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 past predictions of the future to that 2024 graph
- 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? 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. For whatever reason, it seems someone put it through some sort of AI post-processing that left the image with some 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 just placed some text on the image so that this is more-or-less the same exact "meme", but without the AI gibberish
You really should not turn the oven on remotely, especially when you have kids. Also your food will definitely not be ruined because your kids leave the fridge open for a few hours. And for the dishwasher you can just set a timer.
Neighbors house almost burned down because of remote controlled device. It was a sauna stove instead of a oven and didn't even have network, just control panel outside of the sauna where you could turn it on without checking the stove first. Kids had left some plastic toy on the stove. Gladly they noticed the smell just in time, few minutes more and smoke would have ignited, at least according to firemen who were alerted on site.
My stove has option for remote control too via simple relay input so I could just throw in esphome or whatever on it and control it across the world over home assistant, but for that exact reason I didn't install anything on the header.
The oven is set high and has triple isolation, even after 1 h it's barely hot on the surface, plus the kids are with us when shopping. The fridge will surely compromise the food, plus consume a lot of energy. And no timer can select the mode of the dishwasher, or change or on the fly or integrate projected solar production.
I will not make my life more expensive,.more risky and less comfortable to save 1kb of internet traffic.
If you have meat or dairy items in your fridge, those can become unsafe to eat after only 2 hours. Since the cold air is more dense, it spills out the bottom of the fridge and gets replaced by room temperature air rather quickly. I've definitely eaten my fair share of questionable foods going past this, but the calculus changes if you're giving that food to other people.
As for the main point, agreed. I'm definitely not a luddite, but if I had kids who weren't yet responsible enough to not leave a fridge open for hours, I think I'd just put child locks on the fridge and make sure they had access to something else.