mach-e

Tom Scott-style absurdist research by tom7 for SIGBOVIK 2021, using machine learning to discover letterforms that are 'uppercaser' than uppercase A and lowercaser than lowercase. It is a comedic, technically inventive deep dive with fonts and a paper.

The Doomsday Machine scene from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviet doomsday device is explained.

The opening scene of The Wire season 5, in which detectives use a copy machine as a fake lie detector to get a confession.

The 'Machine that goes PING!' sketch from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, in which hospital staff fuss over a machine while ignoring the patient.

A one-minute clip from the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in which a computer refuses to reveal its results. It plays on machines giving unhelpful answers.

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.

A short Conan segment in which George R. R. Martin explains that he writes his Game of Thrones books on WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine.

A short comedy video of the Turbo Encabulator, a piece of technobabble nonsense describing an imaginary machine in deadpan engineering language.

The earliest filmed version of the Turbo Encabulator technical-jargon parody, shot in the late 1970s with narrator Bud Haggert. It deadpans a stream of meaningless engineering language.

Tom Murphy's satirical SIGBOVIK 2007 presentation, delivered under a pseudonym, proving that generalized Super Mario Bros. is NP-complete. It is a short, deadpan take on a complexity theory result.

A recorded phone call in which the Lenny bot, a looping set of prerecorded replies from a rambling old man, keeps a telemarketer on the line for 14 minutes. The uploader calls it the best Lenny call yet.

A Burnistoun sketch from BBC Scotland in which two men try to use a voice-recognition elevator that cannot understand their Scottish accents.

Simone Giertz presents Truckla, a homemade pickup truck conversion of a Tesla Model 3, shown in a short humorous promo.

A one-minute scene from the film Enemy of the State showing absurdly implausible image enhancement, with freezing, rotating, zooming and focusing on a video.

A one-minute clip from a CSI episode featuring the trope of zooming and enhancing low-resolution images. The uploader says it was the last CSI episode they watched.

A REACT episode where teenagers try Windows 95 for the first time and react to the retro interface and technology.

An HBO clip from Silicon Valley season 4 in which the 'Not Hotdog' app is demoed. The app classifies food photos as hot dog or not hot dog.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl code using Windows Vista's speech recognition, with hilariously bad results.

A two-minute supercut of film and TV characters ordering a computer to 'enhance' a blurry image into a perfectly sharp one. It is a remaster of an earlier 2009 version.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl scripts using Windows Vista speech recognition, with comically bad results. The footage shows the recognizer repeatedly mangling commands.

A sketch from the Scottish comedy show Burnistoun in which two men cannot get a voice-recognition elevator to understand the word eleven in their accents.

An episode of REACT in which children try to figure out 1970s-1980s computers, including an Apple II and floppy disks. It was made to promote the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

Michael Reeves rigs up a camera and software that tracks a goldfish's movements to choose stock trades, tied to wallstreetbets sentiment. It is a comedic programming and electronics stunt.

A two-minute compilation of TV and film scenes where investigators say 'enhance' and a blurry image becomes sharp. It mocks the trope.

Penn and Teller help Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs play a prank on Nobel-winning physicist Arno Penzias. The clip shows the gag and its setup.

A roughly one-minute TV clip in which a guest accidentally breaks a rare, one-of-a-kind wax cylinder recording on camera.

A one-minute clip of the Warcraft II sound card test in setup, where the test sample plays and the voice says the sound card works perfectly.

A short, edited clip of Mark Zuckerberg talking about smoking meats at a barbecue. It circulates as a meme about his awkward persona.

A Red Dwarf clip where Kryten fixes a toaster and finds it to be the most annoying machine in the universe, endlessly offering toast.

The Monty Python sketch "Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook", in which a faulty phrasebook yields lines like "My hovercraft is full of eels".