Hi, I'm qdot, founder of buttplug.io and author of Butts Are Difficult, the ethics page in the buttplug.io docs.

I also wrote the rest of the buttplug.io docs but this is the part that I'm proudest of, both because I was really happy how it turned out and also because unlike the parts of the docs involving the API, this one doesn't go out of date as quickly.

Ask me anything!

I'm glad this is a concern. I maintain software to the effect of buttplug.io and a particular inspiration to start the project was how difficult alternatives were to get going with. I don't want to install anything, or register anywhere, I just want to get my rocks off!

And thank you for buttplug.io. It's super easy to integrate!

I realise this isn't much of a question, sorry :)

I have never ever seen Bluetooth work as intended

Apple-to-Apple seems to be dead reliable from everything I've heard. Samsung-to-Samsung seems almost as good. Apple or Android to random, Chinese car stereo might be a connectivity nightmare. Connecting to an OEM stereo with whatever implementation was poorly specified by the car company might also be a nightmare.

Bluetooth as a network protocol, that might be stable. Bluetooth interactivity is not stable or even usable in many cases.

It's not just in cars and other non-computer interfaces, good luck trying to pair a non-Apple device with an Apple device. If you say "it works on my computer", congrats, you're the only one. And also speaking hyperbolically.

Are you aware of any uses of your software in other domains, e.g., health?

Hilarious and impressive; I’d love to hear more, do you have more details, context or source?

Which hey, less support for me.

I'm curious what your background is that you approached the problem in the way that you did? I appreciate that you're covering all the edge cases for a lot of different toys, but it also really feels like you use 1000 lines of code where 10 will do.

Ok. Let's break this down.

The library currently handles support for 523 different devices from at least 40-50 manufacturers. (https://iostindex.com/?filter0Availability=Available,DIY&fil...).

These devices can connect over bluetooth le, usb (both raw and HID), serial, or one of several network protocols. We support windows, mac, linux, android, iOS, and WASM/web, each having their own HW APIs (or in the case of the mac/iOS crossover, specializations within the API). On several of these platforms there are also massive variations in bluetooth radios, which can cause a huge array of issues.

Each device may have variable actuators, or may also have sensors to take input. They may also require their own keepalives or other specializations specific to their protocol or brand to manage connections.

We then have to generalize commands to make life easier on developers. They send us those generalized commands, from whatever language they like since we abstract into an IPC system and provide a language-agnostic protocol spec, from whatever interconnect they want to use because our connector system is also violently flexible, and we have to convert them into the correct protocol and ship that over the correct bus.

So, since you're curious about why your solution for one device from one brand running through a web browser differs from my library, there you go. It's just a matter of different goals.

Now, if you can do all that in 10 lines, fantastic, I look forward to your library as competition in the future. :3

While I'm glad you've found a solution that works for your case, I can't tell you why you were seeing latency in our library that wasn't also in the browser. I'm well aware of the JS-to-IPC-to-hardware chain in the browser (I'm the ex-device interfaces lead on firefox, worked with some of the chrome engineers on the development of the hardware focused WebAPIs too) and it's even more complicated than ours.

It's a fully web based (though closed source) toy control application that supports about as many devices as I do, plus a bunch of others that I don't, and has Blockly scripting and WebRTC for remote sessions.

It's neat as hell.

Here's a background video I did on the hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFcrNk33_io

It's DIY, 3d-printed hardware that's incredibly extensible, and has a decently designed abstract communication protocol that I've ended up pointing other DIY creators at. Keeping up with everything the hardware can do while also trying to make it work with our generalized commands is a challenge, but it's a good challenge, because we don't see a ton of innovation from the large commercial manufacturers.

Least enjoy: We support over 500 devices now, so this is just a whole classes of devices at this point heh. There's a lot of hardware we support that's just not very good to begin with, and users can't tell whether it's our library or the hardware hardware that sucks. Then there's the hardware that makes very... odd decisions about how to do things. For instance, there was a brand known as MuSE or Lovespouse that's been popular for the past couple of years. Instead of creating a bluetooth connection to the device, the device acts as a host and listens for advertisements w/ specialized data in order to set vibrator power. Not only is this easily hackable (there was a bunch of articles about someone doing exactly that with a flipper zero last year), it's damn near impossible for us to implement cross platform support for, as advertisement creation in BLE is wildly different across platforms, and doesn't even exist on iOS (the company themselves only shipped on android, where buttplug works on win/mac/linux/android/iOS). On top of that, the Lovespouse devices were extremely cheap ($10-30US sometimes), so we had users buying them then asking if we supported them, and all we could say was "nope".

Problem is that it's non-standard, so every device packages the data a different way.

There's a god damned heart rate profile standard in the bluetooth spec AND YET I'm not sure I ever actually worked on a device that used it. :|

Also the double entendre of "plug" in technology contexts, subtly brilliant.

As for which CoC to use (if looking for a prewritten one), you can check out ours as an example."

Haha, not sure if intentional.

Tech, caring and humor in butt one in and out

And there's even an acceptable self-plug!

Some of this I'm sure is my particular usage but still...

Examples: When the controller batteries are low I get a warning in the middle of my session and it sticks around way too long. If a battery dies in a controller the message is undismissible. The software I use works fine with one controller but instead I have to stop what I'm doing, remove the headset, find a battery, install it, put the headset back on, resume the software, and often reset the view because anytime you take the headset off it resets it's orientation.

There are also times where it just says "Fatal Error" and exits when the battery dies.

Another issue is I have 2d software I use in VR because having a giant screen is nice. But, Oculus insists on playing some annoying hum sound in the home screen with the built in desktop viewer. Note: I'm not using the 3D environments as my home screen because that ads more time to get stated. So, in any case, I have to launch something to get rid of the sound. I usually pick a video viewer app because it's very small and then pop up the desktop over it without selecting a video. But, Oculus is apparently unaware of this use case because they break this in some new way every few releases.

The latest is, if you bring up the desktop in the middle of an app, after about 5 seconds it automatically takes you back to the VR app. It's almost like they forgot the feature exists. Other issues in this area are it went from a fairly rock solid feature to one out of 3 times entering into some bug loop where it flips between paused mode (desktop) and VR app mode. Being able to get out of this loop bug has about a 1 in 4 chance. Fixing it removing the headset and restarting the Oculus software on the PC. Then starting whatever apps you were in.

Note that I'm using a Rift-S. I tried using a Quest 3 with Link which tries to give you the same experience but the Link was way way too flaky, crashing 1 of 3 times, when I pulled up the desktop.

Another feature that broke, which I used frequently, was pulling up the desktop and pinning it so it stays visible while a VR app is running. It was a great way to goon.

And, all of this is using porn software which makes it hard to make bug report that will be taken seriously.

Would love to discuss these use cases more though, feel free to contact me via one of the methods in my HN bio!

The thing is a pinch hazard and a user could get their scrotum sucked into the slit of the machine, or get pinched as it vigorously slides back down.

Just look up the reports of what can go wrong --it's not pretty. ("do not press it on your scrotum" is the frequent community refrain.)

AFAIK, most of these devices do not have pressure sensors and feedback mechanisms. They're output only.

No amount of software develpper empathy will help as when things go wrong it will happily slice your genitals off and keep chugging away.

Many years ago, there was another device that relied on a lubrication pump, but the pump never worked very well (building a pump for unspecified body safe lubricants is difficult on several levels).

The term “degloving” got used in relation to the hardware a couple of times.

I'm going to Rot13 this so I don't make people faint.

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The original plan (and it may still happen, who knows) was to figure out a way to chop off that top message layer and create a generalized system for doing exactly what you've said. That was going to be called 'deviceplug', and it's why btleplug is under the 'deviceplug' org on github (https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug). I've just never gotten around to it because I'm not quite ready for the additional support burden yet.

All that said, Buttplug is also a haptics experimentation project aimed at finding out what it's like to create a way to communicate about a very specific type of touch via technology and programming. There are specific goals within the project related to that, but the amount of tech required to actually pull that off means I end up with what basically amounts of a fleet management framework. :)

Funny enough, using those sensors to relay information to things like events on avatars in VR virtual worlds has had some interesting results!

In all seriousness, good on you. It's nice to see tech being used for unambiguous let-humans-have-more-fun purposes. (I look forward to eating my words in five years when you pivot to enterprise SaaS for growth purposes and Cisco is offering you as an employee benefit.)

This is one of those times.

We're really not. Most platforms are way too strict with NSFW things, especially the recent LLMs which won't even write spicy fan fiction. There's no point in NSFW which is completely out of context and unnecessary, but a genuine buttplug controller? What's wrong with that?

It's sad that even in 2024 it is taboo to talk about it in the eyes of some, or apparently to even publish tangentially related source code to GitHub. I very much doubt that any curious teenager is going to get turned on from reading the buttplug.io source code. And if they do: props to them.

On the one hand, we seem to sexualize the weirdest things (beauty pageants for kids, anyone?) without anyone seeming to care. But on the other hand, we're weirdly prude & defensive about perfectly natural processes (sex, masturbation, sexual curiosity & experimentation) to the point that we have to censor them on the internet. I still can't grok that.

TV, at least in The Netherlands, has become a lot more prudish, Music censored, etc.

I've worked (in the internet branches of) Dutch National media organizations, for magazines and publishers. All lament, that "back in the days, a pair of its, or a penis flopping through a scene was normal." All due to American influence. It's certainly not imposed top down.

A dutch beach club owner told me it used to be rather normal for women to be topless on the beach, up to the early 2000s. And that nowadays it's almost unheard of.

Have you at least considered the possibility that Europe has its own prudes?

Some countries like the UK seem to be ahead of the pack in the hangup department but they also don't have the global footprint / influence that the US have.

And generations are influenced by social media. They will form (at least a part of) their world views, values, behaviours from social media.

Another reason why it's such a d*mn shame that Europe doesn't manage to keep it's own tech giants that could compete with the US ones.

The fact that (for the most part) 2 American credit card companies determine what porn people can and cannot watch on-line world-wide is an embodiment of this very problem.

I specifically said "American Cultural Imperialism" and mentioned "bottom up". So there's absolutely no US institute that would be even remotely interested in what people on a Dutch beach wear or how much boobs there are in a French movie shown in a French home.

It's the general "way of life" and "culture" that is exported, embraced and then lived by. Making new generations "more American" and therefore, also more prude. At least, that's the idea.

It's not more prude, it's just more sexualised.

Yes we shouldn't treat sex as a taboo and children should be educated to avoid STDs, unwanted pregnancies, etc. No, we shouldn't expose children to the filth of the adult content world.

For others, sex work is validating, empowering, exciting, beautiful, freeing, independent, a way to be seen (that means recognized for who they are - rather than societal conformance pressures), a direct interaction with people who truly appreciate and are thankful for the work, flexible, personal (as opposed to impersonal / replaceable cog), creative, and something that they can get up for in the morning.

What you are describing is not rooted in, or equivalent to "sex work". You can be depressed and want to kill yourself at the perspective of going to the office. That it's an "office" is not the root of it.