* An open-source standards and software project for intimate hardware (maybe NSFW) (https://buttplug.io/) 7 years ago | 39 comments
* Buttplug Sex Toy Control Project Implemented in Rust (https://buttplug.io/) 2 years ago | 3 comments
oliwarner · 1d ago
Teledildonics is just an amazing word. Really makes me want to contribute to BO.io to pad out my CV.
Then again, it might raise uncomfortable questions about the pen testing I have on there. Something something something backdoor.
TeMPOraL · 1d ago
So many ideas and industry terms get much more interesting when applied in this area.
Penetration testing (especially with red and blue teams). Agile. Continuous delivery. "Move fast and break things". Application firewall. Protection at rest. Injection attacks. Man in the middle. Load balancing. And so on.
There's one phrase I'm too fond of, that I thought of the other day:
Enterprise Teledildonics
Someone please make it become a thing.
walthamstow · 1d ago
It may be UK or even London-specific but 'exponential backoff' is a great phrase in our lexicon.
'Packet sniffing', while not sexual, is also something a lot of men in Britain do.
No comments yet
intrasight · 23h ago
And of course the precursor to all inappropriate technical computer terms: finger
>Someone please make it become a thing
Why stop there? How about "Global Teledildonics". I think the world would be a better place with that.
dgfitz · 23h ago
Finger, mount, touch, find if you’re self-deprecating.
TeMPOraL · 23h ago
If we're going for CLI commands: zip/unzip, eject, (mod)probe, umount; I guess man counts too.
ben_w · 19h ago
And "man" can prefix all of them.
man date
man wait
man yes
man unzip
man touch
man expand
man mount
man glob
man unmount
man zip
man nano
man sleep
A friend back in Cambridge decided to name a file "bottom" just so he could run "touch bottom" and giggle at the sillieness.
dgfitz · 11h ago
Ah I was, off the cuff, going for core/more utils, those are great too. Ran out of ideas.
Samantha: WTF, Dave?! Freeloading as always, now you fucking spoofed me???
emeril · 17h ago
I know about boofing, I learned about it during one of the more recent us supreme court confirmation hearings
jijijijij · 16h ago
See? Who needs an department of education?!
latentsea · 1d ago
Spoof is a slang term used in certain parts of the world that refers to a certain viscous liquid.
alt227 · 1d ago
I think you might mean 'Spuff'.
A sentance I never thought I would write on HN.
latentsea · 23h ago
It goes by many names. Spunk being another, but spoof being one too.
throwaway290 · 1d ago
"Detached HEAD" this is uncanny valley of why LLM should not be used in anything related to psychology. Obviously just HEAD is funny enough but no it came up with detached HEAD (because it doesn't have any mental imagery or empathy, of course). Detached HEAD is a whole another level worse than force push if you ask me.
Why ask LLM for puns anyway? Do you delegate all the fun or activities in your life?
latentsea · 23h ago
Why ask the thing whose primary strength is language, a question pertaining to language?
Man... maybe I just like to have fun at scale.
latentsea · 1d ago
"shift left" is another good one.
pcthrowaway · 1d ago
If you can demonstrate a novel pathway to inserting large payloads into unsuspecting backends, you may be a good candidate for government jobs.
oliwarner · 5h ago
No one distributes their package like me.
wantoncl · 1d ago
FizzBuzz will become an especially relevant interview question.
ssousa666 · 1d ago
my intuition tells me that this problem is best solved using DP
That is also by qDot [1], the Buttplug.io author. When I just looked at their GitHub today, I realized I used their libs in other projects over the years (OpenKinect and libnifalcon). They share lots of great work!
I've seen APIs for controlling those toys already a few times and it always surprises me that they're quite open. It's a thing I'd expect each device to come with a proprietary locked down app and nobody complaining about it publically, because that'd look.bad on them. Anyone can tell me why is that different? Is it because huge corporations are staying away from the market, thus they couldn't have ruined it?
Kwpolska · 1d ago
AFAIK, those APIs aren't publicly described by the vendors, they were reverse engineered by the community. Also, the toys themselves are Bluetooth-based, so pairing and proximity are enough for security.
devjab · 1d ago
I'm not English and I'm not sure what you would call electronic devices in your house, but very few of the ones you'd find in a typical Danish household which are locked down particularily well. It tends to be fairly easy to "hack" anything which has a computer in it, whether that is your Microwave, your electrical toothbrush, your router, your e-bike or something similar. What sets sex-toys appart is probably the amount of effort people are willing to put into hacking them. I'm guessing here, but I imagine you'd find a lot more people wanting to hack their sex-toys compared to people wanting to hack their Microwave.
Until I saw this post, I thought the e-bike community was the largest "hacker" community in regards to tampering with your electronics, but I imagine it too is dwarfed by sextoy hackers. Anyway, here in Europe there are a lot of hacks for e-bike computers. Part of this is because many people want to increase the software restraints on speed limits. Which is illegal, and, at least in larger Danish cities also very likely to get caught. Many people do it for statistics though, my e-bike computer as an example resets my "current" milage every 500km and then store the total in another place (something which gets reset everytime it's in the shop). It also didn't have a clock option for any of it's standard screens. My primary reason for hacking it was getting a clock on the display, but I now also back-up my milage + I have some added statistics for fun. When it needs to go into the store, I re-flash it to the factory settings or whatever you'd call it. I'm by no means a device hacker, but it wasn't hard to search engine my brand and find the tools I needed to do what I wanted.
Anyway, I don't think there is a lot of "secuirty" in any of our daily devices. Maybe it's because I'm European and a lot of people wouldn't want the NSA watching in through a Google Camera, and therefor buy non-major-tech-company brand stuff, but even things from large brands like Bosch are very hackable. Again, I'm not a device hacker as such, but isn't everything rather hackable once you have the hardware?
yard2010 · 23h ago
How would you get caught for opening a speed restrictions and what are the consequences?
Grayskull · 1d ago
My guess is, it has to do with cam streamers and ability for people to develop extensions for streaming platforms for their devices.
Lovesense, for example, became shorthand for "toy controlled by chat" on streaming sites.
koolba · 1d ago
> I've seen APIs for controlling those toys already a few times and it always surprises me that they're quite open.
Not really. People in the space are to used bending over backwards to please their customers.
jijijijij · 18h ago
Pretty sure that's because those toy companies are using cheapest off-the-shelf chips and most basic protocols, because, well, it's cheaper. Likely a lot of rebranded, "open" Chinese toys anyway. That and a neglect for reliability and security probably makes reverse engineering rather straight forward.
Assumption based on connectivity experience, since the Bluetooth connection is usually rather unreliable and weird, and obviously not as well engineered as even cheap Bluetooth in-ear headphones, or game controlers. Ironically very susceptible to being blocked by body parts (which means vibe no more). Seems, like it's some dead simple serial transmission, which isn't fault tolerant at all. Those controllers are not bothering with any buffering, or much any computation at all really. Seems like they just straight stream signals to the motors.
tecleandor · 1d ago
As @Kwpolska says, mostly they have reverse engineered Bluetooth protocols. I'm on my work computer (that's fiercely monitored) so can't give you much links right now, but Buttplug site has information about all the messages and protocols. And some of them are quite a mess.
Some of them, like Lovense, have said they had intention to publish APIs, but they just have some empty repositories in Github. (Lovense is a weird company, everything points to just one or two persons in [IIRC] Taiwan. They're very opaque.)
And some have been fishy too. There have been class actions against brands like Hytto / Lush [0] or We-Vibe [1]
We're already well off the front page but feel free to AMA. :)
agys · 1d ago
The .io top level domain is a perfect choice.
ngruhn · 21h ago
oh my god, you're right xD
bennett_dev · 1d ago
This plus ChatGPT scheduled tasks could make an interesting alarm clock
hypercube33 · 1d ago
Looks like it has home assistant integration so you can have alerts when you forget your garage door open
sebstefan · 1d ago
Keeping this in my bookmarks for the inevitable moment someone says big tech can shove unwanted AI features up their ass.
neomantra · 1d ago
Author here. What a Happy Friday to see this now, as I created it on April Fool's Day. I annually do silly personal projects on that day. That week I happened to be playing with MCP servers and thought it would be funny. ConAcademy is where I put weird ideas and implementations.
I will state that this specific MCP Server is pretty useless and certainly not how one would want sexual interaction, I try to indicate this in the README. But, a beginning has to start somewhere and good-giving-game is how we roll so it's on GitHub.
[Ironically two years before, my project was Buttplug-integration in a Charm-powered SSH chatroom with BubbleTea TUI. That navigated aspects of digital consent via SSH keys, making an anonymous graph of what entities could do what to other entities' devices. I think some of that is needed in an Agent-Controlled MCP future.]
I'm not the Buttplug.io maintainer, but did chat with them about this for a while on Discord. While I have your eyeballs, they are looking for additional maintainers for their project if any Rustaceans are interested. This MCP server is written in Golang but would be better in the Buttplug ecosystem if it was Rust.
My early career was in haptics research and I have several patents in it via Immersion. My master's thesis was writing a 3D haptic renderer and integrating haptics into VRML, if you remember that! I have worked on NIH grants for Sexual Dysfunction diagnostic devices and created homemade toys. Now that I just received my Neurable EEG headset, I am working on Biaerolar Beats research [1].
On the topic of vibe coding, yes I vibrated my LELO F1 with this, but this project was truly a hand job. I did try to vibe code `a2a4a2a` (A2A protocol for A2A fun) a few weeks ago, with both Claude and Gemini, but A2A protocol was too new and it was too hard for me to teach it A2A. I'd be interested in seeing how people handle this in general.
All in all, it was fun and I learned a lot about tool-calling LLMs. That week I made three MCP servers (thanks `mark3labs/mcp-go`), one for money [2], this one for sex [3], and one for drugs [4].
Although I haven't followed up on that last AgentDank [4] yet, it's probably the coolest in terms of open data and actual AI results -- just watch the video there. Bringing custom data plus SQL endpoint to a tool-calling LLM is ridiculously powerful.
> certainly not how one would want sexual interaction
speak for yourself
amelius · 1d ago
Curious how people here see the privacy implications of the various services out there. I suppose it was simpler in the old days where you could just buy a product and have no relationship whatsoever with the vendor and so nobody watching over your shoulder (as is the case with VR goggles nowadays and many other types of services).
comrade1234 · 1d ago
Is there an llm that can dirty-talk? Would be amusing to tie the two together.
npteljes · 1d ago
Hosted services tend to use censorship, but the way they did the censorship originally can be reverted to a high degree in the model, with "abliteration". Then, if you have access of such a model, that can surely dirty-talk. Or so I have heard.
We've been living in the buttplug.io timeline for about a decade now, actually!
vegancap · 1d ago
Not something I've followed closely, to be honest
andrepd · 1d ago
Wanting to script your sex toys is not even in the top 200 strange things about the times we live in.
leshokunin · 1d ago
Someone took the term vibe coding literally
doingtheiroming · 1d ago
I was hoping this was going to be a malicious MCP from the good old days of security tool naming.
SkyeCA · 23h ago
I don't see the value to integrating this kind of thing with an LLM or find the presented use cases as compelling, but I'm always going to support more work related to Buttplug.io and I'm sure someone will find it useful.
It's unfortunate just how stigmatized such software (and the associated devices) still are because it's a very, very interesting field. I myself started what I thought was going to be a small haptic feedback side project and have fallen down a rabbithole I never could have imagined existing.
The sex toy/haptic feedback world has, if I'm honest, reignited my love for development.
neomantra · 15h ago
Haptics is such a primal modality -- I've really enjoyed working with it. I used to evangelize it and present SFW demos to people around the world. You really do need to touch it to understand. Making the devices and experiences is really fun. It's easier than ever with modern Maker setups.
Like many things, there can be stigma e.g what Masters&Johnson faced, but if you are serious you can get past it pretty easily. We've done serious psychophysical studies and tried to make tools that helped people medically and emotionally.
But it's also OK to be playful too. More than anything about intimacy, this specific project was a quirky response to the "MCP All The Things" zeitgeist at the time.
Like writing science fiction, by working with these things early in any way, you earn an appreciation for the problems. After a week of MCP, it became abundantly clear about the Security and Observability problems. User configuration was rough too. I spent the next weeks working on sandboxing tech, MCP observability tech, and other ideas. None of that got to a good-enough-to-publish level, but my understanding/capability was increased.
Other issues are how you model consent of personal devices and maintain that with LLMs or other users. How do you define what the boundaries and shared capabilities are? Do you incorporate reputation? How do you distribute or federate that? How do you maintain anonymity but keep it useful? How do ephemeral agents get access to that data? [I don't explore any of that in this project.] These are general problems with MCP/A2A servers that will need to be solved. It's not just about buttplugs, but a slew of data and services, if we allow these AIs to become part of our daily life.
pjs_ · 1d ago
I heard a story that these guys built one of the only high performing opensource Bluetooth stacks, and that it is a dependency for various SFW orgs… can anyone substantiate
davedx · 1d ago
I’d like to say well, now I’ve seen it all, but I am sure the boundless curiosity and ingenuity of the human race will surprise me for a long while yet.
jcims · 1d ago
>but I am sure the boundless curiosity and ingenuity of the human race will surprise me for a long while yet
It truly is a beautiful thing. Even when it's butt stuff.
ChocolateGod · 1d ago
This is how the robot apocalypse will start
hermitcrab · 1d ago
I guess being pleasured to death by AI powered sex toys is better than being mown down by killer robots in a Terminator style apocalypse.
sandworm101 · 1d ago
I once signed up fot a lecture on "consumer device security" (lawyer stuff). To my suprise, every example used by the presenter involved an internet-connected sex toy gone rouge. Either private information had leaked or the device had "entrapped" a user for ransom. I was at my desk laughing but couldnt explain why for fear of discussing the very nsfw content.
visarga · 1d ago
All right, that does it! I've had enough internet for today.
bregma · 1d ago
Let me guess... if we need you you'll be in your bunk?
alzamixer · 22h ago
User-testing it was a pain in the ass.
engmarketer · 1d ago
this has got to be the funniest thing i've seen from what an MCP could do this year LOL
rcastellotti · 1d ago
please HN add some comments, I have no idea what to think about this.
gostsamo · 1d ago
Do not think, just feel.
lawn · 1d ago
We have finally found the killer app for LLMs: to control our sex toys!
(Jokes aside, it's technically an interesting use-case.)
amelius · 1d ago
The next step in making humans less interesting.
KingMob · 1d ago
BRB, gotta go the wastelands for parts to repair my Cherry 3000.
vendiddy · 1d ago
How is the security?
nssnsjsjsjs · 1d ago
It's the S in IoT plus the S in LLM and MCP. Lots of S!
* Buttplug: An open-source software suite for teledildonics (https://buttplug.io/) 5 years ago | 249 comments
* Empathy for the user having sex with your software (https://docs.buttplug.io/docs/dev-guide/intro/buttplug-ethic...) 10 months ago | 127 comments
* T-code – A protocol for implementing UART serial communications to an adult toy (https://stpihkal.docs.buttplug.io/protocols/tcode.html) 2 years ago | 74 comments
* An open-source standards and software project for intimate hardware (maybe NSFW) (https://buttplug.io/) 7 years ago | 39 comments
* Buttplug Sex Toy Control Project Implemented in Rust (https://buttplug.io/) 2 years ago | 3 comments
Then again, it might raise uncomfortable questions about the pen testing I have on there. Something something something backdoor.
Penetration testing (especially with red and blue teams). Agile. Continuous delivery. "Move fast and break things". Application firewall. Protection at rest. Injection attacks. Man in the middle. Load balancing. And so on.
There's one phrase I'm too fond of, that I thought of the other day:
Enterprise Teledildonics
Someone please make it become a thing.
'Packet sniffing', while not sexual, is also something a lot of men in Britain do.
No comments yet
>Someone please make it become a thing
Why stop there? How about "Global Teledildonics". I think the world would be a better place with that.
Hot swap. Hardening the system. Spoofing. Release pipeline. Uptime guarantee. Burst capacity. Stand-up. Forking the repo. Detached HEAD.
not sure what spoofing would be in a sexual context, but it does sounds like something potentially illegal, or at least morally gray :D
Maybe because Spoof sounds simiar to Snuff...
Spoofing may be the act of pretending to blowing coke up someone's butt, but then "accidentally" snorting it yourself.
Samantha: Woah, easy now. It's my turn!
Dave: Alright, alright, I'll do it! [prepares straw; fakes choking, coughing]
Samantha: WTF, Dave?! Freeloading as always, now you fucking spoofed me???
A sentance I never thought I would write on HN.
Why ask LLM for puns anyway? Do you delegate all the fun or activities in your life?
Man... maybe I just like to have fun at scale.
* Deldo is a sex toy control and teledildonics mode for Emacs (github.com/qdot) (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29207607 | 126 comments
[1] https://github.com/qdot
« We were vibe coding before it was cool. »
><
Until I saw this post, I thought the e-bike community was the largest "hacker" community in regards to tampering with your electronics, but I imagine it too is dwarfed by sextoy hackers. Anyway, here in Europe there are a lot of hacks for e-bike computers. Part of this is because many people want to increase the software restraints on speed limits. Which is illegal, and, at least in larger Danish cities also very likely to get caught. Many people do it for statistics though, my e-bike computer as an example resets my "current" milage every 500km and then store the total in another place (something which gets reset everytime it's in the shop). It also didn't have a clock option for any of it's standard screens. My primary reason for hacking it was getting a clock on the display, but I now also back-up my milage + I have some added statistics for fun. When it needs to go into the store, I re-flash it to the factory settings or whatever you'd call it. I'm by no means a device hacker, but it wasn't hard to search engine my brand and find the tools I needed to do what I wanted.
Anyway, I don't think there is a lot of "secuirty" in any of our daily devices. Maybe it's because I'm European and a lot of people wouldn't want the NSA watching in through a Google Camera, and therefor buy non-major-tech-company brand stuff, but even things from large brands like Bosch are very hackable. Again, I'm not a device hacker as such, but isn't everything rather hackable once you have the hardware?
Not really. People in the space are to used bending over backwards to please their customers.
Assumption based on connectivity experience, since the Bluetooth connection is usually rather unreliable and weird, and obviously not as well engineered as even cheap Bluetooth in-ear headphones, or game controlers. Ironically very susceptible to being blocked by body parts (which means vibe no more). Seems, like it's some dead simple serial transmission, which isn't fault tolerant at all. Those controllers are not bothering with any buffering, or much any computation at all really. Seems like they just straight stream signals to the motors.
Some of them, like Lovense, have said they had intention to publish APIs, but they just have some empty repositories in Github. (Lovense is a weird company, everything points to just one or two persons in [IIRC] Taiwan. They're very opaque.)
And some have been fishy too. There have been class actions against brands like Hytto / Lush [0] or We-Vibe [1]
--
0: https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-forwards-class-action-s... 1: https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news...
> Intimate Haptics Control Standard and Library
From https://buttplug.io/. You get better explanations here https://buttplug-spec.docs.buttplug.io/docs/spec
I'm qDot, creator and project lead of https://buttplug.io!
We're already well off the front page but feel free to AMA. :)
I will state that this specific MCP Server is pretty useless and certainly not how one would want sexual interaction, I try to indicate this in the README. But, a beginning has to start somewhere and good-giving-game is how we roll so it's on GitHub.
[Ironically two years before, my project was Buttplug-integration in a Charm-powered SSH chatroom with BubbleTea TUI. That navigated aspects of digital consent via SSH keys, making an anonymous graph of what entities could do what to other entities' devices. I think some of that is needed in an Agent-Controlled MCP future.]
I'm not the Buttplug.io maintainer, but did chat with them about this for a while on Discord. While I have your eyeballs, they are looking for additional maintainers for their project if any Rustaceans are interested. This MCP server is written in Golang but would be better in the Buttplug ecosystem if it was Rust.
My early career was in haptics research and I have several patents in it via Immersion. My master's thesis was writing a 3D haptic renderer and integrating haptics into VRML, if you remember that! I have worked on NIH grants for Sexual Dysfunction diagnostic devices and created homemade toys. Now that I just received my Neurable EEG headset, I am working on Biaerolar Beats research [1].
On the topic of vibe coding, yes I vibrated my LELO F1 with this, but this project was truly a hand job. I did try to vibe code `a2a4a2a` (A2A protocol for A2A fun) a few weeks ago, with both Claude and Gemini, but A2A protocol was too new and it was too hard for me to teach it A2A. I'd be interested in seeing how people handle this in general.
All in all, it was fun and I learned a lot about tool-calling LLMs. That week I made three MCP servers (thanks `mark3labs/mcp-go`), one for money [2], this one for sex [3], and one for drugs [4].
Although I haven't followed up on that last AgentDank [4] yet, it's probably the coolest in terms of open data and actual AI results -- just watch the video there. Bringing custom data plus SQL endpoint to a tool-calling LLM is ridiculously powerful.
[1] https://github.com/ConAcademy/biareolar-beats [2] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/dbn-go/blob/main/cmd/dbn-go... [3] https://github.com/ConAcademy/buttplug-mcp [4] https://github.com/AgentDank/dank-mcp
speak for yourself
https://ollama.com/search?q=abliterated
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headcrash
It's unfortunate just how stigmatized such software (and the associated devices) still are because it's a very, very interesting field. I myself started what I thought was going to be a small haptic feedback side project and have fallen down a rabbithole I never could have imagined existing.
The sex toy/haptic feedback world has, if I'm honest, reignited my love for development.
Like many things, there can be stigma e.g what Masters&Johnson faced, but if you are serious you can get past it pretty easily. We've done serious psychophysical studies and tried to make tools that helped people medically and emotionally.
But it's also OK to be playful too. More than anything about intimacy, this specific project was a quirky response to the "MCP All The Things" zeitgeist at the time.
Like writing science fiction, by working with these things early in any way, you earn an appreciation for the problems. After a week of MCP, it became abundantly clear about the Security and Observability problems. User configuration was rough too. I spent the next weeks working on sandboxing tech, MCP observability tech, and other ideas. None of that got to a good-enough-to-publish level, but my understanding/capability was increased.
Other issues are how you model consent of personal devices and maintain that with LLMs or other users. How do you define what the boundaries and shared capabilities are? Do you incorporate reputation? How do you distribute or federate that? How do you maintain anonymity but keep it useful? How do ephemeral agents get access to that data? [I don't explore any of that in this project.] These are general problems with MCP/A2A servers that will need to be solved. It's not just about buttplugs, but a slew of data and services, if we allow these AIs to become part of our daily life.
It truly is a beautiful thing. Even when it's butt stuff.
(Jokes aside, it's technically an interesting use-case.)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WqD-ATqw3js&t=1270s
sticky bit
floppy disk
lap top
big o
batch sorting
https://buttplug.io
I remember some people have wired their vibrators intensity and vibration pattern to their vi(m) configuration, e.g. current indentation depth.
Is it valuable? Maybe for someone it is.