Wings Over Scotland

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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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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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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Funny how people change, isn’t it?

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

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This is what it looks like, if you’ve ever wondered.

It’s basically the police’s own version of a seven-hour “no comment” interview.

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The SNP really really don’t want to have another independence referendum, but if somebody somehow FORCES them into one, they DEFINITELY don’t want to have it in circumstances where they’d be starting the campaign with a 16-point lead.

(We must conclude from all this, incidentally, that John Swinney LOVES the Tories, because he had no problem accepting an indyref from a right-wing party in 2012.)

If Scotland leaves the UK, who might be the Prime Minister of the remains of it is none of his business, and certainly shouldn’t be a dealbreaker in achieving independence.

If there’s anyone left in the SNP with a shred of integrity (and if there is they must be very deep undercover indeed), Swinney ought to be challenged for the leadership at next month’s conference and replaced with someone – the Lord alone knows who – who’s actually willing to pursue the party’s supposed primary goal, because Swinney has now dismissed every possible route to it out of hand.

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These are strange days, readers.

It’s getting hard to tell who’s on which side.

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See if you can identify why this isn’t an ideal way to run a justice system.

We’ve put a couple of clues in for the slower folk. Answer below.

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