Empathy for the user having sex with your software

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".

Here’s how that came together: https://nonpolynomial.com/2023/10/30/how-to-beg-borrow-steal...

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

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.

:3

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.)

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. :)

Related: https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/

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.

People are way too openly horny.

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.