So, one day, i was borrowed a book about html basics (was a kid back then), and thus i made quite a few pages on our old Windows XP laptop.
As the time went by, my interest in computers grew (i was into electronics beforehand), thus i learned new things, such as python and then windows batch and all sorts of other stuff. Then, one day, i wanted to no longer be dependent on our newer windows 10 laptop (cuz i have two brothers and fithing with them over who gets to use the computer was annoying) and somehow, i stumbled upon raspberry pi. And the next birthday i was given some money, so i went and bought the raspberry pi 4b 8gb flirc box thing. It came with the adapter, case - pretty much everything i needed. The only problem was, that i was completely broke by that point. So i had no money to buy a monitor or a keyboard or anything. Some time later (and some convincing my parents to buy me some the stuff) and after christmas, i ended up with a finally working setup.
There were of course some problems, like the fact that my wifi wasn't working 70% of the time, but i was super happy anyway. I had a 32gb sd card for the filesystem and ubuntu (ew) installed on it. I was happily using the system and had quite a lot of fun, it had a wireless mouse and kbd attached and a dvi monitor as a screen. Then after some time (and lots of other stuff - like running out of space) i reinstalled the thing to raspberry pi os desktop (formerly raspbian, the fun thing was, that at the time the 64-bit version even wasn't the default one) and was using it for quite some more time.
Then, however, i was in the last year of elementary school and our high school wanted us to have a laptop for less than approximately 1k $. I got it somewhere at the start of the summer break. It's a used thinkpad p53 (64gb ddr4, i7 9850h, quadro rtx 3000 - 6gb vram) and i use it to this very day. The thing however was, that now i had a system, that was a billion times more powerful and i didn't have a use for the pi. So approximately at the start of the school year i made it into a minecraft server for me & my friend group (lots of fun) and as the time went by, i started a python webserver on there (for sharing some files), which i then learned wasn't the best way to make a server. Later i learned about apache and installed it there. I started making a page, that would eventually turn into this thing.
I fistly wrote this into a real paper notebook, now i'm just rewriting it in markdown - here we go.
Oh and also some info should probably be fact checked. I probably won't do it, cuz i'm just as lazy as Sans.
So yeah i started this like, because i got up from the computer because a full day of just staring into the screen doing nothing really drained a lot of energy from me and made me really just feel like shit. After just a short while (like in under 1h probably) i feel like a trillion percent better. I'll try to control myself better because of this.
So i just want everyone with the same problem to just get off of the fucking thing. Now, don't get me wrong, playing with computers, tech, electronics etc. is like my second best hobby, right after being with people, who are important to me. BUT. Too much of anything is just bad. This raises the question however - how responsible are we actually for our social media etc. addiction? Well, yeah, we're responsible for not leaving our phones, computers, etc. There's no law forcing us to stay online, but who's actually responsible for it being so addicting? Is our reward system to blame? Yes and no. It's what keeps us addicted. It's what keeps us scrolling. It's just biology. Evolution has decided, that if something, like for example food, makes you feel good, we should keep doing the thing that makes us feel good, eating in this example, and made a perfect hormone for that job: dopamine.
And from a survival standpoint it's a really good idea! The problem is, that it opens a possibility, that can be used in all sorts of good ways, but it can also be abused in various bad ways, like drugs and all sorts of addictive stuff, which social media undeniably is a part of. This opportunity is then exploited by tech overlords like Google, Meta etc. This is done using algorithms nobody really understands, that are optimised for maximum monetary profit. The way this is done is roughly as follows:
The problem for the average content consumer is, that they spend like hours just consuming stuff they'll forget in less than a day losing multiple hours a day for some tech overlord's profit. Constantly messing up the dopamine system also isn't great, because it shortens one's attention span. Another thing is, that it also costs a LOT of energy, so you get fully drained and frustrated in a couple hours of lost time and then always come back even if it sucks, just because you're addicted. That's just how it works. The overlord knows it. You know it.
So get up.
Please.
Whenever it just sucks, just stop.
fun fact: the blog part of this page is actually written in markdown! the markdown source code is here