I believe the fact that Polish uses the Latin alphabet (with a small Slavic twist to express the extra sounds) meant it was much easier for Poland to align itself westward. I think the average Pole is much closer culturally to the Western neighbours than to a Ukrainian or Russian (maybe apart from cuisine).
reddalo 6 minutes ago [-]
Like Kazakhstan, which decided to switch from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet [1] in order to align more with Europe and less with Russia.
I wonder if Ukraine will do the same in a distant future...
The adoption of the Latin alphabet was itself a move to align itself westward, with kingdoms in the Latin world, not the Byzantine one, and tied to adopting Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy.
gedy 3 hours ago [-]
Being Catholic helps too
q3k 3 hours ago [-]
Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine.
(This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)
grvbck 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, a common use of bread, potatoes, cabbage/other vegetables, hearty meat dishes etc but the Polish kitchen is closer to Ukrainian/Russian in technique/ingredients.
Barszcz, pierogi, fermented everything, pickles, sour rye, and many dishes built around wheat/rye, mushrooms, dairy, and Eastern-style fillings are much more like Ukrainian/Belarusian/Russian food.
The biggest German influences are probably the sausages and the beer culture.
CurtHagenlocher 3 hours ago [-]
How reasonably can German cuisine be described as a single unified thing? My mother was from East Prussia and my father from Swabia and their "home" cuisines were pretty dissimilar -- if for no other reason than climate.
minkeymaniac 2 hours ago [-]
Same is true for Croatia.. food from Slavonia (near Zagreb) is very different from the coastal regions (Istria and Dalmatia)
broken-kebab 2 hours ago [-]
It's also true for Belarus, Baltics, and some parts of Ukraine. Generally, we can speak about North-Eastern European cuisine with potatoes, secale flour breads, and various pickled things. And that name will make a lot of everybody upset, cause everybody in those lands pretend they are "Central". Americans would not believe how many "geographical centers of Europe" are claimed there.
rconti 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure how surprised Americans would be to learn that there are so many "centers of Europe". After all, we all know that Colorado is in "the west", Texas in the "southwest", and, clearly, "the South" is located in the geographical southeast :D
broken-kebab 21 minutes ago [-]
These American peculiarities are funny too, but they are mostly historical, and from that perspective have reasonable explanation. In turn "we are not Eastern, but Central" is relatively recent PR-born madness. Somebody decided that EE often associates with questionable things like alcohol consumption somehow, so the solution is to separate yourself from other drinkers by claiming being completely different "Central" kind. Nobody stops drinking meanwhile, because why would you? I simplify the story, of course, but the logic is exactly like that.
tau255 3 hours ago [-]
Due to Partitions of Poland a lot of of territory was under Prussian influence for over a century - that had to have some culinary effect (other than forced germanization).
keiferski 1 hours ago [-]
Yes it's similar, but certainly not more than Ukrainian/Russian/Belarusian food.
Best part is that it installs itself automatically, without prompting me for that.
Thank you Microsoft; nice to see your QA works well.
TheRealPomax 2 hours ago [-]
And every time you press it, an entire VM gets spun up, fully provisioned, and then set to LLM processing mode even though all you'll be doing is immediately closing the app again.
Thanks Microsoft, stellar!
f33d5173 2 hours ago [-]
The real issue here is first that browsers don't expose a simple way to check for key combinations and second that developers don't bother building their own. You'll find on any number of sites that an intended key combination can also be invoked with additional modifiers of alt or shift or whatnot. Even here, the code shown only fixes the broader issue on windows; alt+cmd+s still gets blocked.
There should be a proposal for browsers to expose a property on the keydown/up/press event containing a code for the key combination. Something like "CTRL+S", "CTRL+ALT+S", etc. The programmer could then switch over this property rather than having to check key codes and modifiers manually.
I would also propose to any web developers that they build this property themselves in their own code and check against it instead of checking modifiers directly. Not only would it protect against bugs like in the OP, it would also be a lot more convenient to use.
notathrowaway51 3 hours ago [-]
Fun fact: when treated with unicode Normalization Form Canonical Decomposition, 8 out of 9 polish letters (ż,ó,ć,ę,ś,ą,ź,ń) break down into base letter + combining diacritical mark, but ł stays intact. That means you can't use sqlite's unicode61 remove_diacritics tokenizer to normalize polish text for FTS.
ks2048 1 hours ago [-]
When a Polish speaker searches for something with “ł”, do they expect to also see “l”?
kuboble 19 minutes ago [-]
No.
But the other way around sometimes yes.
TRiG_Ireland 3 hours ago [-]
The linguistic, historical, and cultural information is so fascinating, and really well explained.
> Instead of blindly and greedily blocking Ctrl S, we could block Ctrl S only if Alt key was not pressed.
Ctrl alt s was the keyboard shortcut for the polish S. Ctrl s was blocked to improve saving. And this also blocked ctrl alt s too.
TheRealPomax 2 hours ago [-]
No, the shortcut was alt+s. That's what people typed. Then on Windows, which used alt-combinations already, it became rightalt+s (as the rightalt wasn't used by Windows itself) but instead of having a dedicated rightalt code, Windows would rewrite that key into a ctrl+alt code combination.
If you're going to tl;dr, at least get the most important detail right. People only ever pressed alt, and Windows went "and now you're pressing ctrl+alt", so that alt+s becomes ctrl+s with an alt that no one's looking for when it comes to intercepting and killing off key events.
egorfine 1 hours ago [-]
> Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian
This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.
fsckboy 1 hours ago [-]
>This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.
your "adjustment" didn't propose what other Slavic language would outnumber Ukrainian to be 3rd behind Polish and Russian, so you didn't move the needle.
egorfine 58 minutes ago [-]
Problem is that language debate in Ukraine is extremely heated and thus self-censoring kicks in. Let's just say I personally believe that there are very few native Ukrainian speakers and let me say in advance that of course I am obviously very wrong here.
smitty1e 3 hours ago [-]
As I am fond of saying: "The good news about Open Source is that you've got the source code; the bad news about Open Source is that _you've_ got the source code."
That is, you may well get sucked down a rabbit hole in order to accomplish a simple task.
npodbielski 16 minutes ago [-]
What?
atombender 3 hours ago [-]
(2015)
2 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
0bytes 3 hours ago [-]
“Polish uses the English/Latin alphabet” - was it developed back when the US and Italy were allies in ancient Roman times?
gdwatson 3 hours ago [-]
I stumbled over that too, but it makes sense when you finish the article. The ancient Romans didn’t build a lot of keyboards.
milkshakeyeah 3 hours ago [-]
What’s hard to understand here?
Rendered at 17:31:48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I wonder if Ukraine will do the same in a distant future...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180424-the-cost-of-ch...
(This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)
Barszcz, pierogi, fermented everything, pickles, sour rye, and many dishes built around wheat/rye, mushrooms, dairy, and Eastern-style fillings are much more like Ukrainian/Belarusian/Russian food.
The biggest German influences are probably the sausages and the beer culture.
Posted from SteamOS.
Thank you Microsoft; nice to see your QA works well.
Thanks Microsoft, stellar!
There should be a proposal for browsers to expose a property on the keydown/up/press event containing a code for the key combination. Something like "CTRL+S", "CTRL+ALT+S", etc. The programmer could then switch over this property rather than having to check key codes and modifiers manually.
I would also propose to any web developers that they build this property themselves in their own code and check against it instead of checking modifiers directly. Not only would it protect against bugs like in the OP, it would also be a lot more convenient to use.
But the other way around sometimes yes.
It comes bundled with xorg nowadays, you can use:
in xorg.conf> Instead of blindly and greedily blocking Ctrl S, we could block Ctrl S only if Alt key was not pressed.
Ctrl alt s was the keyboard shortcut for the polish S. Ctrl s was blocked to improve saving. And this also blocked ctrl alt s too.
If you're going to tl;dr, at least get the most important detail right. People only ever pressed alt, and Windows went "and now you're pressing ctrl+alt", so that alt+s becomes ctrl+s with an alt that no one's looking for when it comes to intercepting and killing off key events.
This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.
your "adjustment" didn't propose what other Slavic language would outnumber Ukrainian to be 3rd behind Polish and Russian, so you didn't move the needle.
That is, you may well get sucked down a rabbit hole in order to accomplish a simple task.