Wings Over Scotland

(We weren’t going to run this AI piece, but honestly the last line is ice cold.)

Regular readers will have noticed a lack of articles lately. The fault is partly mine: the editor and I have been busy with other things for a fortnight, and Holyrood has been left to its own devices.

Having spent a few moments this evening reading up on what he missed, I can report that very little has changed.

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AI may very well kill us all in the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime it’s a magical tool that enables even near-idiots to perform near-miracles. While the Scottish Parliament has been off for the October half-term and nothing’s been happening in politics, I’ve been occupying myself with modifying some very old computer games.

(Click the pic to see what I’ve made this week.)

Now, I have close to zero coding skills, but I’ve been able to do it thanks to the wonder that is Claude. I’ve messed around with various AIs before, usually to clean up artwork of one sort or another (something at which Grok is extremely skilled), but Claude is operating on a whole different level.

A term has already emerged to describe what it does: “vibecoding”, meaning that you just type in the gist of what you’re trying to achieve and Claude does all the work for you and produces the finished article in minutes.

Now, that’s something of an exaggeration – the examples I’ve created myself have taken anything from a single prompt to half a day of chatting with the algorithmic auteur, but its talents do seem to have taken a dramatic leap forwards in the last month or so, resulting in an avalanche of new games, especially in the retro field.

(Typically you might until recently have seen one or two a day appearing, but I must have played 200 in the last fortnight alone.)

The bulk of them have been easily the equal of what might have taken a dedicated human coder months to produce, and on the strength of the last few days’ work I would without hesitation tell the current collection of clattering clownwits infesting Holyrood to not bother coming back from their holidays, and let the machines run the country.

Because we’ve got “vibe” politicians writing our code (legislation) anyway, and unlike their useless, incompetent output, at least Claude’s works.

Ladies and gentlemen, the next leader of the SNP.

To be scrupulously fair to the huffing dolt-child, we suppose in grey, chilly Aberdeen there could be some confusion on the matter. But remarkably, the above isn’t even nearly the dumbest thing that’s happened (so far) at this year’s SNP conference.

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The obvious question is “Why haven’t you made a bigger one in all that time?”

Did it not seem important until now? Was there nothing significant going on? Or were they just a little short of cash for some unknowable reason?

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We’ve just had an extraordinary email from Police Scotland, readers. Here it is.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the real-life Timecops.

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In a little under three days, Phase 1 complete.

Wings readers: still the best. But what now?

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We were trying to work out what this reminded us of.

And the answer was in the same place it usually is.

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Our fundraiser to bring a judicial review of Police Scotland’s decision not to charge anyone with embezzlement in the case of the SNP’s missing £700,000 indyref fund is now live, and can be reached by clicking on this image, or here.

The target of £30,000 represents the cost of the initial application (with contingency for the other side’s costs should it fail).

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Yesterday afternoon John Swinney announced an independent review into the dual roles of Scotland’s main law officers, the Lord Advocate and the Solicitor General, which have been a subject of great controversy since the Scottish Parliament was re-convened in 1999.

Wings welcomes this development unequivocally, albeit we’re slightly concerned that the former judge leading the review is himself a former Lord Advocate who may be inclined to regard any suggestion that the role – in which the LA is an independent law officer but also a government minister answerable to the First Minister – carries a huge conflict of interest as a personal slight.

But what’s interesting is that the SNP promised such a review way back in 2021, in its manifesto for that year’s Holyrood election.

We can’t imagine what can have caused them to delay it until now.

We don’t have much to say about this graph that it doesn’t say for itself.

The arrest of Peter Murrell on 5 April 2023, just a couple of weeks after his wife had realised the game was up and walked away before the cops came round and put a big blue tent up on their front garden, changed everything in Scottish politics.

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Alert readers will recall that last year the SNP convened a summit in Glasgow for the sole purpose of uniting the nation in preventing Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister.

The party also regularly tells us that to actually achieve independence, support would have to build to an overwhelming consensus into the 60-65% range, rather than the 50% +/-3 that it’s been stubbornly stuck at for the last 12 years.

So, y’know, now we know why they’re so frantically desperate to keep Farage out.

Funny how people change, isn’t it?

That sounds a lot to us like “Bombs Not Bairns”.

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