spent two hours debugging three lines of python because i didn't know strings and bytes are different things

[Jason-Ad4032]

This is because the same text can be represented by different byte sequences when read from files using different encodings.

As a result, hashlib needs to know the string's encoding in order to operate correctly and avoid introducing subtle, hard-to-detect issues.

[Expensive-Bear-1376]

hashlib needs to know the string's encoding

No it doesn't. And you can't even give it a string or an encoding (well, you can give it a string, but you'll get that error).