Hackaday Links: July 5, 2026

- Happy belated July 4th! While fireworks fade, drone swarms now paint the sky—safer, quieter, and infinitely more complex than exploding rockets. Meanwhile, Sony’s disc shutdown looms for 2028, shifting ownership debates to the digital layer. The real story? Amazon is winding down Mechanical Turk. After two decades of human-in-the-loop labor, AI automation has finally outpaced the need for micro-taskers. It’s a clear signal: the age of manual data labeling is ending, replaced by autonomous agents. On a brighter note, the LINK spacecraft successfully launched to rescue the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, proving that robotic precision can save multi-billion-dollar assets from orbital decay. Robots, rockets, and AI convergence—the future is automated and ascending. Whoa, that's mega-illegal... just kidding, it’s fully licensed engineering.