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).
q3k•Jun 28, 2026
Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine.
(This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)
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•Jun 28, 2026
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•Jun 28, 2026
Same is true for Croatia.. food from Slavonia (near Zagreb) is very different from the coastal regions (Istria and Dalmatia)
tau255•Jun 28, 2026
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).
broken-kebab•Jun 28, 2026
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•Jun 28, 2026
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•Jun 28, 2026
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.
keiferski•Jun 28, 2026
Yes it's similar, but certainly not more than Ukrainian/Russian/Belarusian food.
gedy•Jun 28, 2026
Being Catholic helps too
keiferski•Jun 28, 2026
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.
0bytes•Jun 28, 2026
“Polish uses the English/Latin alphabet” - was it developed back when the US and Italy were allies in ancient Roman times?
gdwatson•Jun 28, 2026
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•Jun 28, 2026
What’s hard to understand here?
smitty1e•Jun 28, 2026
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•Jun 28, 2026
What?
TRiG_Ireland•Jun 28, 2026
The linguistic, historical, and cultural information is so fascinating, and really well explained.
nashashmi•Jun 28, 2026
This was a fun read. Here is the tl;dr version:
> 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•Jun 28, 2026
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.
atombender•Jun 28, 2026
(2015)
paweladamczuk•Jun 28, 2026
It's just like the new Copilot 365. Every time I try to type "Ć", Copilot pops up. I have to close the app constantly.
StefanBatory•Jun 28, 2026
Best part is that it installs itself automatically, without prompting me for that.
Thank you Microsoft; nice to see your QA works well.
Random09•Jun 28, 2026
Every little thing like that creates a new Linux user.
After switching I've never looked back.
Posted from SteamOS.
TheRealPomax•Jun 28, 2026
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.
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•Jun 28, 2026
When a Polish speaker searches for something with “ł”, do they expect to also see “l”?
kuboble•Jun 28, 2026
No.
But the other way around sometimes yes.
f33d5173•Jun 28, 2026
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.
egorfine•Jun 28, 2026
> 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•Jun 28, 2026
>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•Jun 28, 2026
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.
11 Comments
(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.
That is, you may well get sucked down a rabbit hole in order to accomplish a simple task.
> 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.
Thank you Microsoft; nice to see your QA works well.
Posted from SteamOS.
Thanks Microsoft, stellar!
But the other way around sometimes yes.
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.
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.
It comes bundled with xorg nowadays, you can use:
in xorg.conf