Rockwell Retro Encabulator

rlcarnes1 HN recommenders · 2010–2025
7.5M views · comedy · evergreen · Uploaded 2008-01-17

A spoof industrial promo for the Rockwell Retro Encabulator, a deadpan stream of technobabble about an imaginary machine. It is a classic engineering in-joke.

HN uses it as a joke whenever jargon-heavy or meaningless technical pitches appear, and praises it as a masterclass in technobabble.

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18 comments from Hacker News

@harpastum2010 · in “Git in layman's terms: isomorphic contours in source-code phase space”

This reminds me a lot of turbo/retroencabulator [1]. After you've watched the video (don't go first or it will spoil it), you can check out the wikipedia article.[2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]

@vox_mollis2015 · in “The Doomsday Scam”

The reported poor performance of both red mercury nuclear devices and the ADE 651 are due to the integrators' failure to power them with the output of a properly-calibrated Turboencabulator. Ref: [LINK] [VIDEO]

@HCIdivision172016 · in “The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry (1944)”

Rockwell Automation did some work to modernize this with the ironically named retro-encabulator [0]. It follows the same principles, but uses the off-the-shelf parts we've come to appreciate from RA affiliates. GE was the main supplier of this updated version [1], and reviews show that its performance was excellent in the field. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] EDIT: There's quite a lot of controversy convering this area of reseach in the following decades. A more technical overview [2] on the turbo-encabulator's operations is discussed in an article covering Chrysler's tulmultuous efforts to apply it to their automotive line. The short of it is that despite being an impressive leap forward in technology, if mass produced it would generate dangerous quantities of DHMO [3]. It just goes to show how a small unexpected side effect can derail even well researched technical solutions. [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]

@andreareina2020 · in “When Math Gets Impossibly Hard”

If you haven't seen it yet, the retroencabultaor video [1] is a masterclass on how to do it. [1] [VIDEO]

Strongly recommendsView on HN
@hawktheslayer2020 · in “1937 film explains how a car differential works”

This was excellent to watch, though the whole time it made me think of this classic engineering video: [VIDEO]

@aeoleonn2021 · in “Judge: Citibank isn't entitled to $500M it sent to various creditors last August”

So cringe-inducing! "best in breed" "pre-integrated" "...unlocks intelligence ingrained in..." such presentations remind me of Rockwell's Retro Encabulator: [VIDEO]

@ajcp2021 · in “Bernie Madoff has died”

> Supposedly he was doing collars (split-strike conversions) to make this money, but it just seemed implausible to me at the time, since I traded options. I figured he just punted futures, nice and easy way to sorta hug the index (I hadn't seen his "returns"), maybe Martingale it and get lucky until you're not so lucky. For all I know you might as well be talking about a Rockwell Retro Encabulator[1] 1. [VIDEO]

@whalesalad2021 · in “Regularization is all you need: simple neural nets can excel on tabular data”

> As a result, we propose regularizing plain Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) networks by searching for the optimal combination/cocktail of 13 regularization techniques for each dataset using a joint optimization over the decision on which regularizers to apply and their subsidiary hyperparameters. Pardon? [VIDEO]

@myrandomcomment2022 · in “Turboencabulator”

Here is the fun take - [VIDEO] And the original - [LINK] Also curious as this was on Twitter the other day...how social mixed if this is the OPs reason for sharing.

@londons_explore2023 · in “How the EU CHIPS Act Could Build “Innovation Capacity” in Europe”

The obvious way to subvert this is by infiltrating the expert pool. Send in your own guys, who will vote to give all the money to you for inventing the critical retro encabulator[1]. I think the only defence is to make the expert pool large (ie. thousands of people), with a good chunk from academia, and have the expert pool anonymous, with the 'votes' of each expert also anonymous (so they can't go to their boss and show how they voted entirely for their own company). And finally, have some system to throw out the 20% highest and lowest votes before taking an average of the rest. [1]: [VIDEO]

@efitz2023 · in “A guidance language for controlling LLMs”

Hahaha "The first step of Byzantine Fault Tolerance is tolerance" omg. That cracked me up. Reminded me of the Rockwell Encabulator: [VIDEO]

@hyperdimension2023 · in “55 GiB/s FizzBuzz (2021)”

He used the Retro Encabulator to generate this text. [VIDEO] (my favorite version) It's an old engineering in-joke. Edit: oops, thought your comment was a reply to 'mindcrime. I'm keeping it here though for the lucky (very lucky in this case) 10,000.

@dleeftink2023 · in “Should Ethereum be okay with enshrining more things in the protocol?”

I'm okay with jargon, but the ratio can be off sometimes. When the ratio becomes too skewed, there's risk of side-fumbling or even encabuloration [0]. [0]: [VIDEO]

@pwatsonwailes2023 · in “NASA can't open its asteroid capsule”

Nah, they need Rockwell Automation's retro encabulator. The inverse reactive current it produces (designed for use in unilateral phase detractors) should also be capable of automatically synchronising cardinal gram meters. My guess would be that the gram meters have become unsynchronised. [VIDEO]

@kibwen2023 · in “Hyundai Uni Wheel electric drive system could revolutionize EV design”

The video is good, but I couldn't help but draw a parallel to the famous Rockwell Retro Encabulator: [VIDEO]

@_fizz_buzz_2024 · in “AI 'hallucinated' fake legal cases filed to B.C. court in Canadian first”

But that is my point, ChatGPT connected the rockwell retro encabulator[0] in reverse, which will of course make the resonance tank split capacitor bridge oscillate out of sync with the active input bias triodes. This will of course immediately fry the dual-bifet transistor driver stage. Not sure why they call this AI. [0] [VIDEO]

@paranoidrobot2025 · in “Tunarr: Create and configure live TV channels from media on your servers”

There are youtube channels with old TV Ads. Some of those will be non-existant. You could also go down the Turbo Encabulator rabbit hole: [LINK] [VIDEO]

@n1xis10t2025 · in “Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)”

Indeed, complexity (both cyclomatic and post-frontal) must be reduced such that the two spurving bearings make a direct line with the panametric fan. For more details consult this instructional video: [VIDEO]