rlcarnes
1 HN recommender · recommended in 18 months, 2010–2025
2:01 · 7.5M views · Jan 17, 2008
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.
18 comments from Hacker News
If you haven't seen it yet, the retroencabultaor video [1] is a masterclass on how to do it. [1] this video
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]
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
> 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
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