Some software bloat is OK

This article is awesome - I love the meme

As a former CS major (30 years ago) that went into IT for my first career, I've wondered about bloat and this article gave me the layman explanation.

I am still blown away by the comparison of pointing out that the WEBP image of SuperMario is larger in size than the Super Mario game itself!

The Mario picture is very misleading. It's not lossless. It has way too many colours. An actual lossless screenshot (albeit not as wide) is only 3KB:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NES_Super_Mario_Bros.png

Sorry. My bad. Looks like the size is also very sensitive to the method of compression and software as well (regardless of being PNG or WEBP). I found another PNG picture here https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/where-do-all-the-bytes-com... it is 64KiB. When you stretch the image, it's also likely to add kilobytes. I guess I need to update the image.

But anyways, I think it's still very demonstrative when an entire game size is smaller than its picture. Also consider that even your tiny PNG example (3.37KiB) still cannot fit into the the RAM / VRAM of a NES console which shows the contrast between these eras in regards of amounts of memory.