Thank you for the links, I had found a few of these but some are new. The basic idea is there, I’ll see if any of these can work for us. I’m growing more convinced though that hosting a whole app for this super simple use case might not be worth it, I think we might pivot to just hosting a really basic static page for it.

This is way too overkill for what we need. I’m sorry, I’ve been intentionally vague about the context for this but I guess it’s too unclear. We’re an activist group planning a protest. We might have to get this set up literally tomorrow and every penny comes out of (mostly my) pocket. We’re also all paranoid about opsec and anonymity, which is why the requirement about avoiding corporate services is there. Perhaps I should have posted this in a privacy focused comm instead, I apologize.

It’s pretty overkill for what we need, and it would still fall under “corporate” for us. At that point I could just go for the static Notion page which I can get live in 5m for free.

We can set up all of those but again, that’s kinda expensive for us rn. What’s the benefit of using a CMS like Joomla versus wishthis, or even a basic Caddy/Nginx webserver with a static page?

I believe you need root to access those, plus a file manager that supports it (I use Mixplorer which does). Otherwise, as someone else suggested, you can access them from a computer over ADB or MTP.

This is such an amazing article, The Verge’s staff is still capable of some excellent journalism.

Oh yeah, you’re right on that. If I’m looking for privacy from the subscription manager signing up with a service like this is a terrible choice, because it is fully a financial institution.

I wish they were all on the same day of the month…

Dates aren’t a big concern though. What I was hoping for is something that would update automatically to some extent if (say) some amounts change, or a payment is missed. But I guess indeed that’s basically impossible without access to my payment data.

Given that I have to update it manually though, I would at least like it to be synced remotely. So that I can, say, check it from my laptop on a webpage or desktop app without redoing all the manual data input.

I thought I heard they were rolling out some material you theming in beta a while ago. Did they revert it?

For my use case yes, that would defeat the purpose, but for what it’s trying to do it kinda makes sense… At least, they have to do it to comply with payment regulations. And you’re still only exposing your identity to one service with a decent reputation, rather than plenty of possibly shadier ones. It seems like a fair tradeoff if what you’re looking for is privacy from services you want to pay for.

I’m not American, it seems to be available in the US only…

I guess you’re right, yeah. I was hoping someone had figured out a different solution, perhaps integrating directly with the individual subscription providers. But I guess that’s way too broad of a scope, integrating with countless individual services.

At least a cross-platform, cloud backed “spreadsheet” would be nice to have though.

Oh sure, didn’t mean to imply that Chinese people weren’t smart enough to think for themselves. I was just making the point that neither western media nor Chinese media is helping at all to create space or goodwill for critical exchange and debate across boundaries and firewalls (which, to be fair, is not surprising).

Glad to see there are actually Chinese netizens on Lemmy, by the way.

[…] I set up a cloud service where my VPN service would be located on Amazon’s web services, a reputable and widely trusted cloud provider. […] After about an hour, I set up a VPN that worked flawlessly. The best part? Not only is it free to use […]

Sorry, what? Last time I checked AWS VPSs were very much NOT free to use, and I’m pretty sure the lowest tier is still more expensive than your average VPN.

Also, this article seems to be arguing against its own points: “you probably don’t need a VPN, but I have one anyway”…

This is just straight up true. Besides the belligerence and racism it pushes, it also makes it near impossible to have an actual, reasonable and critical comparative discussion of Chinese and Western societies. It closes any space that might exist for Chinese people to take part in any discussion of international affairs, since the attitude is so strongly against them. This pushes any open minded Chinese netizen back into the arms of their own government’s propaganda, rather than inviting them into an open discussion of the good and bad sides of their and other societies.

Backed by who?

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with a recent history of questionable investments…

God I hope this is a bit

I’m aware they’re not using a generic model, but that’s not much better. Current custom-made models still fuck up significantly more than humans, and in less predictable ways.

Even if their custom model is slightly incorrect 1% of the time, that’s still a major problem in critical systems like those.

Legacy COBOL code is largely used in critical systems like those of banks and airlines. What could go wrong with having that code rewritten by stochastic parrots who get programming answers wrong half of the time?

Me when I start seeing sickoposting in my default Lemmy comms