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Rockwell Retro Encabulator

rlcarnes
Comedy
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this comedy video1 month2010–2025 score 1.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

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

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.

“the retroencabultaor video [1] is a masterclass on how to do it.” (HN, 2020)

1 strong recommendations · 17 jokes · Comedy

18 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@andreareina Sep 2020 Strongly recommends
on HN thread 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] [this video]
Satirical technobabble video as masterclass of the form

Citations, criticism and jokes

@vox_mollis Nov 2015 Makes a joke
on HN thread 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] [this video]
@HCIdivision17 Feb 2016 Makes a joke
on HN thread The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry (1944)
Read more
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] [this 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]
@ajcp Apr 2021 Makes a joke
on HN thread 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. [this video]
@myrandomcomment Jan 2022 Makes a joke
on HN thread Turboencabulator
Here is the fun take - [this 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_explore Mar 2023 Makes a joke
on HN thread 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]: [this video]
@hyperdimension Jul 2023 Makes a joke
on HN thread 55 GiB/s FizzBuzz (2021)
He used the Retro Encabulator to generate this text. [this 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.
@pwatsonwailes Oct 2023 Makes a joke
on HN thread 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. [this video]
@_fizz_buzz_ Jan 2024 Makes a joke
on HN thread 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] [this video]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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