The Docker compose file is YAML. My reading of YAML's standard is that it must be in one of the Unicode encodings, and the smell I get from the article is that

The Docker compose file is YAML. My reading of YAML's standard is that it must be in one of the Unicode encodings, and the smell I get from the article is that it is probably in windows-1250 (the CP Windows would use for Polish; Mikołaj is a Polish name, 0xb3, the octet in the error, is the Windows-1250 encoding of "ł"); thus, it isn't valid YAML. I'm not sure what sane behavior Python could have here besides errorring. > EVERY language should _try_ to handle Unicode such that if a data sequence were valid before it remains valid after. This sequence was never valid, and never will be. > in the article's case, the correct answer is GIGO. Just pass it through and hope it continues to work. Dear God, no; emit a diagnostic and abort. Countless decades of existing code have shown time and again that "plow forward with some hot garbage" is not a good idea. But that ignores that … that that isn't how any of this works; the YAML parse is going to want to emit strings, which the incoming data isn't.