Same here. The joke kind of works if you think of router firmware (DD-WRT and the like), but that’s not really something guests tend to mess with. Thankfully.
The explainxkcd article didn’t help much this time. There was one comment under it which another comment called the only viable explanation, so I’ll copy it here in case someone can extricate some humor from it. I admit my brain just wandered off mid-sentence.
Some devices need operational firmware downloaded to them after reset, so it’s handled at boot time by a firmware downloader. A typical example is devices which have s DSP in them; the DSP’s code would be loaded into the device’s RAM designated for the purpose. For Wi-Fi, it might handle the low level details of associating with an AP, performing the WPA2 protocol for example so the device looks for the most part logically like any other network interface, e.g. Ethernet. In this case, it would have nothing to do with the firmware in the Wi-Fi AP.
