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Rockwell Retro Encabulator

Rockwell Retro Encabulator

rlcarnes
1 HN recommenders · discussed 2010–2025
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About this video

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.

Why it appears in the archive

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

AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.

From the Hacker News discussion

andreareina · 2020-09 · strong rec

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

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harpastum · 2010-12 · joke

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]

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vox_mollis · 2015-11 · joke

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]

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HCIdivision17 · 2016-02 · joke

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]

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hawktheslayer · 2020-12 · joke

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

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aeoleonn · 2021-02 · joke

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

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ajcp · 2021-04 · joke

> 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]

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whalesalad · 2021-06 · joke

> 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]

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