This week, I went and upgraded my digital brain. Not randomly: as a result of Garry Tan releasing GBrain, a layer for OpenClaw that ingests all your notes, files, emails, contacts, voice files, etc. and allows an agent nearly instant access to all of them.
I started this newsletter series by describing how I journaled for years and over time, I've come to a certain thesis of the world: that massive amounts of (usable) data exists in our minds and behaviours, in our whims, and in our nature. It inspired the name of this newsletter (Cellular Thinking), and the focus of my attentions.
I've also searched for ways to examine my own mind, to better come to understand our world, existence, how I can better do things, and to place solid data behind my very idiosyncratic (probably) human self.
It turns out, one of the biggest proponents of technology just built a whole system that does this on autopilot: and 100x bigger. A thesis does not grow weaker because others build in it: it is not a competitive notion. It is a scientific one: it grows stronger with repeated evidence that it is not false.
On Monday, I touched ESP32 modules for the first time in the morning. By 6 PM that same day in the cafe I was sitting at, I had the device addresses of everyone sitting around me on a neat little dashboard coming from one board, and signal disturbance data coming from people passing by a second board on the other side of the table.
I'd like to say for the peanut gallery that one of my functions is that of a security researcher, and these are publicly available datums - if one knows how to find them.
This is just WiFi data, and a small slice of it. There are entire other swathes of categories available, too. What I urge is that you understand your model by which you understand the world - your thesis. It is subject to be refined and evolved, like a marble statue being carved from rough hewn rock. It may shatter and reform, but you will become a stronger artist in your observation of life.
Even GBrain has a thesis:
My general thesis is the following:
Everybody has at most 100 billion biological neurons, and 86,400 seconds in a day where every part of their biology and thoughts are screaming at them from every angle - and whatever is left over from that black box are the actions we take. That is internal data.
The world itself is frequently studied through the trial and error of hundreds of millions of people. That is external data.
Combining ill-understood internal and external data is where magic happens. That's where I put my time: finding the data nobody's looking at yet, because that's where the breakthroughs live. This, in turn, creates richer and more sophisticated lives for humans. Uber did not have to find purely new data: they relied on the fact that everybody was already driving cars. A thesis will help you build new opportunities.
What guiding thesis do you have?
Be well,
Michael Kirsanov