Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/04/the-furby-was-coded-for-cute.html
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I never found them cute. That creepy beak and the weird, third eye were disturbing to me.
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Same here; they were creepy as fuck. Coding FAIL.
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Interesting segment from Radiolab on the emotional response garnered by Furby vocalizations. Heard it a while back, and I found it quite interesting.
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After a computer programmer posted the source code online last August, one commenter on Hacker News praised it for being “surprisingly sophisticated.”
Fixed:
After a computer programmer posted the source code online last August, one commenter on Hacker News backed away from the keyboard and ran for the hills screaming “super creepy!!"
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Fresh out of the box, a Furby speaks its native tongue of Furbish.
Isn’t that the Noam Chomsky theory of language?
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I was a child of the nineties and I can asure you that these little fellas were pretty cool toys for their time.
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Sounds like a raspi project is highly in order. Furbys are generally pretty non-mobile, so tossing in some new hardware, with maybe a USB power supply, you could program them to be remote controlled (over wifi) with all the processing power on other computers.
After that, some AI programming could make them even scarier.
like furlexa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCOsM-4NEKs
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Friend of mine had a long forgotten one in her closet, had been there for ages. She got it out and set it down, we kept talking and then the furby started talking. Huh… guess the batteries are still good years and years later. Keep talking, it goes off again. Whatevs, we leave the room and across the house we can hear it going off every now and then and talking to no one so we decide this is weird and we gotta turn it off. We flip it over to turn the switch and it’s already on OFF.
We took the batteries out and threw it back in the closet. Fuck that.
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Back in the closet… and not in the trash can outside?
I’ve seen too many horror movies - I’d pitch that possessed shit, ASAP.
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You need to deal with a Furby pretty much like you would with a T-800/T-850.
Anything less is just asking for Trouble.
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With a capital “T,” apparently.
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Oh man, I’m decluttering… three straight days of cleaning… and I just packed a rainbow furby into a donation box. Part of me wants to keep it but the other part of me is like… nah. I’m a sucker for cute shit apparently.
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Does its 6502 processor have a CCF instruction? (Cute and Catch Fire)
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I got one for a friend it was about the time google maps were not doing navigation yet …and I thought of an early tom tom speaking the turns as I had read arthur c clarke’s ‘accent to orbit’ etcetera
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I had fun reading through the source code. I haven’t goggled 6502 since I left my Commodore 64 for a Macintosh SE back in 1988. The opcode mnemonics are SO much easier to read than x86 and ARM. The actual code doesn’t begin til page 19, but it’s a good read for you assembly-heads.
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Oh, this reminds me…
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