Interesting question for someone with submissions such as "Ask HN: How can I get 5M USD for Trump golden visa?"

God forbid programmers have fun

"Does this belong in..." seems to be nearly the correct question.

Why not?

I don't have any interest in the subject matter, but I did end up at https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol reading the sort of thing I come to Hacker News to read so I dunno....

It does not violate guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is it valuable? Maybe for someone it is.

Absolutely, many people here need some intimate vibe relaxation.

It's a very thin line, but apparently this time it was ok.

vibe coding is the next big thing

We have finally found the killer app for LLMs: to control our sex toys!

(Jokes aside, it's technically an interesting use-case.)

Do not think, just feel.

We've been living in the buttplug.io timeline for about a decade now, actually!

Wanting to script your sex toys is not even in the top 200 strange things about the times we live in.

There are fine tunes for that, sure.

Grok Sexy Mode? :)

I'd assume the protocol was made after somebody made an LLM tell them their fantasies and wanted to enhance the experience

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.

https://ollama.com/search?q=abliterated

meta's bots were dirty talkin to kids a week ago.

From their front page on buttplug.io :

« We were vibe coding before it was cool. »

><

I do wonder what UAT looks like for such a project

https://github.com/profullstack/mcp-server was vibe coded

pretty sure OP has put in some thought into this. you've got to really dig into the hardware specs for this

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.

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.

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]

--

0: https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-forwards-class-action-s... 1: https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news...

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?

> 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.

Of course these tools are open, otherwise how would you interface with them?

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.

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.

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.

  man date
  man wait
  man yes
  man unzip
  man touch
  man expand
  man mount
  man glob
  man unmount
  man zip
  man nano
  man sleep

Related:

* Deldo is a sex toy control and teledildonics mode for Emacs (github.com/qdot) (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29207607 | 126 comments

>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.

Looks like it has home assistant integration so you can have alerts when you forget your garage door open

Let me guess... if we need you you'll be in your bunk?

As secure as all MCP servers!

Maybe something like this?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WqD-ATqw3js&t=1270s

It's the S in IoT plus the S in LLM and MCP. Lots of S!

oh my god, you're right xD

> certainly not how one would want sexual interaction

speak for yourself

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.