As others hsve pointed out, it's a very coarse (and rather arbitrary) categorization.

E.g. both Turkish and Russian are in Category 3, but Turkish is trivial compared to Russian.

Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and follows easily defined rules that fit about two pages of easily digestible tables.

In comparison, Russian is a separate class tought in Russian schools for four years to native Russian speakers. And you still get people who can't properly inflect numerals, for example.

Turkish has a completely different vocabulary (loanwords aside) and a completely different grammar.

"I want to swim" in Russian is "ja hoću plavatj", "I" + "want" + "to swim". The only difficulties are the conjugation of "want" and the aspect of "to swim". In Turkish it's "yüzmek istiyorum", where "-mek" is "to" and "-um" is "I". Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.

> Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.

As a native Russian speaker who speaks English and Turkish:

The question isn't about alienness. It's about difficulty. Turkish is trivial compared to Russian. You can learn all the grammar rules you'd ever need in a week or so (though most study materials make it harder than necessary). The rest is just learning vocabulary. Which is just as alien to an English speaker as Russian.

As for the example...

Here's a valid three word sentence in Russian: Ya idu domoj (I'm going home).

Depending on context, mood, feel, etc. any permutation of those words is a valid sentence: ya domoj idu, idu ya domoj, idu domoj ya, domoj ya idu, domoj ya idu.

And that's before we get into inflections, conjugations, gender etc. that neither English nor Turkish have. Or somewhat arbitrary pronunciation rules (korova is pronounced kahrohva) whereas in Turkish every word is pronounced exactly as written (with very few quite regular contractions in regular speech like yapacağım -> yapıcam) etc.

> The question isn't about alienness. It's about difficulty.

The original link is specifically about difficulty to native English speakers, which is certainly linked to its alienness.

Turkish is regular, has well specified rules you can learn in a week, is extremeley easy to read (pronounce as written, there's no floating/jumping/changing stress). Oh, and the alphabet is latin-based.

Russian: extremely complicated grammar using concepts entirely alien to English (declensions, inflections, conjugates, grammatical cases, genders, transgressives, and even plurals are weird), has free-form-not-really sentence structure, jumping stress. Oh, and a completely different alphabet to boot.

"the alphabet is Latin based"

Yes, phonetic spelling but you won't be able to read anything much before WW1.

As if that is a required criteria for learning Turkish, or for assessing its difficulty.

Note: 99.9% of Turks are not able to read much of anything before WW1.

Exactly. Historical amnesia which is partly what Kemal Atatürk was after. Year Zero.

Isn't English also a separate class taught in English schools to native English speakers?

Not always well. One of the problems is that English speakers do not get taught the proper parts of speech. I learnt far more about English from learning other languages than I ever did in English class. We would get told off for bad spelling and grammar, but very little on the actual mechanics.

English classes (at least at my high school) were largely about literature, less the language itself. Though I did take one elective class on grammar.

Yes.

All through middle and high school, so for 7 years from around 10 to 16. It did become one eventually in primary school, so probably the last 2 or 3 years there.

Not for four years, for all eleven years...

> However, according to Apple's docs, they only allow alternative app stores in the EU and Japan

Also: even though Apple is explicitly told not to censor these alternative stores, Apple effectively does this through notarization

> fines on American companies bigger than revenue from your entire tech industry?

1. As someone already mentioned, taxes != revenue

2. On top of that, "public internet companies" != "entire tech industry"

3. On top of that, tax evasion and creative accounting by "public internet companies" companies is well known, documented, and is subject to additional fines (not as often or as much as they deserve)

4. On top of that "announce these new fines monthly like clockwork" speaks volumes about the state of the "public internet companies" and there continuous disregard for the law.

Of all issues they chose "poor advertisers can't get their hands on user data"

It depends on the algorithm which often preferences "similarity" (for whatever definition of similarity is).

This year I got into some pretty generic blues/rock when driving and really liked one of the songs in some playlist/radio [1]. Little did I know that the song was AI. So when I started a radio based on that song, the resulting radio was 99% AI though I didn't even realise that until after a second/third listen through.

So you can really fall through the rabbit hole.

[1] He Talked A Big Game, Played A Small Tune by Dumpster Grooves. A better song than most human slop that sells stadiums. https://youtu.be/L3Uyfnp-jag?si=mPBgJ_qO2AF80FGP

Wow, that channel is misrepresenting its songs as lost records. Pure cancer.

Yup.

There's also obvious care and human creation there as well.

They have several "artists". Bertha Mae Lightning gets the better lyrics and artangements. Virgil Dillard gets simpler tunes and the occasional weird grammar/lyrics. And so on.

I even saved that radio as a playlist to show people: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/072Wp3cFsziKBQlnglF5XM?si=... It has both obvious AI ("artist" by the name of promptgenix) and not-so-obvious (Enlly Blue, Dumpster Grooves).

The weird/sad/funny/ironic part? Many of those songs are still better than whatever Taylor Swift and a lot of other artists produce.

wat

> I am sure that they will come back and optimize, but tbh this is not the priority with a new site where the hits will top out at ~ 10k / hour.

You don't need to "come back and optimize" if you don't start with needing a progress indicator for a "transform: scale" animation to display a single static download link. The number of hits is not relevant.

Neither do you need to do three separate fetch requests for static plain text examples that you then laboriously dump into the DOM by creating dummy elements, putting content in there, then looking up and cloning `code` tags to then dump those code tags on the page.

I think you might have an issue with modern frontend practices. That's okay, but there's a disproportionate amount of hate towards Ruby's redesigned page. And it looks perfectly fine. HTPP/2 parallel requests aren't that big a deal, all things considered.

The website looks cool to me, makes me want to try Ruby.

He doesn't hate Ruby's redesigned page. He is complaining about yet another example of waste of resources that clients have to do because you want your page look "dynamic". Please, make sure and be aware were these comments are being posted, a site that it's both "dynamic" and doesn't require much resources from the client.

This is a page that appeared on HN front page news.

So what do you expect? People ignoring the frankly idiotic choices made that you now defend with "they will come back and optimize it"?

> HTPP/2 parallel requests aren't that big a deal, all things considered.

I literally see a progress counter that is for some reason required to display the most trivial animation to show ... a single static link. On a gigabit connection. All that takes up to two seconds.

On that same connection the same thing happen to three purely three static examples of code that somehow need up to two seconds to appear and to shift the entire content of the page.

Both are especially jarring on mobile.

Hmm, I don't see it. The animation loads instantly for me on a cold visit. The examples were already there. I tried it in Orion and things were a bit slower, Firefox too. But still not the multi-second delay, and I'm here on a ~30Mbps copper line with some latency. (Thanks syndicus!)

That said, I've no reason to defend the page. It just didn't strike me as bad, but I can see how others are experiencing a bad page.

Here's mobile experience: https://youtube.com/shorts/LFIQeEL2S0U

The same is on desktop Firefox. For some reason youtube can't process the screencast for that :)

So, in order to show a single download link it needs to load an animation with visible loading progress even on a gigabit connection. It takes a few seconds to appear. All to show a scaling animation that can be achieved with a couple of lines of CSS.

Same for absolutely static code examples that take a few seconds to load and shift the content away.

Why?

You are a rare species, on the verge of extinction.

Unfortunately, most people today probably don't care about what you're talking about. (I do, but I've decided not to comment on it anymore, because it would probably drive me crazy :)

The site is for developers and most of the rare species are developers.

The designer fail to target their audience.

Ruby is not targeting those kind of developers though.

It's C/C++ developers that typically prefer a no-fluff approach.

As polyglot developer, I am also for a no-fluff approach and vanilajs for the win.

One of the reasons Next.js is attractive to me, is exactly they have rediscovered why so many of us have stayed with SSR.

> no-fluff … Next.js

Hmm. We can agree to disagree on the definition of fluff.

Sure, if you ignore the SSR and SSG part, which sadly most nodejs stuff lacks.

Additionally, Next.js should only be used when SaaS product vendor doesn't allow for any other option, which sadly is the case when making themselves sellable to magpie developers, while riding VC money until the IPO takes off.

I rather deliver, than do yak shaving, but at least can deliver only HTML and CSS if I chose to.

> couple of lines of CSS

This is bit too much to ask. Just check the source it is swollen with Tailwind.

Interesting, never seen "swollen" used to describe code bloat, but it creates powerful imagery now that I read your sentence.

Sure but if someones duplicates 50x this:

> flex-shrink-0 transition-transform duration-300 hover:scale-105 w-[160px] h-[144px] 2xl:w-[200px] 2xl:h-[180px]

just to avoid CSS, not sure they would bother with CSS animation.

Spotify pays 70% of revenue to rights holders.

Why don't you ask them where the money inteded for artists is going? You know? The small insignificant companies of Sony, Warner Music, EMI that own the vast majority of music and own all the contracts?

They have also arbitrarily decided not to pay out if you fall below a certain threshold, which hits smaller artists as well. Of course part of the problem is that the pay out is so low, so if you don't have millions of streams it's not worth it.

That is the decision of artists to sign with a mega corp. Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not. You can take your 70% or whatever the exact number is with no.middle man if you like.

Unfortunately the number of people producing music and the quantity of it is much higher than the number of people able to consume it. And culture is simply network effects. You listen to what your friends or family listen to. Thus there are only a small number of artists who make it big in a cultural sense.

And one of the cheat codes for cracking the cultural barrier is to use a mega corp to advertise for you but if course the devil takes his cut.

Anyway AI is coming for all these mega corps. If you haven't tried SUNO and many of you have it's amazing how convincingly it can crack specific Genres and churn out quality music. Call it slop if you like but the trajectory is obvious.

As a consumer you will get you own custom music feed singing songs about YOUR life or desired life and you will share those on your social media account and some of those will go viral most will die.

Content creation as a career is probably dead.

(a) you can’t directly upload to Spotify. You need an intermediary in the shape of a distributor. Whether that’s a label or a DIY platform like DistroKid.

(b) Spotify introduced a threshold of 1000 streams before they pay anything. This disincentivises low quality warbling autotuned ditties as they are unlikely to pass that threshold. (It’s more nuanced - you don’t just need 1000 streams from a handful of accounts as that could easily be gamed.)

(c) Suno and Udio have been forced into licensing deals with the major record companies. The real threat will be when we see an open sourced Qwen or DeepSeek style genAI for music creation.

There is a pretty interesting open source music AI named ACE-Step. Currently its quality is at about the Stable Diffusion 1.0 level, and they'll release a new version soon (hopefully in January).

That’s very interesting, thank you! Do you have any info on how it compares to Suno/Udio etc? I don’t know if you saw the news about Anna’s Archive having effectively scraped the majority of the Spotify library. It will be very interesting to see how this impacts on the next generation of generative models for music. Any thoughts there?

> Any tom dick or harry can create a Spotify account, load their warbling autotuned ditty written by themselves ( or AI ) on any theme, in any genre and wait for fame or fortune to appear or not

No, you literally can't.