EDIT: A rough timeline of events here:
- In 2024, a user noticed this odd traffic on their local network, took a screenshot of the graph, and posted it to Twitter
- After discussing the issue with other Twitter users, the original poster realized that this graph was actually a mistake with their router or something. This reporting software was reporting some other device's network traffic as being the washing machine's traffic. The washing machine was actually only using a reasonable amount of data.
- Despite this past revelation, in 2026, someone put together a "meme" of sorts comparing the supposed events in that 2024 graph to what people in the past had predicted the future to be.
- For whatever reason, that "meme" was put through AI post-processing of some sort. Was the attempt to "upscale" this image after it had been passed around and been automatically compressed down by various platforms? Or was it someone using some newfangled AI-assisted compression technique in an attempt to create a smaller file size than any of the more traditional compression techniques? No idea. Whatever the reason was, the image was left with a bunch of nonsense text on the graph portion.
- I saw this "meme" and decided to share it here without scrutinizing the text on the graph. As mentioned in my first point, this graph was originally posted years ago, so I was already familiar with it and did not feel the need to read into it in the image I was sharing. I felt safe assuming it was just the same graph that I remember seeing years back.
- After users here called out the nonsense text, I just recreated the "meme" from scratch. I grabbed the original screenshot of the graph from Twitter and a stock photo of clouds, and then combined them along with some text so that this is more-or-less the same exact "meme", just without the AI gibberish.
