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Nina Kalinina

nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt

This profile might be managed by Terraform.

Or, as my "professional" email signature says, "IT expert and mixed media artificer".

Despite being a late millennial, I grew up with a ZX Spectrum and kept using an i486 as my main PC until 2008.

I have a degree in electrical engineering, majoring in industrial and microelectronics, but somehow ended up building massively distributed computer systems. I helped to roll out HTTP/2 at a Google competitor, then eventually helped to ensure that Instagram deletes the user data that users asked to delete, and until recently was a site reliability engineer for a big chunk of iCloud. I learned a lot during my long-ish career, and this knowledge makes me sad and keeps me up at night sometimes.

I never post here in a "working adult" capacity, and wouldn't dare to speak for my current or past employers. Instead, I engage in playful shitpost and creative exploration of technologies that have no commercial applications.

Feel free to DM me, I'll try to reply to all!

mastodon (AP)

Nina Kalinina

5 months ago • •

Nina Kalinina
5 months ago • •

TIL solitaire in Windows 10 has ads that can be turned off with a paid subscription. 💀

in reply to Nina Kalinina

mvu

in reply to Nina Kalinina • 5 months ago • •

look how far we've come

in reply to Nina Kalinina

prom™️

in reply to Nina Kalinina • 5 months ago • •

I hope the old binaries still run, or this may lead to serious infrastructure collapse.

in reply to prom™️

Nina Kalinina

in reply to prom™️ • 5 months ago • •

@promovicz IIRC there were rumors that Windows 11 might eventually deprecate 32-bit support. But there's Wine for Windows to bypass that. And Wine for Ubuntu on WSL, too.

@prom™️

in reply to Nina Kalinina

Ethan Blanton

in reply to Nina Kalinina • 5 months ago • •

@promovicz 32-bit solitaire?!?! What are all those bits for?

@prom™️

in reply to Ethan Blanton

Nina Kalinina

in reply to Ethan Blanton • 5 months ago • •

@elb there are multiple versions of Solitaire - they have different decks, and different target architecture. I'm curious to compare winsol.exe from 16-bit windows, 32-bit NT 3.51, 32-bit 4.00.95, and perhaps 64-bit 2000 and idk Windows 7 - but who has time for that t_t

@Ethan Blanton

in reply to Nina Kalinina

Ethan Blanton

in reply to Nina Kalinina • 5 months ago • •

It would be pretty interesting to identify when/if they just rewrote the darn thing. I suspect not until very late in the game -- I know notepad.exe retained its 64 kB file size limit for a very long time because it was just a 16-bit segmented executable.

in reply to Ethan Blanton

Nina Kalinina

in reply to Ethan Blanton • 5 months ago • •

@elb apparently Solitaire kept getting new features all the time. Windows 2000 got new improved UX, then in XP they replaced the arts, Vista offered improved statistician, and Windows 7 version seemingly got 3D effects. The original binaries were dropped in Windows 10 and replaced by an applet with ads.

@Ethan Blanton

in reply to Nina Kalinina

Ethan Blanton

in reply to Nina Kalinina • 5 months ago • •

Well, that explains why I didn't know, I quit using Windows as a daily driver before '95 (3.1 and NT 4 were my last hurrahs) and basically never touched anything XP or later except in a VM for software testing.