Sarath Tharayil
v. learning · noticing · becoming
I build things with data and code, usually end-to-end. I ship side projects at odd hours, care a lot about how things feel to use, and tend to go deep on whatever has my attention. Lately that's been AI systems, and ideas that don't sound terrible.
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SUMMARY:
Why two perfectly rational people always make the worst possible choice together, and what that reveals about climate, war, and human cooperation.
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AUTHOR:
Sarath Tharayil
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In 1924, two mathematicians proved you can decompose a solid ball into five pieces and reassemble them into two balls of equal size. No stretching. No scaling. Completely rigorous mathematics. Here is how, and why it works.
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Sarath Tharayil
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Someone picks a card from nine, buries it in the deck, and you deal four chaotic piles counting backwards from ten. The sum of what lands face-up tells you exactly where the card is. Every single time. Here is why the deck has no choice.
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Sarath Tharayil
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In 1742, Goldbach wrote Euler a letter with an observation so simple a child could understand it. No one has proven it since. Here is the 280-year story of the conjecture, the man who came closest in a boiler room under a kerosene lamp, and what it costs to chase an unprovable truth.
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Sarath Tharayil
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Google used to ask job candidates what they'd do if shrunk to the size of a coin and dropped in a blender. The math says jump out. The physics says you're dead either way. Both answers are wrong for interesting reasons.
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Sarath Tharayil
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A Russian mathematician picked a fight with God in 1906 and accidentally built the mathematical engine behind Google, ChatGPT, nuclear weapons, and card shuffling. The story of Markov chains and the strange power of forgetting.
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AUTHOR:
Sarath Tharayil
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In 1968, a scientist built a perfect world for mice: unlimited food, no predators, no disease. The colony was extinct in five years. What Universe 25 reveals about density, identity, and what happens when survival becomes too easy.
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Sarath Tharayil
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How political propaganda, algorithmic manipulation, and neurobiology combine to hijack belief, and what it actually takes to break free.
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Sarath Tharayil
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A step-by-step interactive guide to 1NF, 2NF, 3NF, BCNF, 4NF, and 5NF with real SQL and transforming tables at every stage.
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Sarath Tharayil
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How India quietly became the source of 40% of America's generic drugs, 60% of the world's vaccines, and one of the most important forces in global healthcare. A fifty-year story of bold laws, brilliant scientists, and one audacious phone call.
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Sarath Tharayil
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A deep look at the real neuroscience and psychology behind why ambitious people consistently fail to act on their own ambitions. Hint: it is not laziness.
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AUTHOR:
Sarath Tharayil
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The smart television sitting in your living room is a continuous surveillance device. This is how it works, which brands do it, what they earn from it, and how to make it stop.
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Sarath Tharayil
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In 1995, a bureaucrat assigned the internet suffix .ai to a tiny Caribbean island. Nobody cared. Then ChatGPT launched. Now Anguilla is abolishing taxes.
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AUTHOR:
Sarath Tharayil
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The Wi-Fi router sitting in your living room can, with the right software, detect your presence, track your movements, estimate your body pose, and identify who you are. No camera, no sensors on your body, and it works through solid walls. Here is exactly how that works, and what you can do about it.
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AUTHOR:
Sarath Tharayil
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There is a river in the footer of this website. Literally. Here is what it is, where it comes from, and why I put it there.
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AUTHOR:
Sarath Tharayil
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Modern life is full of things that feel broken but are not, things that feel designed well but were not, and things that were designed for something else entirely and just never left. A philosophical walk through why the world is like this.
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Sarath Tharayil
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Kerala's 2026 power crisis starts nine years ago with four contracts, a procedural shortcut, and a regulatory body that decided rules matter more than electricity. Here's how the state lost 465 MW of cheap baseload power and then spent two years failing to get it back.
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Sarath Tharayil
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Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Perplexity all feel meaningfully different to use, and that is not random. Their architectures, training data, and system-level design push them toward genuinely different strengths. Here is what is actually going on under the hood.
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AUTHOR:
Sarath Tharayil
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Gerald Durrell's love letter to Lee McGeorge, July 31st 1978. I first heard it read by Tom Hiddleston in LettersLive and have not stopped thinking about it since.
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AUTHOR:
Sarath Tharayil
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A phrase like 'unlikely' can mean 10% to one person and 35% to another. This gap has been documented in CIA memos, medical guidelines, and climate reports for over sixty years. The data is stranger and more consequential than you might expect.
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Sarath Tharayil
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All seven Malayalam fonts available on this site, with live previews. Six are from the Rachana Institute of Typography.
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Sarath Tharayil
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The old proverbs, the quirky observations, the things that only make sense if you've lived in Kerala. A place to keep them before they expire.
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Sarath Tharayil
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On tropical and sidereal zodiacs, Earth's 26,000-year wobble, and how the Malayalam calendar and Western astrology quietly drifted apart from each other.
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AUTHOR:
Sarath Tharayil
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Ben Horowitz wrote the leadership book I wish existed before I ever had to make a hard call. Notes on The Struggle, radical honesty, and why protecting your team from bad news is the worst thing you can do.
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Sarath Tharayil
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An always-on autonomous trading dashboard that monitors the market, applies custom criteria to individual stocks, and buys or sells shares automatically.
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Project
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India's Supreme Court banned an NCERT civics chapter for saying the judiciary can be corrupt. The chapter quoted their own sitting Chief Justice. What followed made the chapter's point better than the chapter ever could.
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Sarath Tharayil
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The North-South divide isn't geography. It's the result of colonial land systems, a disastrous freight policy, and radically different bets on human capital. Here's how two Indias were made.
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AUTHOR:
Sarath Tharayil
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Yahvi compared love to language , how it evolves, gets forgotten, and takes on dialects over time. Here's what that made me realise about the people I've lost fluency in.
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AUTHOR:
Sarath Tharayil
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A quick breakdown of how I built my Kerala election reference tool, what the model uses, and where it can be wrong.
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Sarath Tharayil
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Comprehensive Kerala assembly election explorer with historical analysis and ML-backed 2026 prediction views.
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Project
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A short note on useful delusion, public embarrassment, and why betting on yourself is often less ridiculous than it looks.
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Sarath Tharayil
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Personal life OS built to track mood, energy, schedule, and activity time in one continuous daily system.
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Project
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A look back at every iteration of this website, from a teal student portfolio to whatever this is now.
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Sarath Tharayil
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Saw a fun questionnaire webapp somewhere and decided to build my own, with a bit of personality.
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Sarath Tharayil
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A fun and witty questionnaire webapp.
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A self-hostable and open-source alternative to physical bullet journals.
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Online treasure hunt website built for a friend's birthday with clues, puzzles, and a mystery to solve.
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Recipe sharing website for home cooks to discover and publish their favourite recipes.
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Aesthetic app to view the current time across different timezones alongside live weather conditions.
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Compare speeds of missiles, fighter jets, and aircraft and calculate travel times between any two points.
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A website to predict cloud inversions on a given day at a given location using meteorological data.
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Formula 1 stat page with in-depth analysis of drivers and teams across seasons.
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A Wordle clone built using the OnceUp framework.
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A webapp to track job applications and stay organised through the hiring process.
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Smart grocery list builder and planner to organise your weekly shop.
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Tried out another trending song of that time.
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YouTube
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Properly edited and color graded montage video. Better shots too ;)
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YouTube
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First montage was just operator shots, this one has a bit of everything.
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YouTube
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Editing my first ever montage video from Valorant highlights.
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YouTube