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Buttplug MCP

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242 pointssurrTurr134 comments

A few prior HN discussions on the Buttplug standard, including the inevitable "in Rust":

* Buttplug: An open-source software suite for teledildonics (https://buttplug.io/) 5 years ago | 249 comments

* Empathy for the user having sex with your software (https://docs.buttplug.io/docs/dev-guide/intro/buttplug-ethic...) 10 months ago | 127 comments

* T-code – A protocol for implementing UART serial communications to an adult toy (https://stpihkal.docs.buttplug.io/protocols/tcode.html) 2 years ago | 74 comments

* An open-source standards and software project for intimate hardware (maybe NSFW) (https://buttplug.io/) 7 years ago | 39 comments

* Buttplug Sex Toy Control Project Implemented in Rust (https://buttplug.io/) 2 years ago | 3 comments

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.

So many ideas and industry terms get much more interesting when applied in this area.

Penetration testing (especially with red and blue teams). Agile. Continuous delivery. "Move fast and break things". Application firewall. Protection at rest. Injection attacks. Man in the middle. Load balancing. And so on.

There's one phrase I'm too fond of, that I thought of the other day:

Enterprise Teledildonics

Someone please make it become a thing.

A/B testing my teledildonics.

It may be UK or even London-specific but 'exponential backoff' is a great phrase in our lexicon.

'Packet sniffing', while not sexual, is also something a lot of men in Britain do.

"shift left" is another good one.

A few more good ones suggested by ChatGPT since this is a great discovery.

Hot swap. Hardening the system. Spoofing. Release pipeline. Uptime guarantee. Burst capacity. Stand-up. Forking the repo. Detached HEAD.

> Spoofing

not sure what spoofing would be in a sexual context, but it does sounds like something potentially illegal, or at least morally gray :D

Maybe because Spoof sounds simiar to Snuff...

Spoof is a slang term used in certain parts of the world that refers to a certain viscous liquid.

I think you might mean 'Spuff'.

A sentance I never thought I would write on HN.

It goes by many names. Spunk being another, but spoof being one too.

Sounds more similar to boofing.

Spoofing may be the act of pretending to blowing coke up someone's butt, but then "accidentally" snorting it yourself.

Samantha: Woah, easy now. It's my turn!

Dave: Alright, alright, I'll do it! [prepares straw; fakes choking, coughing]

Samantha: WTF, Dave?! Freeloading as always, now you fucking spoofed me???

I know about boofing, I learned about it during one of the more recent us supreme court confirmation hearings

See? Who needs an department of education?!

"Detached HEAD" this is uncanny valley of why LLM should not be used in anything related to psychology. Obviously just HEAD is funny enough but no it came up with detached HEAD (because it doesn't have any mental imagery or empathy, of course). Detached HEAD is a whole another level worse than force push if you ask me.

Why ask LLM for puns anyway? Do you delegate all the fun or activities in your life?

Why ask the thing whose primary strength is language, a question pertaining to language?

Man... maybe I just like to have fun at scale.

Edge computing. Deep learning. Uncertainty quantification. Attention head. Sparse probing. Queue managment. Consensus algorithm. Parallell I/O.

back pressure

Let's hope it's deepseek-compatible.

And of course the precursor to all inappropriate technical computer terms: finger

>Someone please make it become a thing

Why stop there? How about "Global Teledildonics". I think the world would be a better place with that.

Finger, mount, touch, find if you’re self-deprecating.

If we're going for CLI commands: zip/unzip, eject, (mod)probe, umount; I guess man counts too.

And "man" can prefix all of them.

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

A friend back in Cambridge decided to name a file "bottom" just so he could run "touch bottom" and giggle at the sillieness.

Ah I was, off the cuff, going for core/more utils, those are great too. Ran out of ideas.

If you do enough enterprise teledildonics, you may end up with an excess of Splunk.

Pretty sure in this niche a MITM is called a Lucky Pierre.

If I ever get around to writing a tool for defeating all the HSTS/DoH/cert pinning nonsense in personal/home setting, that's how I'll name it.

Something something code injection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice

If you can demonstrate a novel pathway to inserting large payloads into unsuspecting backends, you may be a good candidate for government jobs.

No one distributes their package like me.

Feel free to do so. As I have started to play with one (Edge 2) this week and the device control part of the documentation is basically empty.

FizzBuzz will become an especially relevant interview question.

my intuition tells me that this problem is best solved using DP

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

I am now having second thoughts about having named my cat Emacs!

That is also by qDot [1], the Buttplug.io author. When I just looked at their GitHub today, I realized I used their libs in other projects over the years (OpenKinect and libnifalcon). They share lots of great work!

[1] https://github.com/qdot

Awww shucks, thanks :D

Is this the "vibe coding" I keep hearing about?

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

I've seen APIs for controlling those toys already a few times and it always surprises me that they're quite open. It's a thing I'd expect each device to come with a proprietary locked down app and nobody complaining about it publically, because that'd look.bad on them. Anyone can tell me why is that different? Is it because huge corporations are staying away from the market, thus they couldn't have ruined it?

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?

How would you get caught for opening a speed restrictions and what are the consequences?

> 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.

> Buttplug is an open-source standards and software project for controlling intimate hardware, including sex toys, fucking machines, and more.

> Intimate Haptics Control Standard and Library

From https://buttplug.io/. You get better explanations here https://buttplug-spec.docs.buttplug.io/docs/spec

The .io top level domain is a perfect choice.

oh my god, you're right xD

I once signed up fot a lecture on "consumer device security" (lawyer stuff). To my suprise, every example used by the presenter involved an internet-connected sex toy gone rouge. Either private information had leaked or the device had "entrapped" a user for ransom. I was at my desk laughing but couldnt explain why for fear of discussing the very nsfw content.

This plus ChatGPT scheduled tasks could make an interesting alarm clock

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

Keeping this in my bookmarks for the inevitable moment someone says big tech can shove unwanted AI features up their ass.

Woah! Hi!

I'm qDot, creator and project lead of https://buttplug.io!

We're already well off the front page but feel free to AMA. :)

Author here. What a Happy Friday to see this now, as I created it on April Fool's Day. I annually do silly personal projects on that day. That week I happened to be playing with MCP servers and thought it would be funny. ConAcademy is where I put weird ideas and implementations.

I will state that this specific MCP Server is pretty useless and certainly not how one would want sexual interaction, I try to indicate this in the README. But, a beginning has to start somewhere and good-giving-game is how we roll so it's on GitHub.

[Ironically two years before, my project was Buttplug-integration in a Charm-powered SSH chatroom with BubbleTea TUI. That navigated aspects of digital consent via SSH keys, making an anonymous graph of what entities could do what to other entities' devices. I think some of that is needed in an Agent-Controlled MCP future.]

I'm not the Buttplug.io maintainer, but did chat with them about this for a while on Discord. While I have your eyeballs, they are looking for additional maintainers for their project if any Rustaceans are interested. This MCP server is written in Golang but would be better in the Buttplug ecosystem if it was Rust.

My early career was in haptics research and I have several patents in it via Immersion. My master's thesis was writing a 3D haptic renderer and integrating haptics into VRML, if you remember that! I have worked on NIH grants for Sexual Dysfunction diagnostic devices and created homemade toys. Now that I just received my Neurable EEG headset, I am working on Biaerolar Beats research [1].

On the topic of vibe coding, yes I vibrated my LELO F1 with this, but this project was truly a hand job. I did try to vibe code `a2a4a2a` (A2A protocol for A2A fun) a few weeks ago, with both Claude and Gemini, but A2A protocol was too new and it was too hard for me to teach it A2A. I'd be interested in seeing how people handle this in general.

All in all, it was fun and I learned a lot about tool-calling LLMs. That week I made three MCP servers (thanks `mark3labs/mcp-go`), one for money [2], this one for sex [3], and one for drugs [4].

Although I haven't followed up on that last AgentDank [4] yet, it's probably the coolest in terms of open data and actual AI results -- just watch the video there. Bringing custom data plus SQL endpoint to a tool-calling LLM is ridiculously powerful.

[1] https://github.com/ConAcademy/biareolar-beats [2] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/dbn-go/blob/main/cmd/dbn-go... [3] https://github.com/ConAcademy/buttplug-mcp [4] https://github.com/AgentDank/dank-mcp

> certainly not how one would want sexual interaction

speak for yourself

Curious how people here see the privacy implications of the various services out there. I suppose it was simpler in the old days where you could just buy a product and have no relationship whatsoever with the vendor and so nobody watching over your shoulder (as is the case with VR goggles nowadays and many other types of services).

Is there an llm that can dirty-talk? Would be amusing to tie the two together.

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.

When Vibe Coding meets Headcrash (Bethke)[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headcrash

What a strange time we live in

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

Not something I've followed closely, to be honest

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

Someone took the term vibe coding literally

I was hoping this was going to be a malicious MCP from the good old days of security tool naming.

Related to buttplugin' with teledildonics?

https://buttplug.io

I remember some people have wired their vibrators intensity and vibration pattern to their vi(m) configuration, e.g. current indentation depth.

I heard a story that these guys built one of the only high performing opensource Bluetooth stacks, and that it is a dependency for various SFW orgs… can anyone substantiate

I don't see the value to integrating this kind of thing with an LLM or find the presented use cases as compelling, but I'm always going to support more work related to Buttplug.io and I'm sure someone will find it useful.

It's unfortunate just how stigmatized such software (and the associated devices) still are because it's a very, very interesting field. I myself started what I thought was going to be a small haptic feedback side project and have fallen down a rabbithole I never could have imagined existing.

The sex toy/haptic feedback world has, if I'm honest, reignited my love for development.

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.

I’d like to say well, now I’ve seen it all, but I am sure the boundless curiosity and ingenuity of the human race will surprise me for a long while yet.

>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.

This is how the robot apocalypse will start

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.

All right, that does it! I've had enough internet for today.

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

Finally something new and groundbreaking!

User-testing it was a pain in the ass.

How do hallucinations feel down there?

this has got to be the funniest thing i've seen from what an MCP could do this year LOL

please HN add some comments, I have no idea what to think about this.

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

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

The next step in making humans less interesting.

BRB, gotta go the wastelands for parts to repair my Cherry 3000.

Do not think, just feel.

How is the security?

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!

backend engineer

sticky bit

floppy disk

lap top

big o

batch sorting

MCP is becoming a mature protocol.

I am going to let claude control the buttplug. Thats what she said before sh*t hit the fan. Literally.

Does this belong in hacker news?

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

How can I get 5M USD for Trump golden visa? Please tell me.

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.

Is it illegal in Texas?

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com