About Me

Hello! My name is chayleaf, and this is my site. I'm a non-binary Marxist-Leninist with Maoist sympathies. I oppose every bourgeois dictatorship - American, European, Russian, Ukrainian, Swiss, Japanese, Venezuelan, etc, I oppose all private property and the free market, I support central planning of the economy, collective worker ownership over means of production and the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat. Political discussion online is generally devoid of substance and filled with thought-terminating memes, so I tend to avoid it. You're welcome to talk to me about politics in good faith.

I'm anti-copyright and a strong supporter of information freedom; but the problem with copyright isn't copyright itself, copyright is just one of the many ways capitalism perpetuates itself. Copyright can't be abolished within capitalism, as it's a "necessary" part of the capitalist superstructure. 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!

Speaking of "Everything is a Remix" - in the same way, I don't believe that humans are superior over AI. What distinguishes humans and AI isn't how we generate ideas, or whether we can generate ideas, but that humans can set goals and act towards them. Of course, AI can act set goals and act towards them too, but the initial "strategy" must be set by a human.

Since copyright is a symptom rather than a cause, the only viable way forward for the anti-copyright movement is abolishing capitalism. That said, that doesn't mean there's a need to respect it while it does exist. I support piracy, 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.

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 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

I'm a heavy laptop user, in fact I've never owned a desktop PC - not because I need battery life, but because I often need to move around.

Previously, I've used a Clevo NH58AF1 - a laptop with a desktop 12-core CPU (Ryzen 3900) and Nvidia RTX 2070 Max-Q. However, it was too loud for my taste (if you think your laptop is loud you haven't heard mine...), and the temps were less than ideal. I started with Windows, then switched to dual booting Manjaro with Windows, and finally to dual booting Arch with Windows there. Arch was what finally allowed me to switch to Linux, as I had poor experience with other distros before.

Now I have an MSI Delta 15. I got it second-hand for less than $1500, and it has a Ryzen CPU and Radeon RX 6700M. I use NixOS with sway and don't dual boot anymore, instead I use GPU passthrough with libvirtd and Looking Glass.

Another 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 what to do with it. Back when I used Arch, I used it for evaluating Guix and NixOS against each other, and decided with NixOS, as it has more development velocity than Guix. I really like how Guix is way more consistent, and I respect the GNU project, 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'm looking into other options (Maybe OnePlus 6? I've tried Pinephone and it's way too slow, and Pinephone Pro's battery life seems to be too small).

My router runs NixOS as well, it's an Arm SoC called Banana Pi BPI-R3. It uses a framework I wrote called nixos-router.

You can read the config for all of my Nix systems (including this server) here (Gitea) or here (GitHub).

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 done by abusing nginx logs.