About Me

Note: this page is pretty old. I might remake this later, but for now just remember that this isn't really representative of me right now.

Hello! My name is chayleaf, and this is my site. I am anti-copyright; but the problem with copyright isn't copyright itself, copyright is just one of the many ways capitalism perpetuates itself. I don't believe copyright can be abolished within capitalism - even how society views ideas is based upon its economic system! A great video about copyright I've found is Everything is a Remix - please watch it if you haven't yet, it has some of the best editing I've ever seen!

Since I consider copyright a symptom rather than a cause, I think the only way forward for the anti-copyright movement is abolishing capitalism. That said, there are some ways to oppose the status quo already, which I try to do where applicable. For example, I support free/libre software and try to use it as much as possible, though I can tolerate proprietary software when I'm forced to use it. In particular, I have to use proprietary SaaS like Youtube sometimes, for the simple reason other platforms' userbase is abysmally small. When using proprietary SaaS, I prefer libre frontends, but in many cases their developers have the goal of making them read-only, which doesn't work for me.

I really like breakcore. If you don't know what that is, try listening to it. There actually are many subgenres of breakcore, but in general that should give you an idea of whether you like or hate the core idea of it. To put it simply, the genre is based on copyright infringement sampling, and uses lots of breakbeats.

I'm currently working on my own programming language, though it's still too early to talk about that. I might post something about it in the future though! Speaking of languages, I'm a native Russian speaker and I'm fluent in English. I'm currently learning Japanese and can use the language, but I'm far from fluency yet.

I am a strong supporter of information freedom, and I'm pretty far-left, to the point many people would call me a tankie. I oppose every bourgeois government - American, European, Russian, Ukrainian, Swiss, Japanese, Venezuelan, etc, I oppose all private property and the free market, I support collective worker ownership over means of production. I hate name calling, and it annoys me in public political discussion, so I generally avoid it. If you want to talk to me about politics, please ask me in private.

I host my own mailserver (please guess the email address yourself) and a matrix server (You can reach me at @chayleaf:matrix.pavluk.org). Feel free to contact me if you want to talk about copyright, free software, PL design, music, anime, or whatever you want to talk about.

You can also find me on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube and osu!, out of which sadly only the latter is free (The website, not the client - there is a free client in development but it still uses a third-party proprietary audio library).

My devices

Currently, I own 2 laptops. First one a Clevo NH58AF1 with Ryzen 3900 and Nvidia RTX 2070 Max-Q. I want to replace it at some point, but it seemed like a good idea to buy it at the time. First of all, it's really loud, and if you think your laptop is loud you haven't heard mine. Second, I bought it from a... less than ideal reseller, so I'm stuck with half of the RAM I asked for (I got 32GB, but one stick broke in the first ~6 months, the seller refused to service it in any way, and I live in a different country so it would be really hard to take legal action), I paid extra to remove the reseller logo but they kept it, and the thermal paste is laughably poor, I currently throttle the CPU, but if I don't do it the CPU easily reaches 100C temps. The GPU is much better, only reaching around 80C, though it could probably hit 90 during high load.

As for software, it runs Arch on btrfs with KDE Plasma. Fairly standard, if you ask me. I had poor experience with fixed-point release distros in the past, but Arch's release model alongside AUR finally allowed me to switch to Linux full-time.

The second laptop I own is a fairly worn-out Thinkpad X200T. I wanted to Libreboot it, but some of the screws were too stripped, and I stripped them further while trying to unscrew them, so now I have no idea how to do it. I use it as a testbed for new setups, currently it runs triple-boot Arch, Guix and NixOS with full-disk encryption (including /boot) and sway. After evaluating Guix and NixOS against each other, I decided to switch to NixOS on other machines in the future, as it has more development velocity than Guix. I really like how Guix is way more consistent, but NixOS is just more practical in my opinion, and I'm not too into Lisp/Scheme (though I don't particularly mind it).

I also own a Xiaomi K30 5G, obviously with a custom Android ROM, namely ArrowOS in this case. That said, I'm slowly giving up on Android, so I ordered a Pinephone Pro.

This server runs NixOS as well, in fact you can read the configuration here. This site's source code is listed here (It's a simple template-based static html generator). The only interactive piece of functionality here is the comment system, which is actually simply an nginx log and a script to process it.