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Comment by cancerhacker | Hacker News Reader

The toy emitting "ut oh" on invalid input reminded me of a phonics toy - I think it was either a schoolbus or caterpillar, where phonemes could be pressed and it would sound them out "g-oo-d" "d-aw-g" - but if as a bored parent you tried "sh-ih-t" or similar it would emit "sh-<heeheehee>" I always wondered if it was localized per-market.

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As an opposite experience I bought my daughter a dump truck at Costco and got a good laugh out of it - it has a bunch of phrases, many are common. One very uncommon one is "Wow, that was a big dump!".

reminds me of the better call saul toilet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR1m29cNVsc

This was likely in response to things like the famous phone incident - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebv51QNm2Bk

If you were the guy coding one of those, and you saw that, I could easily imagine putting in a special case, just for fun. The aha, I could fix that we often feel.

There was an infamous case of some obscure Macintosh educational software that had a feature where it would read back text that you typed in. It even included a swear filter to prevent it from saying bad words.

However, there was also a race condition/out of bounds memory read issue that caused it to stop reading the text you typed in, and instead start reading words directly from the swear list.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZQmL-PKr8Y

Bonus points to you!

This reminds me of the video I think Technology Connections did on old TV censoring equipment back in the 70s. I think it ended up being a simple filter over the subtitle information or similar but thought of this from your comment.

I have one that's a dog with the letters on it and my son was happily pressing away, turns out of you hit "b" then "I" It says "b" "I" "itch".

Bonus humor that it’s a dog. You could just be trying to accurately refer to it!

When I was a kid, I had a toy gun that would start with kind of distorted phrases, then continued with shooting sounds. I think it took me a couple of years before I understand that the voice was yelling something akin to "Baldy! Get the f... over there! <shooting noises>"

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