A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Teensy ELF Executables for Linux

I think large chunk of it is from dynamic linker, rather than glibc. At least that appear to be the case according to "file a.out". Adding "-static" option seems to prevent that:

  $ gcc -Wall -s -nostdlib tiny.o; wc -c a.out
  12780 a.out

  $ gcc -Wall -s -nostdlib tiny.o -static
  $ wc -c a.out
  4304 a.out

Bulk of what remains is page-size alignment. Linux works with 4KB pages:

  $ getconf PAGESIZE
  4096

...so it makes sense that gcc (ld, really) aligns to that. But we can dial it down:

  $ gcc -Wall -s -nostdlib tiny.o -static \
     -Wl,-zmax-page-size=64; wc -c a.out
  400 a.out

...and a bit more could be shaven by dropping Build ID:

  $ strip -R .note.gnu.build-id a.out; wc -c a.out
  344 a.out

This wonderful piece of software: https://github.com/aunali1/super-strip seem to find more things to remove, although not sure what would be that:

  $ sstrip a.out; wc -c a.out
  220 a.out

Of course, this is not quite "golfed", and I too, would love to see OP's article updated to x86_64 and current crop of gcc/binutils.

I can't imagine screen readers do a great job of seeing Greclish and giving visually impaired users a sensible pronunciation, either.