Yeah, that article doesn't make a very strong case against a Dyson swarm. At least it's been updated with an admission that any remotely sane approach is practical after all (rather than the assumed "set up a 1-square-km solar array, in the same orbit as Earth for some reason, and power yourself solely with that while you dismantle an entire planet and stash it in a warehouse somewhere before starting to build more solar panels"). Although the second update shows a continued lack of understanding - who on (or off) Earth would expect a planetary-scale engineering project to take less than 100 years?!

I've skimmed the follow-up article and I'm not going to read it in depth to avoid spending the morning shouting at clouds.

Anyway I digress. Self-replicating factories sound great but eventually they're gonna start evolving no matter how tightly we try and lock them down, at which point we'd better hope the planet we're living on doesn't look too much like lunch to them. (I'm picturing the Greenfly mentioned in some Alistair Reynolds books.)

Perhaps before building a swarm around the sun we should build one around the earth to gain fine grained control over the weather, and it even doesn't need to be in the orbit, but can be a swarm of sun heated air balloons.