So qdot handled this thread beautifully today. I don’t know who this person is but they managed to simply handle all questions, openly and without being rude. They spun gold from snark, they gave the childish a mature reply, and this post’s comments were a joy to read for how worthwhile they were.
I assume that the mods had some hand in this as well, because the chances of this ending this way without someone helping to ensure that seems near-zero to me. It’s not that I lack faith in HN, it’s just that human beings reliably go off course on this topic. And today, they didn’t.
Thanks for your efforts, whatever they were, and my hat is off to qdot for their stellar participation here today.
Since we didn't do anything, I'm signing our portion of this praise over to you. Bravo!
Many thanks to whoever sent that complement, as well as dang for pointing it out to me. It's been a pleasure to be in this thread, lots of interesting questions and honestly unexpected (but certainly welcome!) positivity.
I'm printing this out and hanging it on my wall.
Two part question:
1. A sufficiently sophisticated operation could use canned footage to fake the apparent call and response here. Is there any current research in the direction of possible authentication methods to prevent such fakery?
2. What are we to make of the way this form of remote dominance (simulated or real) has been commodified and put in service of capital accumulation? Are not the paying customers even engaging in a form of self-domination, helping to reproduce their roles as wage slaves, by participating in this system of production?
2. Are you familiar with findom? Cause that's like, just straight up what findom is. Literally unbalanced trade of capital as fetish.
I mean, I think they would if they were told it was a live broadcast.
Of all the fetishes out there, I think wanting to view a person in real-time is one of the more easily understandable ones. I am positive that there are plenty of people out there who prefer watching a live cam over uploaded VODs, even if they never actually interact with the model.
I'm sure that cam models are exceptionally concerned about privacy for very good reasons, and I don't think anyone should be obligated to provide live verification if they don't want to. But it's not like it's an irrational request.
I'm also a bit divorced from the customer perspective in this situation because I've been working on the industry side for so long, so I have different expectations and views.
That said, as an implementer of technology of this type, my point was that I feel like live verification gets EXTREMELY INVASIVE in this context. Once you start bringing biometrics and really, hard numbers in general into the voyeurism of camming, it turns into this weird fractal of objectification that I haven't really had time to really unwrap in my head yet, which I'd kinda wanna do before even touching implementations of the tech itself.
From the customer point of view, though, "How do I know it's really them?" is a reasonable question because they don't really understand the implications of the answers.
A live theater show doesn't seem comparable, since in the cam model's case they're being viewed through a screen regardless. Your sibling comment that compares it to finding out a live broadcast turns out to be a movie is more apt.
Chapter 1 in a nutshell, so to speak.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm...
So like, remember to check for that in September.
In the former case. wouldn't the "cam" worker be able to achieve the same "proof of life" by simply having a conversation with the customer? Eg, the customer types something in chat, and the worker responds on the live stream?
In the latter case, if it is all virtual, then its all virtual, and response to a toy could just be faked.
I mean, if the tech reaches such heights that a customer can't tell it from a human, does it even matter for the customer?
(Actually I think that on an emotional level it does, but realistically it's a question of inputs to the brain, i.e. the whole Matrix mind-body thing. Anyway, I'm sure this is firmly in the AGI territory.)
Also, can teledildonics be applied to improve online shopping experiences and social media? I am thinking that buttplug scripts could be the new emojis or css dazzle.
Lastly, there seems to be some asymmetry in the development of these technologies: Passive reception of dildonic signals is emphasized, active transmission of signals that originate as muscle contractions (and such) gets the short shrift. Is this simply a reflection of the generally submissive tendencies of tech workers or is there a larger force at work here?
https://github.com/buttplugio/buttplug-tampermonkey
On the tracking of muscle contractions, I'd recommend checking out the Nogasm project, an open source orgasm denial system that uses air pressure changes to track pelvic floor contractions, which are indicative of arousal levels. These could be tracked against, say, bug rates in code to monitor affective states in developers.
Hmm queue Ripley/Alien -- well "micro-changes in air density"
>Passive reception of dildonic signals is emphasized, active transmission of signals that originate as muscle contractions (and such) gets the short shrift.
Just want to make sure I understand what you're asking here; because it sounds to me like you're asking something along the lines of "Hey, the vibrating device is neat, but I'd actually like a device that can directly stimulate movement of the device wearer's muscle groups on reception of a remote signal. Can you do that?"
...because if that is what you're asking, the very idea horrified me at the prospect of the new forms of abuse that technology would enable. And I don't mean "abuse" in a good connotation either.
I'm not saying that anyone here would intend to go that far, but that's the first spit take I've had in response to something I read in a while. Ranks right up there with Neuralink in terms of cans of worms I do not wish to see opened by the unscrupulous.
>Is this simply a reflection of the generally submissive tendencies of tech workers or is there a larger force at work here?
That's an odd lens to look at the tech industry through... What exactly about the art of crafting, building, manipulating, and operating some of the most complex, sprawling in their capacity to influence people's lives/behaviors, and difficult to understand machines on the planet strikes you as submissive? Just because there may be a tendency toward expending energy in a direction someone else is willing to pay for doesn't make the academic exercise an overall act of submission. For that matter, look at how difficult it is to reign in the profession ethically. You have an entire industry worth of movers and doers who collectively have made possible some of the most outstanding advances in the field that is the application of computing machinery, while at the same time completely eviscerating some of the most basic and fundamental principles that have hitherto been nigh unchallenged in the history of the classical western democracy/republic. To program is not to submit; to program is to inflict one's wills and desires on others in the shape of the end product. Assumption of existing mores and the outcome of thoroughly deliberated, collective decisions in regards to the means and ends of any non-trivial project is a necessary thing to enable coordination. Is there some study correlating being a programmer with submissiveness, or is this one of those "introverts are all subs" stereotypes? Tendencies toward conflict aversion or social reservation do not accurately correlate to to submissive/dominant preferences by a long shot from what I've heard/experienced.
Then again, maybe you have a point, and you're referring to another facet of the industry I've never really meshed that well with. I just wish more people understood and looked at the Art the way I do... I don't think I'm very special or out there in the grand scheme of things. I've heard so much "Well, that's just the way it has to be" encouraged and even cultivated in the trenches it makes me sick. Sometimes to the point that I can even entertain there is an adverse selection pressure employment/career-wiseforthe self-direct(ed|ing) professional programmer. There is more disincentive to the practice of the adversarial duties of the engineer in the context of software I cannot help but be shocked it's taken as long as it has for a counterculture against Tech to form.
>These could be tracked against, say, bug rates in code to monitor affective states in developers.
Um... No. I think that is one set of data points better left uncollected/analyzed if only for the safety of laborers in all walks of life. Why are we so enthusiastic about making data like this exploitable? This reminds me of a project someone was working on at an NFJS a few years ago where They were collecting as much information as possible about the meta-state of the programmer at work. All through the presentation I couldn't help shaking the feeling that if managers ever caught wind of it, and decided to integrate it into their performance eval techniques, life as a working programmer would rapidly degenerate.
I apologize if I'm coming off as a complete buzzkill. It isn't like I've not been stimulated by the attraction and appeal of similar contemplation before mind. A lot of fun could be had between two consenting adults. I just hope we spare some time to consider what other uses could come from what we enable.
To sum up, I leave you with a cautionary snippet of wisdom it's taken me a while to come to appreciate:
"There is no greater downer, than the Supreme Square empowered by the Totally Rad;" [and the odds of this happening approach unity as social acceptance, Radness, and time approach infinity].
You really don't.
The main thrust (sorry) of teledildonics as commonly pursued is that subject A presses remote buttons or whatever, and subject B experiences some vibration from the sex toy they are using. A has remotely caused the vibration.
A reverse is also conceivable: subject A is using a teledildonic sex toy, and subject B gets some signal (like a ring-tone or whatever) whenever subject A's erogenous zone muscles contract.
In other words, reversing the direction of the signal. Instead of remotely "doing something" to the sex toy user, one would get some information about what the sex toy user is doing on their own. This is what I asked about. You projected something really strange onto it.
> "That's an odd lens to look at the tech industry through... What exactly about the art of crafting, building, manipulating, and operating some of the most complex, sprawling in their capacity to influence people's lives/behaviors, and difficult to understand machines on the planet strikes you as submissive?"
You do it because some jackass told you to do it and gives you some cash to go be rude in bars and restaurants, and to overbid for apartments. Total bdsm degeneracy. Totally undignified. Totally degrading. You're a slave who takes solace in being slightly above the worst off slaves. Nobody in a cooperative society would do what tech workers do and if they tried, they'd be treated as people suffering some kind of cognitive illness.
Not to make you feel like you overreacted at all, because this is a fantastic reply and I desperately wish I saw more awesome thinking like this around tech and ethics, but I read the OP as a shitpost, and was replying in kind.
The only reason I can give stark commentary like that is because I've done a lot of ethics work on this field (first hire at my startup with an ethicist who helped craft our project mission statement and philosophies), and yeah, it could get REALLY, REALLY bad in terms of labor, privacy, and many other contexts.
If you'd like my full perspective on how/why I build this stuff, I gave a lecture at CMU last year that goes over a lot of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M43u-iFPfMI
Specifically on the affective state in technical development, I do think biometrics is interesting there, but absolutely not in a way that could be harnessed like I was joking about above (even though it would be because who are we even kidding these days). I did some work on this stuff around 8-9 years ago, a project I called the "Quantified Coder" (I was involved in the whole QuantifiedSelf thing for a while):
https://youtu.be/52Ml_zax4A0?t=768
Please note that this talk happened before the current ML craze of "your face can tell us if you're a bad human" shit. It sounds FAR different now than I did then. There's neuroscience researching doing really great work on affective state of developers these days (like Chris Parnin, who came up here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23046429) that I think will be legit helpful.
Anyways, my reply was just riffing evilly on those ideas as a joke.
Apologies though, forgot I was in an setting where that reply DEFINITELY might not have come off as (extremely stark) humor.
> ...because if that is what you're asking, the very idea horrified me at the prospect of the new forms of abuse that technology would enable. And I don't mean "abuse" in a good connotation either.
E-stim is already a thing, it just lacks (so far) the remote aspect.
What does project do to ensure security?
Buttplug is a core technology of my startup, alongside the user facing Intiface brand (https://intiface.com). I'll be working on more network focused services there in the near future, where I'll be addressing more security focused questions.
If you're curious about some of the beginning directions of that, I posted a full Teledildonics 101 workshop last month on my youtube channel, that goes over systems design thinking for remote intimacy, including some touchpoints on security.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDZBOOe-bdwNAjm018ql9...
https://www3.citizenm.com/news/europe/rotterdam/the-rotterda...
I did a sex tech workshop like, 3 blocks away from it, and Paul McCarthy is a major influence on my work! :D
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23036893
https://medium.com/@peternorvig/ive-consed-every-pair-54ef5d...
Astolpho has been doing most of my art (like the squid buttplug on the buttplug.io page, and the Buttplug sommlier foxes on my patreon - http://patreon.com/qdot), but I'll try to contact you once I'm looking for more art, which I'm hoping will be soon, once I can get out of the code mines and back to applications work.
and of course this turns out to be by someone I have run into before in the Yiff Mines :)
However, you really have to look at the surrounding situation and mental state of the user to get why any of this matters. When you've got enough endorphins flowing, the slightly augmentation to sensory input can have a multiplicative effect. Since the brain regulates whatever your reality is, it's our job to fuck with that (in good ways) more than it is to make some completely mechanically/physically correct 1:1 recreation of sex with another person.
Let's say you're stuck with audio/video chat for intimate relations. But you've added some touch via teledildonics! Sure, it's crappy touch, but someone you want actually touching you but for some reason can't can now at least control that touch!
The media loves to spin sex tech as "this will replace sex in the future" a la Demolition Man or whatever, but that is both the wrong goal and complete bullshit. The fun part of all of this for me is building machines and interfaces to do what people and their genitals can't, and providing technology to build those interfaces/machines to see what other people come up with when freed from the tyranny (allow me my melodrama here) of human form.
This also allows us to build new forms of intimacy, possibly very, very silly forms. As an example: I work with cam models a lot, trying to build interfaces that aren't quite as a objectifying as the usual cam room. One time, I worked with a model and her fan club to hook up Rocket League (yes, the cars in hats playing soccer rocket league) to a sex toy, so any time the controller vibrated, her sex toy vibrated. There's video of how this works (and the software I used to do it and the github repo) here:
Now, this probably sounds like some weird as hell sex. Cam model is on camera, nude, using a toy, playing 3 v 3 rocket league with up to 5 cam room customers. However, this means that the normal rules of rocket league get bent. Players were no longer interested in goals, but rather, in how to cause the model's controller (and therefore toy) to vibrate. This might mean crashing into cars (Hi JG Ballard fans!), trying to get goals when the model was close to a goal to make big explosions, etc... It ended up in all of these continuously shifting team/social structures as people would join/leave, figure out new things, etc... Everyone ended up playing for hours, everyone had a really good time, and it was interactive for both the model and the customers.
So, basically, you've gotta look at these as new forms of sex, not replacements for what we've got. They may not even be good forms of sex, but hey, if everyone's consenting, no one gets hurts, and even maybe it turns out to be a buggy horrible mess, it's fun to try, right?
https://github.com/orgs/buttplugio/projects/1
tl;dr - Right now I'm trying to standardize our logic on Rust (I'm also the ex-device interfaces lead on firefox at Mozilla, so I love some rust :) ), then extend back out to other languages and platforms through FFI to the Rust base.
The Rust work has also ended up creating other libraries, including:
- systray, a library for building simple systray apps with rust: https://github.com/qdot/systray-rs - btleplug, a cross-platform host side Bluetooth LE library in Rust, mostly via copypasta but hoping to unify soon: https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug
In the end, Buttplug is just a hardware abstraction layer, think of it like the USB HID or Bluetooth Profile model, except outside of the protocol specification space. I'd like to abstract the back end a bit more and allow other projects to use it, so you could have, say, a library that abstracts health device protocols or something.
In my experience, this is mainly caused by planning in too much detail, too far ahead. And then your plans change and it's a bunch of cl noise you have to clean up or live with.
The only system I've stuck with for my FLO projects is the following:
- One tag (or milestone) named "someday/maybe". This is for things that are reasonable to do (you'd accept patches), but not worth the time/effort for you to implement personally. It exists so you can filter them out without closing. - One milestone called "next release". Only add issues to this milestone when you've competed them. Note: don't close these issues yet; keeping them open results in more visibility and fewer duplicate bug reports.
When it's time to do a release, rename the "next release" milestone to the version of the release (ex: v2.4.1), close all the associated issues (making sure they're in the changelog as you go), and replace it with a fresh "next release" milestone.
---
In the past I also had a "planned" milestone, but it's redundant with someday/maybe; anything open and not assigned to a milestone is planned.
Red Moon has the same order of magnitude of open issues as Buttplug, and not much of a community.
- If there were a larger community, I'd probably write a high-level roadmap, describing my vision and areas where it currently falls short.
- If there were other contributors or significantly more open issues, I'd add a "high priority" tag, limited to ~10 issues at a time, so there's a way to engage with less noise.
For me, it also stems from Buttplug being my playground to find some of this stuff out. This started as a way for me to work on research ideas both about sex tech, and about building and maintaining projects in a long term manner. For planning specificly, I went from "I can do it outside of bugs" to "Nope let's just use bugs" to "Nope that was a bad idea too let's go back to the original idea but store it next to the code". We'll see where that puts me.
Of course, now that this is trending HN, everyone gets to learn with me too. :D
I get a TON of requests about estim support, it's just difficult to figure out how ethics/liability works around all of that.
Your device is, probably not surprisingly, popular with a subset of our users. Especially your wristband form factor, though the fact that you've made it modular has ended up with some interesting 3d printed mounting solutions too. :D
Rumble rerouting support for Fallout 4 works with the GHR I think? https://intiface.com/ghr
Not the titles I'd expect in the context of electrosex.
(I'm oldschool so something in the vein of Leisure Suit Larry or Lula the porn studio management simulator would seem quite proper for me.)
The way you insightfully psychoanalyzed the personalities of programmers of different languages in your deldo demo suggests to me that you might enjoy W Watson's "The Pervert's Guide to Programming Languages":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22910702
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/vulk-blog/ThePervertsGuid...
You, sir, have won the internet today.
As for the hardware part, well, let's just say I can never, ever, ever have a zoom meeting where anyone can see my desk.
I'm hoping to stop cranking out code and actually write the developers guide soon, which I think will help immensely.