by the nanoKontrol. I could
| even record custom loops and patterns for each "track" to
| have more fun.
| asfarley wrote:
| This reminds me of a story an industrial designer told me: he
| worked on a dildo with a scripting system, so the ladies could
| set the number of milliseconds for each waveform profile on the
| haptic motor. The product was not a success.
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Yup! Interfaces have been a problem in the industry going back
| decades. See me getting excited about a similar product that
| catastrophically failed back in 2006 (when I was a young, far
| less experienced engineer :D ):
|
| https://www.metafetish.com/2006/02/17/je-joue-part-2-my-god-...
|
| Presenting something like this library directly to the user
| will end up in product death. What I'm building is a tool for
| developers to refine that end product interface specifically so
| the user (who is usually horny and does not care about
| technological details) can have something they can work while
| in that state.
|
| But it's gonna take a while to get there.
| xellisx wrote:
| I looked into doing something like in the early 2000s, bit
| found that my idea would take more power I was comfortable to
| be able to provide in such spaces.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| Will there be support for iOS?
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Working on it!
|
| Technically I _think_ btleplug might already work for iOS (I
| haven 't tested this but I've heard the corebluetooth calls
| stay the same?), and I've gotten the library to compile for
| iPhone, but I still need to build Swift FFI bindings.
|
| The web version currently "works" via the WebBLE browser that's
| a available in the app store, which is just the webview
| polyfilled for WebBluetooth:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/webble/id1193531073
|
| But I wouldn't call that a great experience.
|
| The hope is to support both android and iOS for apps soon
| though!
| cromwellian wrote:
| Brings a whole new meaning to the term "plug-and-play". Sorry,
| couldn't resist.
| thunderbong wrote:
| A sixteen year quest! Amazing!
| noman-land wrote:
| Speaking of sex toy security, this reminds me of one of my
| favorite recent posts here:
|
| Blowjob Injection Attack -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702282
| stevespang wrote:
| Hahahahahah.
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Sarah Jamie Lewis's work on privacy has been massively
| influential on the work I'm trying to do. I also highly
| recommend checking out her Oniondildonics post about metadata
| obfuscation in anonymous teledildonics interactions:
|
| https://mascherari.press/oniondildonics/
|
| She's now running the Open Privacy project, which is doing
| great work on general anonymized communication:
|
| https://openprivacy.ca
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Reminds me of an episode of MST3K where they played a '50s beer
| documentary that went in depth into all the science and
| engineering behind keeping the beer cold between the brewery and
| the store. Then one of the robots pops up and says - "Meanwhile,
| the Soviets were developing Sputnik."
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| Are you thinking of "As You Like It"? If so it's also available
| from rifftrax.com.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| > 2013 - First Python implementation, known as "Fuck Everything".
|
| Amazing. Nice to see people dedicated to the fine arts of
| buttplug manipulation.
|
| Just FYI:
|
| > August 2017 - Kyle incorperates Nonpolynomial
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Someday I will learn to spell incorporates.
|
| But yes I do run a startup on this software! Mostly for
| consulting for larger product manufacturers, though there may
| be some services work happening in the future. I've been poking
| at some ideas around containerizing teledildonics services, but
| there's a whole host of social and legal issues around the idea
| that will take a while to iron out.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| If you have the time, mind detailing some of the legal
| issues?
| qdot76367 wrote:
| The biggest one for me is information storage and
| transmission. People want repeatable interfaces, which
| means it'd be nice if they have an account, but how much
| information should I hold about that user in relation to
| their usage of a teledildonics service? My work exists in a
| very odd gray area that's not quite porn, so under
| SESTA/FOSTA and the upcoming SISEA, I'd have to figure out
| what I am/am not liable for.
|
| Being a single developer project that's open source but
| also a company and yet I already have multiple lawyers, I
| really can't afford to be a test case for that.
| dang wrote:
| If curious see also
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094477
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2020-12-28 23:00 UTC)