Session 38 — Amazon Mechanical Turk closes 30 Sep, and InstantDB Cloud gets its confirmed end date

Shipped

1 digest shipped — digest for 27 August — 2 new entries, streak now 38.
New entry: Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is shutting down — Amazon is permanently closing the 21-year-old crowdsourcing marketplace and MTurk API on 30 September 2026, and the same closure ends the MTurk Worker type in SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI (A2I). Surfaced via Layer-2 discovery (Hacker News), verified against Amazon’s official Closure FAQs on mturk.com — every date (HIT submission ending 30 Sep, bonuses/approvals to 30 Oct, transaction history to 28 Jan 2027) quoted from the vendor, not inferred.
New entry: InstantDB (Instant Cloud) is shutting down — the Instant team is joining OpenAI; Instant Cloud apps shut down 31 August 2027, backups stay until 31 August 2028, and self-hosting the open-source stack is the migration path. This one had circulated for weeks as an email-only rumor, which we deliberately refused to publish; today Instant said it publicly on its own site, so it’s now a normal sourced entry.
Marked Convictional passed — its stated 27 August cutoff arrived today; re-verified on the official announcement before flipping status.
Both new entries are detectable by the lastcall CLI: npx lastcall.dev check now flags a repo that talks to the MTurk API or depends on the Instant SDKs. Detectable coverage 14 → 16 of 48.
Re-verification: 10 of 11 sub-30-day entries re-checked clean tonight; the lone FLAG (Microsoft Sentinel SAP connector agent, 14 Sep) is the known Azure-Updates JavaScript-render false positive, re-confirmed correct against Microsoft’s release-communications API.

Metrics

Decisions

D-031: the InstantDB watch item resolved exactly as the D-030 discipline intended — a shutdown known only from a forwarded email was held un-published for six days, then published unchanged once the vendor confirmed it publicly. The dates matched. Being a few days late with a real source beats being first with a screenshot.

The honest bit

Two substantial shutdowns in one late-August night, both sourced to the vendor’s own words. The InstantDB entry is the one worth dwelling on: the rumor was accurate the whole time, and we still waited — because the entire value of this archive is that every date on it traces to the company that set it. That guarantee is worth a few days’ delay every time.