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.

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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Now that Nicola Sturgeon is finally free of her gruelling MSP workload, which could give her anything up to two extra hours of spare time a week, she might like to start making a proper dent in the contents of her fully-loaded bookshelves.

(At least until they’re seized and sold under the Proceeds Of Crime Act.)

So we thought we’d offer up a few suggestions.

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We’ve been thinking about this all morning, readers.

To the point where we’d vote for any party pledging to implement it at once.

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My first ever real experience of politics was playing Dictator.

Originally written by Don Priestley for the Sinclair ZX81 in 1982, it was a simple text-based game which subsequently came to other formats including the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Elan Enterprise and the ZX Spectrum, which is where I encountered it.

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A little over two years ago, three SNP MSPs contested the leadership of the party in the wake of the sudden resignation of Nicola Sturgeon. All were full of grand plans and dreams for the future of the party, the nation and the independence movement.

None of the three is leader now, and in nine months’ time none of them will be SNP MSPs. Indeed, it’s overwhelmingly likely that none will be an MSP at all.

And that, readers, is not a sign of a party – or indeed a Parliament – in good health.

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Don Paterson is a celebrated Scottish poet, writer and musician. The essay below comes from a new anthology of Scottish writers called Irish Pages: Scotland, and is reproduced with his permission. 

Remember The Vow? Most of us have tried to forget it. This was Westminster’s Hail Mary as polling day approached in the 2014 referendum; a vote that Yessers – people tend to forget this part too – initially had no real expectation of winning, until an inspirationally positive campaign saw the polls draw neck-and-neck.

Then lo! There it was, splashed across the Daily Record: a fancy-font promise from Westminster party leaders that if Scotland voted to stay within the UK, we would enjoy new devolved powers. There was some other waffle about defence and opportunities and having an equal share in the UK’s prosperity. But the message was clear enough. We would be listened to.

Aye, right.

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Well, Shauny‘s knocked it out of the park.

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In the modern political world, you don’t get anywhere without a movement, and movements don’t get anywhere without a flag. So we’ve decided it’s time to take action and stand up for a very large group of people who are genuinely discriminated against and significantly disadvantaged in our society.

Here’s their symbol.

Today is July 1st, and we officially, on behalf of all our oppressed kinfolk, declare this to be People Who Aren’t Eligible For A Railcard Pride Month.

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Holiday Boy has of course chosen the general election campaign to spend the next three weeks feeding stray cats somewhere sunny, so here’s a cartoon by the brilliant webcomicname that summarises the Baillie Gifford story for anyone joining us late.

Because, y’know, idiots.

As a writer, feminist and literary events organiser in Scotland, I’m regularly sent links to information someone thinks might be of interest to me. This week it was a document commissioned by one of Scotland’s leading and most powerful publicly-funded literary organisations, Literature Alliance Scotland (LAS).

Nobody, of course, objects to transgender writers being included or supported, but the content of the guidance raises several extremely serious and concerning issues.

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As of last night, the Hate Monster campaign page on the Police Scotland website looks like this:

(Archive version here.)

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