Even after Py2 -> Py3, the platform-dependent decoding sitting around for _so long_ was so annoying. Just constantly running into issues with file reads because

Even after Py2 -> Py3, the platform-dependent decoding sitting around for _so long_ was so annoying. Just constantly running into issues with file reads because servers were configured a certain way. "Just specify the encoding" is like... fine, but annoying when it's some third party script I just can't use. I'm at least glad we had some guarantees from being Python 3.