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

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the real-life Timecops.

Read the rest of this entry →

More than three months ago now, we sent Police Scotland a Freedom Of Information request. A few minutes ago we finally received a response. Brace yourselves.

That is, um… interesting.

Read the rest of this entry →

These are strange days, readers.

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

Read the rest of this entry →

Great news, everyone – Scottish Labour has finally worked out how to talk to the people of Scotland. This video featuring the party’s MP Melanie Ward just appeared on the Scotland Office’s LinkedIn page, and it explains the complexities of the interlinked Scottish and UK economies in terms that the UK government hopes all of you awful thick Jocko plebs might be able to understand. Enjoy.

And tomorrow morning, do remember to eat your cereal, won’t you?

The National runs headlines like this quite often.

The sort-of newspaper doesn’t actually have a sports section – it just publishes The Herald’s – but if it did you have to wonder what it would look like.

Read the rest of this entry →

Ever-alert Wings readers will be aware that for the past three and a half years or so I’ve been the target of a campaign by disgraced former policeman Lynsay Watson, who over that period has relentlessly attempted to get me arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for knowing – and saying – that human beings can’t change sex.

(As we’ll learn during this article, I am far from unique in that experience.)

Watson has made numerous ludicrous, vexatious complaints to various police forces about me – a particularly memorable one being when he reported me last September for “perverting the course of justice” because I’d tweeted a link to a fundraiser for someone being persecuted by another transactivist – as well as trying to extort tens of thousands of pounds from me with threats.

Yesterday, though, he finally found some police officers gullible enough to listen.

Read the rest of this entry →

This really is the most extraordinary statement.

The short version is “We’re going to keep breaking the law every day while we think about whether we want it to apply to us or not”.

Read the rest of this entry →

Despite what you or we might think, in the eyes of the Scottish Football Association this ISN’T a pitch invasion. This is simply what a football match in progress looks like.

Because according to the absolutely extraordinary statement they’ve released this evening, that was game time. The clock was still running, nothing was being added to account for the fact that there were thousands of thugs rampaging across the field, and the game was still happening in that moment, until it was ended four seconds later.

Read the rest of this entry →

At the end of last year we noted the unusual and persistent levels of divergence in Scottish political polling. As polls have become much more frequent during the election campaign, nothing about that has changed. The final polls, published yesterday, are so far apart from each other that they tell us basically zip.

Analysing this mess is meaningless, so we’ll just give you some highlights.

Read the rest of this entry →

To pass the time on (praise be to Baby Jeebus) the last day of the Holyrood election campaign, we thought we’d do a catch-up summary of all the seat projections we could find from last month and this month. Here it is.

Now, as it happens we think the potential seat ranges are significantly wider. There are so many factors of uncertainty that while there’s no credible doubt who’s going to be the biggest party, we reckon SNP seats could potentially be anywhere from about 47 to 68 (most likely the upper part of that range), with corresponding ramifications below.

But there’s one potentially interesting thing in that bottom half.

Read the rest of this entry →

We think the lads at The Scotsman might have gotten a bit confused and/or carried away when it came to putting the clocks forward at the weekend. At 6am on Sunday morning they tweeted this:

But the link was a 404. We checked the print edition of Scotland On Sunday but there was nothing there either. Finally, though, the article has shown up in today’s paper and on the website, and to be honest with you, readers, we still think it must be some sort of mistake, because it’s two days early for April 1st.

Read the rest of this entry →