megopie , 9 months ago

The definition of bloat is to “swell or inflate as with liquid or gas”, so using it to refer an excessive usage of resources (like water) to maintain a server farm seems as accurate a usage as in regards to code. Or to the “inflation” of sales numbers and targets by using LLM hype also seems appropriate. Honestly it seems like the article is using a very flexible adjective to tie together a lot of related phenomenon.

They’re expressing a frustration that is similar across a wide variety topics. Namely with wasteful and unnecessary usage of time, effort, and resources to expand systems and create “stuff” that serves no purpose.