As a member of the uninitiated, it would be great if these kind of posts could include some context on what Ruff is and why this is significant?

It's a python linter, from what I've seen.

Implemented in rust, not python, so it's extremely fast. It's orders of magnitude faster than pylint itself.

How many orders of magnitude?

There's a very clear graph the first thing on ruff's GitHub page, easy to find and research yourself: https://github.com/charliermarsh/ruff Can't miss it if you take time to check out the project.