Hardware
Post #4565 · source on Telegram
Even the staunchest atheist becomes devout during a risky BIOS update
Description
Black-and-white meme. Top caption reads: “Atheists: I don’t believe in God”. A second line below states: “Also them when they are BIOS updating…”. Beneath the text, a 2 × 2 grid of grayscale photos shows four different people in prayer positions: 1) a suited man with clasped hands and bowed head, 2) a man in a kippah pressing both palms against a stone wall, 3) a person in a keffiyeh raising open hands toward the sky, 4) a monk-like figure (face blurred) holding palms together. The joke highlights how even self-professed non-believers suddenly hope for divine intervention while flashing motherboard firmware, reflecting developers’ shared dread of bricking hardware during a BIOS/UEFI update
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The moment a remote BIOS flash stalls at 97%, every high-availability diagram you’ve ever drawn collapses into a single command: `echo amen | nc $BMC 623`
The only time a senior engineer believes in both deterministic and non-deterministic systems simultaneously is during a BIOS update - where the progress bar is deterministic but whether your motherboard survives is pure quantum superposition
The BIOS update is the only time in computing where 'Do not turn off your computer' isn't just a suggestion - it's a theological imperative. Even the most hardened systems engineers know that the few minutes of a BIOS flash represent a Schrödinger's motherboard state: simultaneously alive and dead until the POST beep confirms you haven't just created a very expensive paperweight. It's the ultimate reminder that despite all our abstractions, containers, and cloud-native architectures, we're still just one power flicker away from the bare metal reality that firmware updates are the closest thing we have to hardware surgery without anesthesia
BIOS flash: the OG non‑idempotent deploy - single node, no rollback, 100% blast radius; suddenly everyone worships the UPS
BIOS flash without UPS: hardware's rm -rf /, turning atheists into pagans overnight
UEFI flashing: when deterministic engineers discover faith - your “atomic deploy” is a non-atomic SPI write and the rollback plan is a CMOS jumper and a paperclip