The online whiteboard of Kristofer Palmvik
I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach. This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of a icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”
The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster. Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.
Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6— Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in this note.
Concept curators operate in environments where the constraint is not information, but interpretation. Businesses are flooded with dashboards, metrics, reports, trends, think pieces, and opinions. The problem is rarely a lack of data. It’s deciding which signals matter and which can be ignored.
Our profession is learning Both as product developers (in the wider sense of the word), and consultants. The tools, ways, ideas and needs are ever changing. We have chosen to be in school for ever. Welcome! We need to keep learning in the paradigm shift too. But when you do - learn deeper, reflect and think deeply. Use the tool, but focus on the practice. Do the practice but try to understand the principle behind it.
Going forward, we will use traditional settings UIs even less because chat has the potential to become the “meta interface.” It’s both our window into the product and the way we shape our experience with the product — the interface for the interface.
SSE in .NET 10 is the perfect middle ground for simple, one-way updates like dashboards, notification bells, and progress bars. It's lightweight, HTTP-native, and easy to secure using your existing middleware. However, SignalR remains the robust, battle-tested choice for complex bi-directional communication or massive scale requiring a backplane.
This post is about the brute-force reverse engineering of binary (compiled) programs using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate this two-part problem: decompilation and conversion to a modern programming language.
tldraw, the outstanding collaborative drawing library, are moving their test suite to a private repository - apparently in response to Cloudflare's project to port Next.js to use Vite in a week using AI. They also filed a joke issue, now closed to Translate source code to Traditional Chinese.
Rails-like framework for React, Node.js and Prisma. Build your app in a day and deploy it with a single CLI command.
Create executable demo documents that show and prove an agent's work. Showboat helps agents build markdown documents that mix commentary, executable code blocks, and captured output. These documents serve as both readable documentation and reproducible proof of work. A verifier can re-execute all code blocks and confirm the outputs still match.
All of those things had to be true at the same time. Well-documented target API, comprehensive test suite, solid build tool underneath, and a model that could actually handle the complexity. Take any one of them away and this doesn't work nearly as well.
A tiny library that makes logos look good together. No framework required. Real-world logos are messy. Some have padding, some don't. Some are dense and blocky, others are thin and airy. Put them in a row and they look chaotic. Logo Soup fixes this automatically.
A deep dive into the math behind making mismatched brand logos actually look good together. And a tiny React library that does it for you.
Certainly, there must be a way to line up a list of icons or logos so they are somewhat proportional to one another. I haven’t seen anyone write about this issue specifically, so I’m naming it the “Proportional Image Normalization Formula,” which is a grandiose name for what is basically grade school math
The LLM experiment has taught us one thing: people are willing to tolerate error, explain themselves, collaborate, trust. Today, they are choosing to invest this positive energy into a synthetic slop extruder. But tomorrow, they could invest it into their fellow human beings, if they chose to do so.
WebMCP API is a new JavaScript interface that allows web developers to expose their web application functionality as “tools” - JavaScript functions with natural language descriptions and structured schemas that can be invoked by agents, browser’s agents, and assistive technologies. Web pages that use WebMCP can be thought of as Model Context Protocol [MCP] servers that implement tools in client-side script instead of on the backend. WebMCP enables collaborative workflows where users and agents work together within the same web interface, leveraging existing application logic while maintaining shared context and user control.
WebMCP aims to provide a standard way for exposing structured tools, ensuring AI agents can perform actions on your site with increased speed, reliability, and precision. By defining these tools, you tell agents how and where to interact with your site, whether it's booking a flight, filing a support ticket, or navigating complex data. This direct communication channel eliminates ambiguity and allows for faster, more robust agent workflows.
The SQL Server Maintenance Solution comprises scripts for running backups, integrity checks, and index and statistics maintenance on all editions of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 2014, SQL Server 2016, SQL Server 2017, SQL Server 2019, SQL Server 2022, and SQL Server 2025. The solution is based on stored procedures. The solution has been designed for the most mission-critical environments, and it is used in many organizations around the world.
Instead of copying the Spotify model, or model from another random company (e.g. FitBit, John Deere), grow your own Agile model. It is the only long-term path to success. Instead, focus on the things that Spotify had going underneath the hood
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