Abbreviation confusability is relative to { in fact one might say measured by ;-) - number? entropy? etc. } the listener/reader's knowledge/exposure, much as sound levels need a reference distance.

I have heard "bare K" refer to a great many different things, not just kilobits (transmission) or kilobytes (storage) or kilograms (drug trade) or kilometers (foot races) and on & on, but pages or items or etc.

The fundamental problem is that some humans like to abbreviate while others get caught and annoyed by the necessary ambiguity of such abbreviation. Sometimes this can be the very same human in different contexts. ;-)

In fact, there even seems to be some effect where "in the know people" do this intentionally - like kids with their slang - as a token of in-group membership. And yes, this membership is at direct odds with broader communication, by definition/construction. To me this article seems to be just complaining about "how people are". So it goes!

This is the primary complaint. The secondary one about voltage and power and the ambiguity of the prefix itself was addressed in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44059611).

> I have heard "bare K" refer to a great many different things

The worst of the worst is when it refers to kilometres. Like, "I'm selling my car on the used market and its odometer is 150k", where they mean "150k km", but stacked prefixes are not allowed in metric, so the correct notation is "150 Mm" or "150 megametres".

I get immense pushback whenever I point this out - the response is usually along the lines of "but you know what I meant", and it inherently assumes that km is the universal unit for talking about distance traveled by car.

I point out that this is as ridiculous as saying "the hard drive is 4k GB" because they grew up with gigabytes; no, the correct notation is either "4000 GB" or "4 TB".

Also regarding bare k or kilo (especially キロ in Japanese), you can say something ridiculously ambiguous like "My scooter goes up to 30k for 90k and weighs 20k" (respectively km/h, km, and kg).