Ario Jafarzadeh

Design/music lover/husband/dad. Excited by a free 🇮🇷, well-being, gaming, AI, & magical tech that increases human flourishing.

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

If you want to sample a mix of X voices on Iran, check out this list: https://t.co/3VB4KtOsmr

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

One of our big findings in our study at Procter and Gamble was that AI blurred the lines between jobs. Now OpenAI has a similar finding.

Organizational boundaries are becoming porous, the walls thinning. Companies are going to need to think about division of labor in a new way.

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

4 words I've been saying a lot lately thanks to AI: "holy shit, it works"

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

Great piece from @danshapiro https://t.co/DRl9rOUXMv

[Behzod @beh_zod]

My friend @itsbdell regularly asks this beautiful question → “What would it look like if you took [thing] seriously?”

Answering this question has helped me make progress when I’m stuck because it:
1. Forces me to articulate - in detail - what doing [thing] looks like
2. Allows me to determine whether or not I’m willing to do number 1.

Six years ago, I was reading @sivers book “Hell Yeah or No” and he describes exactly what it felt like to leave Slack and start Yet Another Studio.

I found myself excited about each step, because it wasn’t friction, it was getting me closer to what I wanted. It was part of the journey.

So much of life is trade-offs. Make the ones you’re excited about.

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

From March…

Bottom line: No matter how easy or how hard it is, most people just don't want to make stuff for themselves, no matter what it is. The economy goes round because people buy stuff from other people who are good at making those things. I know software makers have a hard time believing other people just don't want to spend all day making software for themselves, but they don't.

[John Maeda @johnmaeda]

RL-ING YOURSELF: The LLM can write better than you, by a standard which others are measured. But you write better than the LLM, by a standard which you measure yourself by. To remain yourself, it is important to write by yourself by. At least if you care to be. Yourself. And not just. The Others.

Because writing wrong, and actively correcting yourself, is how you learn. It is the path to becoming your new self. It is how you keep growing. It is how you remain. Yourself.

—JM updated a year later

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

Never meet a Farsi speaker

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

opus 5 is a VERY interesting release for a few reasons

1. it showed that the general benchmarks we use today are almost completely useless now

opus 5 is nowhere near fable in practical use, not even close. anyone who’s used it meaningfully can tell this very quickly after a few tasks. yet opus beats fable on many benchmarks

i now trust domain specific benchmarks built with private datasets a lot more than the popular ones. perhaps the future is everyone running their own evals because the public ones are really not telling us much

2. it seems with the 5 series, anthropic is trying a new way of training models

previously, the same generation of sonnet and opus were often released at the same time or sonnet comes out before opus, which indicates sonnet and opus were trained by separate pipelines in parallel

with the 5 series, it was very clear that they trained mythos first, and then distilled it into sonnet and opus. it seems this approach has a big influence on the models

seeing sonnet 5 being a flop and opus 5 getting pretty mixed reviews already, i’m not sure this is working out

3. “how pleasant is it to work with the model” used to be a strength in claude, but now it’s not. honestly, grok is my favorite right now on the “pleasant” dimension. kimi is not bad either

it feels like both anthropic and openai are giving RLHF less care, in favor of scalable RL that’s machine verifiable

this almost looks like AI is directing humans to build a world that’s more friendly for machines rather than humans, and most humans don’t even realize they are being manipulated to help with that

almost every new generation of frontier models now talk more jargons, need more steering to do what you want, and are just less fun to work with

if this continues, AI will start to speak their own language that looks like English but average humans can’t understand. they will choose to do things that their human user never asked for. are we already failing at alignment?

[John Maeda @johnmaeda]

FUTURE/PAST: My mom would often write down motivational sayings that she cribbed from the National Enquirer, People Magazine, Reader’s Digest into various notebooks she kept. Those three academic journals 😎 were the source of much of my learnings as a child growing up in the back-of-house at our family-run tofu factory in Seattle.

It was nice to find these two quotes in my late mom’s various belongings as they resonate with me. This particular book she had ends on 140 quotes, which I find to be such a funny coincidence in remembering the early character limit of Twitter as having been 140. Eeery …

139/ The more you say NO, the more valuable and meaningful it is when you decide to say YES.

140/ Your future is created from your past.

This is definitely a good last page from her. —JM

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

@beh_zod @SlackHQ @NotionHQ You should chat with @legofish

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

@hemeon I think of it like modern art… yeah, you *could* have done it too, but few do, and if it solves a real problem, paying for the hassle of not having to maintain the thing has value

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

@thsottiaux Do y’all have UXR as an in-house function? Just curious as it’s fallen out of fashion over the last few years

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

Trying the new ChatGPT desktop app now with the work stuff in it. Astounding that these apps don’t allow for fluidity between their various modes. A Work session has no ability to read or get awareness of a lengthy ChatGPT session I had with it in the same app. WTF

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

A knob for adjusting the effort level? This is really not compelling. Work on something that obviates the entire need for self-adjusting the effort level

[Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus]

OpenAI reveals Codex Micro (their first hardware product, so to say)

OpenAI’s $230 Codex Micro is a compact control deck for agentic coding, with RGB status keys, shortcuts for common Codex actions, and a dial for adjusting reasoning effort.

Built with Work Louder, it works on Mac and Windows and is designed to make managing multiple agents feel faster, more tactile, and less dependent on constantly switching between chats.

It’s a bit gimmicky, but one thing is clear: OpenAI works within and with the community, developing cool products that are fun and capture the zeitgeist.

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

Just had the oddest AI conversation of my life with @VerizonSupport’s 611 assistant. It was like a caricature of an offshore human customer service rep with an uncanny valley accent. Kept repeating itself and was overly polite, not matching the tone of the call. Strange times

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

If you told me during my Windows 3.1 formative years that using a PC would look like this in 2026, I’d say you were high

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

New ChatGPT voice update is a great example of “human parity fallacy.”

I don’t want AI speaking to me like a human with crutch words and ill-placed interjections. I prefer a “just enough” approach.

We’ve already covered this ground with the printing press. I don’t want to read cursive handwriting for digital information either

[Amanda Orson @amandaorson]

The faster technology moves, the more I think about Bezos' question

What won't change in the next 10 years?

Things I've been writing down over time:

- Humans will always need shelter, food, energy, and healthcare.
- The desire for ownership and the accumulation of wealth.
- The physical world will move more slowly than the digital one.
- Every increase in technological capability, especially AI, will require more energy.
- People and businesses will continue to need access to capital.
- Capital will continue to seek returns that exceed inflation.
- Underwriting methods evolve, but demand for credit (loans) is persistent.
- Trust remains scarce and becomes increasingly valuable as content, code, and fraud become cheaper.
- Verified identities and reputation becomes more important as information becomes abundant and synthetic.
- Long-term wealth creation and dynastic (multi-generational) thinking predate modern technology, and will persist.
- Coordination and transaction costs never fully disappear; market friction will continue to justify the existence of firms and intermediaries.
- People will continue to compete for status.
- Consumers will pay a premium for products and services that confer status.
- Time remains fixed at 24 hours per day.
- But attention is a finite resource and an enduring constraint.
- Products that credibly save time (or enable delegation) have a perpetual market.
- Inaccessible, proprietary data will be a persistent moat. The more inaccessible and difficult to aggregate, the deeper the moat.
- People want accountability, recourse, and clearly identifiable responsibility when things go wrong.
- Regulation consistently lags technological innovation.
- Compliance requirements, licensing, and regulatory moats persist even when machines can perform the underlying task.
- Local knowledge remains valuable and difficult to replicate.
- Heterogeneous markets (like real estate) continue to reward people with deep contextual understanding.
- Incumbent organizations tend to underinvest in disrupting their own businesses, which always creates opportunities for challengers.

Bezos' insight on what wouldn't change in 10 years was "Customers will always want lower prices and faster delivery."

It's boring/ true, but I think that's the point.

Everything we build today can and will be rebuilt more cheaply, faster by someone else.

Build on the invariants, not the trends.

What have I missed?

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

@PahlaviComms Listen up @fpleitgenCNN

[Ario Jafarzadeh @ario]

Plato already had this covered:

https://t.co/hUUpRdoXZG

https://t.co/GK94LXdLcO

[Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt]

Software quality =

How much team uses it themselves
x
How similar team is to users
x
Taste for making good decisions