Ross Gardiner
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Ross Gardiner
@rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Software engineer living in #amsterdam, where I make robots do robot things at Monumental.

I have opinions (and am interested in other people's opinions) about […]

[bridged from https://indieweb.social/@rossng on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
I'm not sure that listing the feature 'direct access to emergency exit' sends quite the right message here.
August 19, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Did some doomscrolling in the chatgpt subreddit after I saw that lots of people were complaining about losing the (unbearably sycophantic) 4o model.

I'm now pretty convinced that asking the LLM to give itself a name is a big red flag.
August 9, 2025 at 9:16 PM
Solving unimportant problems with poorly-supported browser APIs.

https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-08-09-where-should-i-aim/
August 9, 2025 at 2:48 PM
I couldn't find a nice way to detect AprilTags on my phone. So I built (well, mostly vibecoded) a little app.

https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-08-03-apriltag-detector/
August 3, 2025 at 12:52 PM
My guide to the CEFR levels of language proficiency
July 16, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141
After years in development, we will be releasing WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141! WebGPU gives web content a modern interface to the user’s graphics processor, enabling high-performance computation and rendering. We’re excited about WebGPU because we believe it will raise the ceiling for games, visualization, and local computation on the web. You can find a tutorial on WebGPU at webgpufundamentals.org, try out the WebGPU Samples, and read documentation for the API at MDN. WebGPU is defined in two W3C standards, WebGPU and WGSL, whose development Mozilla has participated in since it began in 2017. WebGPU has been available in Google Chrome since 2023, and is expected to be available in Safari 26 this fall. Although Firefox 141 enables WebGPU only on Windows, we plan to ship WebGPU on Mac and Linux in the coming months, and finally on Android. Windows was our first priority because that’s where the great majority of our users are, but we are looking forward to enabling it on the other platforms as soon as it is robust and our test coverage is adequate. (Your humble author is strictly a Linux user, so this concern is close to his heart.) Note that WebGPU has been available in Firefox Nightly on all platforms other than Android for quite some time. Firefox’s WebGPU implementation is based on WGPU, a Rust crate that provides a unified, portable interface to the low-level graphics APIs of the underlying platform: Direct3D 12, Metal, and Vulkan. WGPU is developed as an independent open source project on GitHub, but Mozilla is a major contributor. WGPU is widely used outside Firefox, and has an active community, so if you are a Rust developer interested in contributing to Firefox’s WebGPU support, WGPU is a good place to start. WebGPU is a large, complex API. We’ve focused our efforts so far on making high-visibility WebGPU applications and demos run smoothly, and we believe it should work well in Firefox 141 for many use cases. However, there is plenty of work remaining to be done to improve our performance and compliance with the specification. In particular: * Firefox uses unbuffered inter-process communication to convey web content’s requests to the GPU sandbox process, which introduces significant overhead. We addressed this in Bug 1968122, which improved performance significantly. The fix will appear in Firefox 142. * Firefox currently uses an interval timer to tell when the GPU has completed a task, adding significant latency to many applications where the task finishes quickly. There are better ways to do this, we are changing Firefox to use them. You can follow our progress in Bug 1870699. * Firefox does not yet support WebGPU’s importExternalTexture method, which lets the GPU read decompressed video content directly from the decoder. You can follow our progress in Bug 1827116. Please give WebGPU a try in Firefox! If you encounter problems, please report them in the WebGPU component in Bugzilla. As always, provide us with as detailed instructions as you can to make the bug occur, and attach the contents of about:support to the bug so we can see what kind of system you are using. It’s been a big project, but we’re done tinkering with the engine and taking test drives — we’re finally ready to roll WebGPU out of the garage and hand it over to you for daily use. We’re looking forward to seeing what you can do with WebGPU in Firefox! ### Share this: * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Like Loading...
mozillagfx.wordpress.com
July 16, 2025 at 8:44 AM
Users don't understand what LLMs can and can't do. We should probably do something about that.

https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-07-02-users-arent-comprehending-llms/
Users aren't comprehending LLMs ⌁ Ross Gardiner
The personal site of Ross Gardiner
www.rossng.eu
July 2, 2025 at 8:59 AM
It's so easy to navigate cities now that most have simple contactless payments for public transport.

Meanwhile, Paris:
June 21, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Very impressed with DJI service: 45 EUR total (incl. labour, postage) to repair a damaged gimbal. With sub-week turnaround.
June 8, 2025 at 12:42 PM
Law of physics: corporate entities are incapable of writing any text containing the phrase 'we are increasing the price'
May 6, 2025 at 11:41 AM
Build your own learning tools: a small thought about how programming computers lets you take matters into your own hands.

https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-04-27-build-your-own-learning-tools/
Build your own learning tools ⌁ Ross Gardiner
The personal site of Ross Gardiner
www.rossng.eu
April 27, 2025 at 11:39 AM
There's something immensely satisfying about putting the washing machine on at exactly the right time.
April 26, 2025 at 11:00 AM
Shameful. I can't see how they can continue to be a party to the ECHR after this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/14/hungary-poised-to-adopt-constitutional-amendment-to-ban-lgbtq-gatherings
April 14, 2025 at 7:11 PM
Back when I was living in Bristol it was barely conceivable that one day through traffic might be removed from Park Street. And, on top of that, real segregated cycling facilities through the Triangle!

Drivers nearly killed or injured me many, many times on […]

[Original post on indieweb.social]
March 21, 2025 at 11:29 PM
SQLite does TEXT COMPARISONS on my datetimes?!
March 21, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Today's entertainment: being passive-aggressively told to 'enjoy my holiday' by a Dutch man who misread some temporary road markings and nearly crashed into me.

My guy, I cycle up and down this road twice a day. You are in a rental car.
February 27, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Being able to use Rust in the browser is great, but it comes with some sharp corners. One such corner is passing arrays of Rust objects into Rust code.

In this post I look at some options and the tradeoffs that come with each.

https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-02-22-wasm-bindgen-vec-parameters/
February 22, 2025 at 12:46 PM
the pin!-ning will continue until compilation succeeds
February 20, 2025 at 12:40 PM
Recently I learned of the view that appeasement was necessary for Allied victory in WWII. Why? It was the only way to build enough public support to respond to the eventual invasion of Poland.

We are in the same bind today. Do we increase defence spending and consequently cede politics at home […]
Original post on indieweb.social
indieweb.social
February 19, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Scratching my own itch. Sometimes I just want to display a single block colour on the whole screen.

https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-02-10-tinted-stream/

https://tinted.stream/
February 9, 2025 at 11:35 PM
The create-astro animation is really rather charming.
February 8, 2025 at 1:21 PM
Try to guess: what happens if you're working on some Rust with your colleagues and paste `use serde::de::DeserializeOwned;` into Slack?
February 5, 2025 at 9:40 AM
The chancellor is talking a big game about an Oxford-Cambridge silicon valley.

Building infrastructure? Great! The region has a lot of talent and will benefit from this.

But we should remember a big reason why Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley: massive government spending on defence […]
Original post on indieweb.social
indieweb.social
January 30, 2025 at 9:56 AM
write code -> rustc starts crashing -> upgrade rustc -> new compiler lint starts complaining about wasm-bindgen macros -> upgrade wasm-bindgen -> wasm-bindgen now generates classes with private constructors, breaks TypeScript build -> write more code to fix it -> new Cargo encodes git urls in […]
Original post on indieweb.social
indieweb.social
January 29, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Rust is type-safe. TypeScript is (fairly) type-safe. So that means no weird exceptions when you mix the two, right?

It's complicated.

https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-01-20-wasm-bindgen-pitfalls/
How to crash your software with Rust and wasm-bindgen ⌁ Ross Gardiner
The personal site of Ross Gardiner
www.rossng.eu
January 20, 2025 at 1:57 PM