Apart from the obvious jokes, I think this is a fantastic example of where we should be heading in the future. No not RC sex toys, although that's fine, but individuals able to customise common software for their individual needs.
Some people have a vision of a few percent of the population producing software that everyone else consumes - much like say agriculture.
I have a vision of software literacy- where 99.9% of people can write their own. Is it less "efficient" - kind of. But most of us won't write drivers for iphone screens. But equally I bet that sex toy software would be an underserved market judging by the reaction on HN :-)
The future is democratic and open. I think that's a good thing.
Yanking this back into RC sex toys because damnit this thread is about my project... :3
So https://buttplug.io partially came from some of the idea that spawned the joke that is deldo.
If there's an experience people would very much like personalized, it's sex. So Buttplug is an experiment in "if we allow people to program their own toys, what will they do?"
Now I'm still the lowest level of the stack here, my library depends on people know some sort of language. The library itself is Rust, and we have FFIs in C#, WASM, Java, and outside client libraries in Python, Go, Haskell. But none of those are simple enough for the regular user who just wants to make their own interface.
Some developers who can work with my libraries are making things like that though. There's https://xtoys.app, which is a full WebRTC enabled web/mobile app for remote toy control with some simple visual programming capabilities built in.
I'm also working on a dataflow ui system (think Max/MSP, Puredata, etc) for people to easily click/drag stuff together.
The main problem is convincing people that they want to spend ANY time, be it in usual program languages or visual DSLs, working to customize something for themselves for an experience that may be far shorter than the time spent customizing. There are always people who don't mind that, but they're the minority.
So finding a balance between all of this stuff is difficult. But it's fun to try.
That isn't the future but rather the past we've abandoned. In the 1980s "computer literacy" meant teaching children how to program (generally in BASIC and/or Logo) and computers generally booted up into a BASIC interpreter. But in the 1990s this changed and "computer literary" became the less interesting "teach kids how to use Microsoft Office".
We don't teach all kids to be plumbers and electricians and car mechanics, but we do teach people to use them safely. And if people want to learn, the resources are out there. How is coding different?
Well, it's different in a million ways. But people don't need to know how to service a car to operate it, and this has made cars harder to maintain, but also much, much cheaper and more accessible to others.
I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make anymore, but your post has made me think. Thank you.
> We don't teach all kids to be plumbers and electricians and car mechanics, but we do teach people to use them safely.
Um. Not to a professional level, but my parents most certainly did teach me to do basic plumbing repairs, minor electrical work (think replacing a switch/outlet), change oil, use power tools, and an assortment of other skills under the broad header of "being handy around the house". People absolutely can and should have at least a basic understanding of how to do stuff.
The problem is that there is easy too much stuff out there for anyone to be competent in the basics of all.
Eg, everybody should learn to dance just to learn decent posture and how to move yourself. Everybody should learn how to grow a few common vegetables. Everyone should learn how to extinguish a fore for each class (A, B, C, D). Everybody should learn some basic first aid outside of CPR and putting a bandaid on it. Everyone should learn the rules of the road - even if they don't drove (to get a feeling for what others that are driving will be doing in the next few seconds). Everybody should learn enough about musical theory to recognise the basic structure, variations on it, and various genres. Everybody should learn a language not spoken in their immediate environment. Everybody should travel, and, when travelling, once or twice look beyond the default tourist traps and experience another culture. Everybody should know some basic self-defence. Everybody should have sufficient financial literacy to do grocery shopping. Everybody should learn about history. Everybody should learn some basics about minorities (race/gender/handicap/...), including what are really offensive stereotypes (to avoid) and common problems (to be able to help). Everybody should learn how to sail - trust me on this one. Everybody should learn how to "navigate" from place to place without a smartphone. Everybody should learn the basics of organising a small get-together (including booking venue). Everyb should learn how to gauge prices for things/services they rarely buy/use. Everybody should know at least one sport and their body sufficiently well to be able to stay in shape. Everybody should know some basics of multiple religions (since you'll run into them). Everybody should know how to use the index of a book. Everybody should prefer vi over Emacs. Everybody should know how to cook several different meals. Everybody should know enough about nutrition to be able to not to die from malnutrition when having a choice for foods. Everybody should be able to swim - including swimming a short distance with their clothes on. Everybody should learn to ride a bike. Everybody should be able to change a diaper. Everybody should learn to be able to teach some basic things. Everybody should learn more about cosmology than "that's the Big Dipper". Everybody should learn geography - at least rough position of multiple countries and cities. Eveeybody should learn ice skating / skiing / snowboarding.
That's just some stuff from the top of my head. I miss at least half of that.
Seriously, I agree with what you're saying but I did a double take when I got to that part, like "why did he slip that in there?".
Life is short and I agree you can't do it all but a society that facilitates people's ability to do all of those things, plus learn some basic coding and all the other things you didn't list is still a worthy goal and one that I want to live in.
Trying to do as much or even some of what's on your list is also a worthy goal. Maybe it's enough to just say everyone should try to never stop learning new things and challenging themselves to be more tomorrow than they are today or were yesterday.
I love this list. And ... yes. Everyone should. I mean a high school education the the Western world is basically a masterclass in polymath for the bronze age. And a PhD in physics is beyond anything dreamt of by the scholars of Byzantium.
We humans have set a very high bar. And every discovery in science makes the bar higher, but all of us should know where the bar is, because all of us are needed to vote on steering this ship. Informed voter is not about reading some manifesto. It's informed about the world and the economy and how it all fits together.
Flat earthers are trying to opt out of being informed so they dont have to have the responsibility of deciding.
I think you mean it's just my opinion. Ok - but do we agree that there is a bar for what is "average" set of skills for participating in humanity - and that that bar is changed (harder to achieve / needs longer educational investment) than say the bronze age?
No, I don't agree there is an average bar. Everyone's opinion of that bar will be different, and nobody has a monopoly on deciding what anyone else's bar _must_ be.
In parts of America, operating a chainsaw at 10 years old is part of the bar. My bar does not include riding a horse, operating a tractor, or firing an automatic weapon. But there are places where those are simple life skills.
I guess you're right that there is some kind of blended average you could take of every bar in the world. It would probably include basic math and communication skills.
A is most fires, B is liquids (oil/petrol/etc), D is metals.
I learned very young not to throw water on a fire if I didn’t know what was burning.
Honestly, there’s a lot to learn, but childhood is long! Well resourced parents can teach nearly all of this by 15 (driving and speaking another language well are more challenging).
That‘s a neat analogy, because a good chunk of the population does figure out how to handle basic plumbing, electric and car maintenance needs without formal education. Almost everyone also knows someone who can "fix the computer". If we can extend that space a little, that‘s pretty good. I also don‘t have a point.
(As a father of two kids, I admit it is wickedly difficult to get them honestly interested in programming.)
I've experienced the same thing. One observation is that "back in my day," you could learn enough programming in a few weeks to hack something together that looked just as good (bad) as real software, with little or no adult guidance. And programmers were a community of nerds, hackers, scientists, etc. Hacking was much closer to bare metal, so it felt more "real" too, rather than digging through someone else's drawers.
And it was cool to be able to do something that my parents couldn't even fathom.
Today, programming has become professionalized, and way too hard, with functioning software requiring layers of abstraction. It has changed from a private passion to a varsity sport, and the kids who have declared an interest in "computer science" are the most straight-laced, helicopted kids in the whole school. Some kids discover that there's still a hacker subculture, but only by luck.
Granted, all of this stuff has been good for me, career-wise, but that doesn't translate into something of interest to my kids.
I agree with this, but I think there's an additional point here. I'm from (I'm assuming based on context) a generation just past yours. I know many programmers older than me who had childhood experiences in which figuring out how to build their own games or random software was extremely formative. I think part of what made that so formative was that the gap between "professional software" and what they could build was extremely minimal, if existent.
For me, I can distinctly remember deciding to tinker with building games when I was very young. I was completely overwhelmed, however, by the jump from "basic Batch programs" to "OpenGL and C++." Obviously, that's an enormous jump, and I could have simply dabbled with Flash or whatever, but the point is that the software I enjoyed playing with was years and years of dedicated learning away from anything I could build or tinker with.
The web, however, was not. It was still nascent, there weren't mature, robust technologies for it, and I could build all the things I saw online completely on my own with maybe a dedicated weekend. This was huge for me, and kicked off my lifelong involvement in computing.
I guess the point that I'm getting at is that technology is so good now that the gap between what an average child can consume and what they can produce is enormous. When I tried teaching my nephew basic scripting, their first questions were "How do I make it do X" where X is some involved bit of graphical interactivity. That level of development simply is what software is to them now.
My hope is that this is cyclical. That there is always another frontier cropping up where the gap between "state of the art" and "hobby project" is incredibly small. I think that is naturally where you'll see kids getting into development.
OTOH personal computer usage exploded during that time period, so it seems like a lot more people are able to use a computer if it has easier to use (less interesting?) software.
I have a vision of software literacy- where 99.9% of people can write their own.
I think all the open source in the world isn't going to help when the battle at the bottom is effectively lost already. The 99% don't even have root access to their own devices and don't care, let alone have any desire to write their own software no matter how easy it is. It's also only getting worse. Every year the number of vendors producing unlockable devices shrinks. Every year Windows and macOS get a little less power-user-friendly. Democratic software development is building a mansion on a hill while the town in the valley is on fire.
I like to believe that this is just a phase. At some point in the future, customizable, user-respecting, fully local (or self-hostable) software is going to become trendy again. People are really getting sick and tired of everything trying its damnest to manipulate them into driving a metric or just be an art piece instead of a tool.
In the much more popular hobby of cars it went away and has stayed that way in developed countries with the control infrastructure while in developing economies they still fix everything themselves. In another 20 years poor nations will still probably be on the same vehicles or cars from a generation are hollowed out while developed countries’ cars are even worse.
I see zero changes in this market bifurcation pattern regardless of industry. It’s not like people are making their own clothes much even in developing countries because we overproduce cheap clothes now anyway, for example.
On the other hand 100s of millions of those devices ship with a programming tool on the home screen where you can create tiny pieces of functionality and hook them into every system and third party application (Apple Shortcuts).
But yeah, it‘s not the same. It doesn‘t get you anywhere close to "producing“ the real software. You‘re programming in a walled garden layer above userspace that you can‘t get out of. To me, these kinds of things are enough to give me hope though (setting aside the ideals of open source). The incentives for learning how to "produce“ real software are strong enough. If more people can build tools for themselves, I‘m happy.
I think part of the problem is the concept of an "application", which is a prepackaged collection of functionalities. The user has to start the application to use a function. If software was developed as standalone functions that users can pipe together through drag-and-drop (or some other means), to create their own "applications", we might be able to reach a happy medium. A non-CLI version of the unix philosophy.
Why would you need root access and unlockable devices to produce code ? Do you have access to the microcode of your CPU ? Can’t you code on a Mac ?
I agree that it would be better for everyone if there were competitive fully open source platforms across the entire stack, but don’t confuse the ability to produce and use open source software with the requirement that absolutely all the stack must be open source. Only Siths deal in absolutes.
>Why would you need root access and unlockable devices to produce code ?
Because without this your projects are always at the mercy of Microsoft's auto update. There's more to life than MVC frameworks. Some people want to be in control of their data. On, say, LineageOS you can rewrite system apps; on iOS your phone will always be a cop and you can't change that.
Why would you need root access and unlockable devices to produce code ?
You don't. You need root access and unlocked devices to produce people who give a shit about coding. We're training people to look under the hood less and less and less every year.
You don’t need root access to produce code. The number of people with access to code development and execution tools (i.e. a browser and a text editor) has never been higher. Even on iOS you can get started with a free service like GitHub or Neocities and do everything through Safari.
The web browser just doesn't matter if you care about the operating system code that it relies on. Without unlocked devices you don't have the freedom to code what you want to code. If I'm using a phone that sends my pics to the cops and advertising companies I don't really care about playing with MVC frameworks. Do you want the freedom to code whatever you want to code or do you just want to play in Microsoft's kiddie pool?
I am a software developer myself and I've never even tried to change my OS code... it's absurd to think an average person would want to do that! They just might want to control their dildo, or lights... or turn on their AC at a certain time... wtf man, how out of touch can someone get?
>it's absurd to think an average person would want to do that
Hate to break it to you but the average person does not wake up and think "you know what I want to do for the next 40 years? look at code for 8 hours a day." Wanting to do this is a weird thing (and that's okay) and it means you have different desires than my mom who likes watching youtube on her iphone.
> I have a vision of software literacy- where 99.9% of people can write their own.
I think the problem is that much of 'software literacy' not about writing code that does what you want, but about nailing down WHAT you want and HOW to do that correctly. It requires a level of, I guess, pedantry and a way of thinking that, based on my experience with hundreds of clients, most people just don't have or care about enough.
I honestly believe that everyone cares more than enough about the thing they care about. But not everyone cares about the same thing the same way at the same time.
Hence the impossibility of writing even a text editor like Word that suits everyone's needs. If you cannot do that for a text editor how can you do it for ... everything?
We need to give people pens and notebooks and also a dozen years of education.
Software is trivial to make for yourself and insanely hard to make for someone else, so your vision is not completely off.
But 99.9% of people are just unable to program things (partly because there is no straightforward tools^, which are already a hardest software ever). There may be a tipping point somewhere in the future, but today there is no incentive or enough alive-or-dead competition, for almost everyone to become “software literate”.
^ think about subj: to program this toy, first you have to learn emacs and elisp; there are much easier ways to play this “game”, though less technological. Even most of software developers won’t really go that far.
> Software is trivial to make for yourself and insanely hard to make for someone else, so your vision is not completely off.
No idea how true that is, based on my own experience - totally false. E.g. writing the control software for grow lights (esp-32) was far from trivial and my daily job that's actually writing software "for someone else" is not hard.
I think you just chose a hard way out of habit :) If it were pi-like platform instead of esp, you could just ssh and vi new “gpio …” lines into your crontab (depending on how the lights are connected). I dealt with esp before too and it’s really of “8-bit++” kind, missing all the power of software we built in recent 30 years, so you have to reinvent wheels too often. The only reason these platforms still evolve is they are much cheaper if you plan to ship thousands pcs or make them work in limited environments.
It's easier to control your grow lights than to write the equivalent for someone else. All the unspoken assumptions about how the system ought to work are yours. Therefore you don't have to fill in the gaps of someone else's attempt at describing what they want.
Technically I did it for my spouse and her flowers [grow lights did require designing and soldering all the power and electronics control circuits - which admittedly I am less verse than writing code], but again I can't quite see the difference between my daily job and personal projects in terms of understanding the matter. If anything personal projects have less room for failure as by their own definition are quite more ambitious.
While there is no intrinsic care about scale, running it remotely, no downtime, APIs misuse, etc. - it's very much the same process with writing, debugging, refactoring, deploying and so on.
>I have a vision of software literacy- where 99.9% of people can write their own. I
Most people are incapable of writing their own software. And not just a driver for an iphone screen, but anything substantially harder than 'printf("hello world");'.
This is like having a vision of the future where everyone can do their own molecular biology research, or where everyone can design their own skyscraper.
I disagree, and I think there’s enough middle/high schoolers coding on YouTube to largely disprove your claim.
Software isn’t really rocket science (unless you’re making software for rocket science). It gets easier all the time.
Consider the the effort required to learn a foreign language. That level of effort can at least make one able to build websites and iPhone apps which I think is enough to make for nontrivial change in society if people knew it.
The fact that you see middle schoolers coding certainly shows that those specific middle schoolers can code, but that's a far cry from 99.99% of everyone. If only 1% of all the middle schoolers in existence could code, there would still be plenty to see on Youtube, because the Internet is a really big place.
Software might as well be rocket science if you didn’t grow up with regular access to a PC or the internet like 40% of school-age children in the US (many of whom just missed a whole year of school — but they’re low income so the news doesn’t talk about that). It’s really hard to learn to program when the only internet access you have is through expensive prepaid mobile phones.
And even if it’s easy, I do that shit at work all day long; I don’t want to do it when I go home.
That said I’ve always found this to be a weird use case. I’ll be keeping my wireless Magic Wand, thank you.
> I think this is a fantastic example of where we should be heading in the future... but individuals able to customise common software for their individual needs.
Indeed, we should. But economic incentives and the adoption patterns of greater society seem to point in the exact opposite direction.
Actually tinkering with software is still seen and arcane and nerdy, even after computers now permeate half of society.
The popular view on computers is still that they are "magic" - either "good magic" in the form of shiny devices that "just work" or as "evil magic" in the form of hackers doing unspeakable things.
Other examples of widespread adoption of technological innovation don't give a lot of hope either: We all are surrounded by artificial materials, processed food and extremely complex electronic devices every day - more or less the case for the last 200 years.
Nevertheless it has not led to everyone having some basic knowledge in molecular science or electronics. Instead, most people have simply given up on understanding their surroundings and are effectively treating those advances them like magic: either enthusiastically accepting them or tolerating them but longing back to some ostensible simpler times where you wouldn't have to deal with them.
And both the industry and regulators are perfectly fine with this: For the industry, a certain amount of ignorance is vital to be able to sell products or services at all.
For regulators, its far easier to have a few big platforms than to have a myriad of individuals that you have to convince.
I absolutely believe your vision of the future would eventually be better for everyone - but right now, the "agriculture" vision seems a lot more likely to me, unless something will significantly change in the future.
The educational system agrees with you - coding is taught in somewhere around 50% of the schools in the US now (more or less depending on which report you read), which is up from almost nothing 10 years ago. Polices are being passed all over the country to increase that numbers, And they are teaching with exactly that philosophy - coding should now be a part of basic literacy.
It may take longer than we would wish, but a day is coming where custom code will be as common as writing down personal notes.
It is much more efficient once you reach the point where you know how to solve a specific problem in a straightforward way. Complex or large-scale problems will always require more effort, but knowing available tools to enhance "personal computing" helps a great deal.
But while I absolutely wish for the same kind of future, expecting a majority of people to learn computers and software deeply enough is just that - wishful thinking.
They are endless. I will not write any because I simply cannot choose one.
>I have a vision of software literacy- where 99.9% of people can write their own
I hope so. A lot of people will argue not everyone needs to know how to program but in the past people would have argued that not everyone needs to read.
Yup. I think it is something where you need a few people to create the grand, complex software of the world, but everyone being able to do simple things for themselves would really empower people to do so much more. I hope we get there in my lifetime.
I imagine something where the vibration intensity is proportional to the complexity of the commands you enter would be a great "teaching" tool. Either that, or rewards for using hjkl over the arrow keys!
I’ve tried M-x make-baby, but my baby will just alternate between two modes: eating, which she calls “normal mode”, and crying, which she calls “edit mode”. Should I be concerned? At this point I’m just trying to quit, but I don’t know how.
One of the worst/best parts of buttplug is that I ended up needed to maintain my own Bluetooth LE library: btleplug (https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug).
Worst because working with bluetooth is always THE WORST, best because of the submissions and community that've grown around it.
There's 2 types of PRs to btleplug:
- People going "here's a PR but uh, why is the library named btleplWAIT WHAT"
- People going "here is a PR specifically to fix something in Buttplug thank you"
I've been really impressed with the heart and soul into a single focus. When I saw this link pop up I thought "Oh it must be using buttplug.io" but was surprised to see it was from you and predates buttplug.io.
As someone who can't always retain focus without getting drawn away to the new shiny I want to know, how do you remain focused on this a single family of projects? How deal will keeping from getting drawn away to a fun new idea?
I'm especially interested because its a topic that others might consider as a bit of a joke. It's obvious you've embrace that a lot in your online persona, but does it ever get to you or sap motivation?
Hah, yeah, I've been at this since 2004, so deldo is mid-career for me, and Buttplug has been relatively recent!
The perception that I've stuck with a single direction isn't quite how things actually turn out. I work in a general context of devices, and Buttplug is now a through-line for that, but I still get distracted and go off and do random things constantly. It's just usually based around that through-line.
For instance, right now I'm rewriting our buttplug application GUIs in Rust using egui, because immediate mode guis looked interesting (and also because electron was a poor choice in the first place). I've also spent most of the year concentrating on VR interfaces to toy control. It all revolves around affective haptics/teledildonics, but that's really just the base camp. Thanks to knowing the field and the technology I need for it, I can go any direction from there.
All that said, yeah, I have constant motivation issues. I take weeks/months off at a time (the combo of Metroid Dread, Deathloop and Forza horizon 5 coming out relatively close to each other this past 1.5 months is one of those times :) ). But working in the subject always gives me that base camp to come back to, at which point I can decide which direction I want to go again.
Most are Bluetooth to the device. Some have http apis that can be accessed in various ways, either via hosting an http server on a phone that then relays to Bluetooth (lovense connect does this) or doing something like having the device itself use wifi and phone home (the handy does this as well as having Bluetooth).
My library, buttplug, handles most permutations of anything that happens. Bluetooth, usb, serial, network, you name it we begrudgingly implement it while mumbling profanities. :3
>In line with upcoming regulations, like the European Union’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), we will also be introducing a new age verification step over the next few months. As part of this process some European users may be asked to provide additional proof of age when attempting to watch mature content.
Reminds me of FUFME: "FuckU-FuckMe(tm) for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT provides the most complete remote sex solution for the Internet and corporate intranet."
I don't know how real Deldo is, but if you're curious about the state of teledildonics, buttplug.io is widely used and actively developed (link probably not safe for work):
> [Editor's note: Motherboard can't in good conscience recommend that you insert a Joy-Con into any of your orifices. Please don't try this at home.]
> I left a voicemail for Nintendo asking if this is by design and to see if playing anally is an approved means of using the Joy-Con. They did not return my call, and after reading this article, they probably never will.
Reminds me of an old question in a news group with someone complaining that he needs 2 hands to use a keyboard shortcut in Emacs and cannot use only one hand. Somebody replied "why would someone use only one hand ?". The answer: "Doesn't Emacs turns you on ?"
Many folks use toys with their partners. Many folks don't want to hook up with random people but still want to get off.
What's the purpose of your comment? Does how an adult/consenting adults enjoy themselves affect you in any way? Does it make you feel better or superior to kink shame others?
Some people have a vision of a few percent of the population producing software that everyone else consumes - much like say agriculture.
I have a vision of software literacy- where 99.9% of people can write their own. Is it less "efficient" - kind of. But most of us won't write drivers for iphone screens. But equally I bet that sex toy software would be an underserved market judging by the reaction on HN :-)
The future is democratic and open. I think that's a good thing.