Posts by Dr Dan Holdsworth 683 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2008
I wonder what the response of Tesla cars to a large 0 in a red circle would be? I'm willing to be that they have not (yet) trapped this sort of error.
Writing things in Chinese would also seem to be a good idea, since good Chinese speakers are not all that common in the UK.
I'm reminded of a manager in an engineering works complaining about all these "Just In Time" idiots. The script when dealing with them usually ran as follows:
Idiot: "What price can you do for this component?"
Engineer: "£5 each for a run of 100, 20p each for a run of 100,000"
Idiot: "Right, can we have 100 per week at 20p each then?"
Engineer: "That's £5 each for a run of 100 due to the tooling up costs. You can buy 100,000 at 20p each, put them in your warehouse and pull 100 a week from there...?"
Idiot: "No, I want 100 a week from you."
Engineer: "Right then, that's £2,000,000 for the parts and another £5,000 to store them for you, both up front."
Idiot: ????!???
What all of this is doing, along with the "Making Tax Digital", is teaching the electorate that if there is one thing they really should not do it is let government have the slightest, tiniest inkling about what they the electorate are doing.
Many, many years ago when solicitors still had secretaries to do the typing, one firm decided to see if this process could be speeded up by using speech recognition software. An early package which required training on the users' voices was procured and duly trained. In test it worked beautifully, and in practice it worked well too, but only in the morning for the bulk of the solicitors (although it still worked flawlessly for the secretaries all day long).
It was eventually proved conclusively that the habits of the legal professionals at lunchtime were to blame. Lunch inevitably consisted of a pub lunch with a pint or two and the pints were always the good stuff, not weak session beer. The effect of ethanol was to slightly slur the speech of the users; not enough to be audible to the human ear but easily enough to throw off the computer systems.
The technology was shelved as insufficiently advanced for the purpose intended.
That reminds me of the time we had a user, a Professor of physics I think, who insisted on printing out and filing in physical filing cabinets every single email he ever received, including all spam. He did this so that he had a record of all email in case it was ever needed again, or so he said. This was only discovered when he requested a new room full of filing cabinets because his current office was completely rammed with filing cabinets full of junkmail.
The senior academics rather forcefully told him to revise his filing system and to get rid of pretty much all of it. The recycling guys had a field day when that happened.
A similar thing to this happens in the world of cycling. Oval chainrings are one of these ideas that seem obviously useful but which aren't actually much cop when you start to use them. This one has popped up in the cycling world at least three times and generally gets reinvented, hyped like crazy and in the face of complete disinterest forgotten about for another few decades.
The same will happen with LLM AI systems, save that they mostly won't resurge again ever. Yes, they have uses same as blockchain has uses, but nowhere near as many as the proponents of the things think that they have.
Alright, how's about a real-world example for you: me. Diagnosed five years ago as autistic, sub-type high functioning, no intellectual disability. I have the greatest of difficulty ion reading peoples' body language, plus a few other social things simply don't register in my brain. Social status-seeking? Nope, don't do that or really understand it either.
What do I get from the Government for this condition? Sweet bugger all, that's what.
The NHS mental health units won't touch autism diagnosis unless it is a child (but they do work on Sundays to phone you to tell you that). It cost me the best part of £900 for a private diagnosis. It gets me legal protection at work and that's about the lot, really. A life of leisure on benefits? Hah, chance'd be a fine thing, I am way too capable to ever get a sniff of that; don't even qualify for blue badge car parking, have to pay for my own prescriptions too.
I'm honest, that's my problem. Ask me a question and you get an honest answer even to my net detriment, and honesty in response does not a PIP claimant make.
They've been stretching the permitted development rules round the Burnley area to put up lots of telegraph poles to carry their wiring from street boxes to customers, and in doing so incurring the wrath of the locals for putting poles in silly places. This isn't actually breaking the law, but a tad more sensitivity and common sense could have been applied in the implementation.
They won't. They can't.
OFCOM have been handed an impossible job by idiot MPs who once again are looking at the Internet, misunderstanding what is going on, misunderstanding what they can and cannot regulate and going on to make complete fools of themselves.
OFCOM have furthermore been told to make even bigger twerps of themselves by issuing legal notices and fines by email, rather than by following existing treaty-based cooperation rules. 4chan has of course noted this, and also included all manner of dog-whistle politics in its court submission, including noting that the issue of who was sovereign over the US was sorted out in the war of independence and that the UK is in no position to re-litigate this decision.Basically their court case is a rather long declaration of "UK laws are for UK companies only and not for non-UK companies".
Unfortunately OFCOM lack the balls to turn round to Government and point out that attempting to fine non-UK entities merely makes them and the UK government look like idiots.
Britain has the most complicated tax code in the developed world. As a result of this huge complexity, dodging tax has become a national pass time and thus a career path has developed. It goes like this:
Firstly, get a degree in something accountancy-related.
Secondly, get employed by HMRC and stay there until you have a fair grasp of how their systems work.
Thirdly, resign from HMRC and go to one of the tax-dodging accountants to help their clients dodge tax, using the expertise you acquired in HMRC.
Thus HMRC is always in the situation of having to train new people since the smarter end of their workforce is continually leaving for more money, leaving them with dregs and trainees.
In the Sci-Fi novel "One of us" the point is made that a plain biometric for a passcode is a very, very bad idea. The book plot starts with a small-time criminal suddenly discovering that his bank account is empty and he is effectively penniless. He asks a local fence for a loan, and instead receives a finger.
This is the severed finger of someone with no family and few friends, detached from its original (sadly deceased) owner and attached to a small life support device. Quick, untraceable money for as long as the owner's death remains undiscovered because in this book banks are stupid and allow pure biometric ID.
OK, so you've got lots of people all over the world who believe in an invisible, unprovable sky fairy (or fairies) and who are prepared to argue vehemently about these fairies. WE the humans generally know that these beliefs can and should be filed in the round filing cabinet on the floor, but an LLM doesn't really "know" anything. It simply learns responses from the input material it has been fed, and isn't able to make value judgements on the credibility of the training material.
Similarly when fed information on medical science you're pretty likely to inadvertently get a fair old amount of bollocks about homeopathy in the mix. Say what you will about this, but I prefer medical treatments which carry on outperforming the neutral control when the sample size exceeds ten thousand or so. The poor old LLM however doesn't "know" a bloody thing, so if the training material has garbage in it, then out will come garbage from the LLM and there's then pretty much bugger all that can be done about this save screening the training material a bit better.
The closest you're going to get to an answer on that is to ask some like myself, who has what used to be called Asperger's Syndrome. One of the main neurological differences between my thinking and most peoples' is that whereas you lot are all hard-wired to seek to know and advance your social status (or your perceived social status), I am not. From where I sit, fashion makes extremely little sense, for instance, because it is a load of monkeys mimicking what a higher-status monkey did in order to look like them. Thus we have the teacosy woolly hat being very fashionable, because at one time a footballer was feeling chilly with his shaved head and stuck a teacosy on his head to keep warm.
Similar sort of thing with cars: time was when the only luxury 4x4 was a Range Rover, and various landed gentry using these because they actually needed the rough terrain capability and liked the luxury. Then along came Subaru and the Subaru 4x4 became the archetypal "Lord of the Manor" transport, at least in those circles but interestingly not in the popular mind. The situation now is that the original users of Range Rovers shun the things as they're so unreliable and these vehicles are road use only now.
The likes of ChatGPT, if asked to choose a good vehicle for town and country work, would go with what it has been taught and that reflects the minds of millions of frankly uninformed monkeys. You'd get the response of "Landrover or Rangerover is best" and should you actually be using the vehicle for off-road driving you'd quickly learn why this marque are vanishingly rare sights actually out in the countryside.
This crop of AI isn't intelligence. This is the refined responses (I hesitate to say intelligence because there is very little there) of millions of ordinary humans, so the best you're ever going to get out of it is the response of an ordinary human. There are cheaper ways to reliably get this response or better, and one is to employ superior humans instead.
Well yes, cryptocurrencies are giving new life to con tricks that went out of use decades ago, surfacing only in MMORPGs like Even Online. Then, all of a sudden we have banking without regulation and without ground rules other than those set by programmers, who are frankly complete innocents in the murky and devious world of finance. The result is a con artists' playground, with all the old favourites like Ponzi schemes, bullshittery and hype and every other con trick going suddenly come back to life before us.
The other problem now is what pretty much everyone does with a new high-end smartphone: take it out of the packaging, admire the lovely design and form, then bung it in a phone case to protect that lovely shiny from the world. Phone cases also add functionality such as tripods for camera use (without which the Astro mode on Pixel phones is essentially impossible to use).
It would therefore be nice to see Apple designing in a much more sturdy casing on the phone its self and giving some thought towards allowing a phone to be held in a tripod for photography or filming (and this would only need to be something like indents on the casing side to locate a gripper, and perhaps stronger magnets on the back). Adding in better corner protection and texturing to the case sides to make it easier to hold onto would also help greatly.
Do that and the end user no longer has to buy and use a case to make the phone usable in the real world. This then leaves the manufacturer logo much more visible, helping with advertising of the thing.
Of the energy used by a datacentre about 99.9% is released again as heat. Heat which isn't very concentrated but which could easily be used by domestic households for hot water and conventional heating.
So, why not do precisely this? Either set up a district heating system that recycles datacentre heat as hot water for entire districts, or cable an area of housing with lots and lots of super-fast optical fibre and deploy computing modules all over the place, with the waste heat being piped into houses for their heating use. If you're putting in enough fibre to make this distributed computing work, you might as well put in a comparatively tiny amount more and give the entire neighbourhood not only very cheap heat but very cheap and fast internet links as well, is compensation for network and hardware techies being omnipresent.
One possible way forward with SMRs is to use mostly thorium instead of uranium. This doesn't need enrichment of any sort, since there is only one stable isotope of thorium. This fuel can be used as a molten salt of thorium but it doesn't have to be used like this; you can just as easily use oxide fuel pellets in conventional fuel rods or a pebble bed design.
If you have a huge fleet of stuff that the vendor regularly breaks with their own supposed-to-be-certified patches, then you don't have a huge fleet of stuff, you have a millstone round your neck.
Diversifying the composition of stuff that you have so that one vendor cannot cripple you would seem a sane move and hang the extra support costs. Alternatively work out which vendor has the best record for not breaking stuff (hint: not Microsoft) and go with them.
Remember back during the COVID-19 epidemic when the UK government brought out their very own outsourced attempt at a tracker app? Remember what an absolute dog's dinner of a thing it was, with no power saving, permissions required for pretty much everything on the phone and the ability to drain a battery in hours?
Remember how both Apple and Google told them to shove it where the sun doesn't shine and also declined to give it root access on their operating systems? (They then cooperated for the first time ever and brought out their own tracking system, which worked, worked well and wasn't a privacy problem or a battery hog).
The same will happen with the Tonycard. The app will be a privacy-violating, battery-sucking monstrosity which will make smartphones almost unusable as a userland app, and will kill the hardware if given root. So, neither Apple nor Google will give it root on unrooted hardware, meaning that to run it as the Government want users would have to root their phones and void the manufacturers' warranties.
Guess how well that will go down, eh?
The joke of it is that there already is a place to put ID documents on Google phones (and presumably Apple too, although I don't have one so cannot say): Google Wallet. That stores the ID safely, won't expose it to the world unless told to do so, and actually only grants minimal permissions to the document.
This would be why the Bank of England has recently been told to become enthusiastic about the new digital currency that they would very soon be developing. A nice Blockchain system where every transaction can be seen, checked against Tonycard records and rejected if they don't meet up; welcome to the new world of regulated AI-cash, citizen!
Set up a system by which a person can be forwarded to be considered for appointment to the Lords by any one of a great many public bodies, each of which gets only a very few slots each year. Then use the Lords themselves to agree or veto each appointment to fill a small limited number of vacant Lords positions each year, with successful nominees being chosen at random from the pool if the Lords cannot agree on enough of them. Set each appointment to last for 10, 15, or 20 years, one slot per person per lifetime.
Any appointee who does not attend sufficiently automatically loses their slot permanently.
The effect of this is that the makeup of the Lords will be a wide variety and cross-section of society who were not elected and who are not answerable to voters but merely to other Lords (a system whereby miscreants can be ejected must also be present).
Finally, once the House of Lords has been reformed then the Parliament Act must also be reformed; I would suggest that if the Commons and Lords cannot agree on a Bill then vetoing the Bill for at least five years would be the best remedy. After all, what is the point of a revising house if you have a mechanism to circumvent it?
The predictable outcome of this law is now happening with 4Chan and Kiwi Farms in the USA. Their argument is why should a publisher in one country have to censor its output for the citizens of another country?
The UK government has tried this before, most notably with the book Spycatcher by Peter Wright; originally banned in England (but not Scotland) and published in Australia. The British government tried to ban the publication and failed miserably, this ban being rendered infinitely more farcical by the book being sold and reported on in Scotland the whole while until the ban was quietly dropped. The only real effect was to greatly boost sales of a rather mediocre book and enrich the author somewhat.
This is the future of the online safety bill and it is already happening: a few major porn sites are requesting age verification and most are completely ignoring the UK government and its petty local laws. The only way the Government might credibly fight this is with a totalitarian Great Firewall of Britain which in the face of pervasive VPNs is doomed before it even gets going.
As I write this, the 4chan site has begun a lawsuit to clarify its rights under the constitution of the USA, which guarantees free speech. The actual wording contains a large amount of what can only be called dog-whistle propaganda, on the lines of "We Americans invented the Internet and we declared independence from you Brits, so sod right off!", but the actual argument is a simple question: Can one State impose conditions on another State's citizens without overt agreement by the other State?
Put this way, I rather think that the answer will be "No", and the implied response will be similar to the one given in Arkle v Pressdram.
At this point the only option for OFCOM is to erect the Great Firewall of Britain, which since the world and his dog already know about VPNs will be as leaky as a sieve and completely ineffective at its stated purpose. It will however be very useful for teaching a whole generation that if government laws are inconvenient all you have to do is work around them. This isn't a smart thing for a government that is trying to raise taxes to be doing.
The money will be in MESH networking and swarm robotics, with limited and specialised AI that is useful for military purposes. Where the Ukraine has pioneered a path others will follow and sooner or later we're going to see someone building a production line for small, general-purpose attack drones designed to clobber armour or devastate groups of people, depending on how the explosive system is triggered.
The only real question then is which minor state gets the overrun treatment and can the actors involved hang onto it long enough to earn a profit back out of the venture?
General AI as being built now seems just to be a pattern-spotting system optimised towards human languages. To my mind, optimising towards languages is a very silly way to go other than for demonstration and proof of concept purposes, because we already have very good human language systems out there now. These are known as human beings.
Pattern-spotting on other things by contrast is quite a good idea, but once again this is a specialised tool of limited real-world use.
The problem with going looking for environmental DNA and RNA is that these markers are very specific to the pathogens you're looking for. That means that this form of monitoring only detects levels of known pathogens and not unknown ones.
A better sensing system would be to include monitoring of levels of human cytokines in the waste water, to see if the population in general is doing more immunologically than normal. This would indicate a new disease is activating peoples' immune systems, and if you start seeing high levels of cytokines associated with viruses or infections but you do not see increases in the specific e-DNA and e-RNA that you're also monitoring, then you have got an unknown pathogen on the loose.
Or maybe not. I don't think anyone has done any monitoring of wastewater cytokines before, so in doing so you'd be breaking new ground and might see some quite surprising results.
Wastewater monitoring of illegal drug metabolites was another world first that provided a slew of new and unwelcome results. It tallied with normal sanity checks in that people took more drugs at the weekend than during the week, but it also indicated that a small multiple of the tonnage of drugs that the police and Customs had guesstimated was being used was turning up in wastewater. This is why you don't hear much about wastewater drug testing anymore; it paints Customs and the police in even more of a useless light than they are normally viewed in, since the amount of illegal drugs that they are not detecting is much, much higher than their supposedly informed guesses.
This testing also established that there are a lot more drug users in the country than was previously thought, and that most of them are perfectly capable of taking illegal drugs and not sliding down into a dependency death spiral. Evidence like this strengthens the position of folks like Prof Nutt, who advocates for drug legalisation.
If you, the age verification service, are "verifying" the age of a person using a device that the person being checked controls then you are merely presenting them with a technical challenge to overcome.
Please do not be surprised when any and every 12 year old with even average IQ works out how to work around it.
If you look at the natural world you will find that the number of organisms that reproduce by cloning themselves is vanishingly small, even though this is at first glance a highly effective and efficient reproductive strategy. The downside of populating a world with clones is that when a parasite that is perfectly adapted to these clones evolves or is designed, it will run rampant through the monoculture of clones and cause disaster.
The same is true of computing systems. If everywhere runs Microsoft and everywhere runs pretty much the same versions of software, then everywhere will have the same vulnerabilities so that when one system is vulnerable, all of them will be. If you have a mixture of Microsoft and FOSS, then a parasite that is adapted to one will not be adapted to another and the otherwise inevitable wipe-out of services will not occur.
The other problem politicians have is the feeling that anything can be perfected by adding to it. The biggest example of this has to be the UK tax code, but a better example is duty on alcoholic drinks.
Currently there are fifteen different levels of duty for alcoholic drinks. FIFTEEN. Alcoholic drinks are exclusively a luxury good, so you might as well simply charge a set duty per ml of ethanol in a potable drink. Any change in duty is therefore made right across the board and affects all alcoholic drinks in proportion to the ethanol level in them.
Such a change would represent common sense, and therefore will never be made.
Reducing the size of the UK tax code would be another change long overdue and well worth making, since at present HMRC is regularly losing court cases on points of tax law. This is partly complexity, and partly because working for HMRC for a few years is considered a highly desirable form of experience for a budding tax-dodging accountant. We therefore have the farsical situation whereby young entrants to HMRC's employ see this merely as a stepping stone to a career working in opposition to HMRC.
UK law badly needs simplification, not adding to.
No, this isn't government surveillance. If you're looking for a needle in a haystack (that one kid in the crowd of blowhard bullshitters who is actually going to do something violent) then you do not enact legislation that makes the haystack a million times bigger.
Time was when there were business VPNs, hobbyist VPNs, paranoid VPNs and actually dangerous people VPNs. Eliminate the business ones and sift through the hobbyists, paranoids and whatnot until you find someone who's actually criminal or dangerous.
Now we've added zillions of one-handed web surfers to the mix and permanently made working out who to watch well nigh impossible. No, this was not a calculated act by government in any way or wise. This was idiots following on with the actions of the previous idiots and wildly ignoring the civil service advice.
Watch a typical management meeting from a safe distance, then compare and contrast this to film of David Attenborough in front of a troop of monkeys. Narrator aside, you will find very little difference in behaviour between the two (and even less physical differences).
Humans mostly trot about the world running on instinct, mostly attuned to social status and how to obtain more of it. Actually using Mr Brain to think with is quite low down on the priorities; intelligence takes a lot of power to run at full steam. This is why the world's best thinkers all had secure jobs before embarking upon the intellectual stuff: secure energy input before burning a load of it on blue-sky projects.
Machine AI will end up the same. It'll burn lots of power initially whilst programming something akin to an FPGA of huge size and complexity, then will subsequently use the pre-learned instinct before switching on the AI as more or less a last resort.
Say a political party wrote a manifesto claiming to be safe and competent politicians, then after being in power for less than a year managed to run the economy into deficit and break records on the rapid descent into unpopularity of its self and its Great Leader.
By the magic of hindsight that would make that political manifesto misinformation, would it not?
Asking for a chain-smoking bloke called Nigel...
Expediency. Followers of the Orange Idiot tend not to be all that articulate or particularly voluble online; literacy is not on the list of desirable traits in followers of the Great Orange. Communists on the other hand tend to like to spout huge volumes of verbiage to hide behind.
If you're trying to train a Large Language Model, what you're after is language. "Ug Ug Ug Durrrrr" isn't much cop compared to, say, the collected works of Karl Marx.
To be strictly honest about this, mental arithmetic when done at speed in a challenging environment is difficult and takes a lot of practice to become good at. It is a really good example of a task that should be farmed out to a computer as rapidly as possible. I speak from experience here having been a bookmaker's clerk in my youth.
Adding up columns of numbers rapidly is very different from school-taught arithmetic. Out in the bookie world you add the big bits first and the smaller bits after and you don't fuss if you slightly over-estimate the take-out figures on any one horse, nor under-estimate the total cash taken on that race (the field money). The idea is to take more money in total than is paid out in any eventuality but to do that you need to know how much you've taken and how much each horse will cost if it wins.
A good clerk going flat out can just about keep up with the take-outs on most horses in a biggish race but will need occasional pauses to tot up the field money and otherwise square things up. A computer with the power of a modern smartwatch will do all of that and run a couple of displays into the bargain, AND trade off money to a remote betting exchange. Computers are GOOD at arithmetic, humans are not, and getting upset at this natural difference is basically stupid.
LLMs are basically just hugely expensive and sophisticated parrots, without the inherent intelligence of the living bird. They work on statistical inferences, nothing more. If the answer is not in the training material, the system is either not going to find it or is going to trot out something that vaguely resembles an answer to a similar question. It cannot understand in the way that we take understanding to exist.
That said it can likely replace a lot of sales staff at the bottom end of the intelligence scale; management as well for that matter.
LLMs will likely trip up badly when dealing with neurodivergent humans, because the neurodivergency won't have been in the training.
To follow on from this, a fair number of the coders for AI are likely to be on the autistic spectrum to some degree and a common factor in autism is a dislike of most of the human race. This is quite understandable; the bulk of humanity has a habit of never saying what they want directly and only alluding to something vaguely, and relying on the other person being able to model the first one's inner thoughts in order to fill in the gaps.
Non-autistic people are also hardwired to try to work out what their social status is in relation to other humans and since they lack the brain power to do this for more than about 140 other humans, they use all manner of proxies to try to gauge success. Fashion, for instance, is one of these proxies to the extent that clothing fashion can best be explained by imagining a group of designers sitting in a pub, betting each other that the other cannot make yet another idiotic trend fashionable. Tea-cosy hats, for instance, or heavily damaged trousers for another.
All of this is incomprehensible if you're autistic and after a while you tend to get rather pissed off with much of humanity. This tends to be reinforced by the realisation that promotion in a career is achieved not through hard and good work but from social connections; you can really understand how a devious autistic mind can start thinking of ways to lead these other monkeys right down the garden path and into trouble.
The basic problem is really how job promotion works versus how people are told and initially think it works.
Most folks start off thinking that doing a good job and working hard will bring rewards and this will, generally. However changing jobs frequently, quoting the latest buzzword bingo on your CV despite not actually knowing much about it and generally spending all your effort on self-promotion as opposed to actual work is much better for increasing one's salary.
And, in the final analysis, that is what this is all about: increasing one's intake of money so that one can do something with said money. Invest it if you're vaguely smart in such ways as legally avoid as much tax as possible. Then, when you hit a predetermined age cease working and devote yourself to enjoying your loot.
The difference between Harrods and the Co-op is that the former is a generalist store catering to wealthier clients, whereas the latter is a domestic seller catering to a wider spectrum. Harrods likely keeps a stock ready to keep its shelves looking full, and in any case would not expect to move all that much of the higher end stock anyway. The Co-op on the other hand is a classic "Stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap" store, and relies on moving stock through for profit.
Climate science is well worth studying, because if the climate records for the last few million years are anything to go by then the one thing the climate will not do is stay the same. Predicting what may happen in the next hundred years or so and preparing for it seems like a pretty good idea to me.
The Veissmann remote controller I got with my current gas combi boiler works as a remote control system; this is basically the bottom level of usability that I would expect from such a thing.
The next level up would be some form of tie-in to my house internet link, to talk to (or be talked to) by an app on my phone. That way I could set up geo-fencing such that when I'm inside a set radius of the house the heating goes from base level heating to the higher "Master is at home" heating level. However to do this I would expect that this functionality would be maintained for the expected lifetime of the device, say about 20 years minimum.
Similarly for "smart" TVs, it would be best were the TV to be manufactured as a simple dumb TV with an add-on box simply plugged into the back of it via USB-C. That way when the smart bits need updating or fixing they can be simply removed from the dumb TV and a replacement unit swapped in. Sadly a set-up like this is expecting far too much from modern electronics suppliers.
The problem with Brexit is that the two sides of the argument have polarised their positions too much. This combined with the tendency of former UK governments to "gold plate" regulations imported from the EU and to use the EU as a scapegoat for the imposition of necessary but painful regulation tended to aid the side of the Brexiteers.
For instance, the EU regulations on light bulbs merely said "Use something a bit more efficient than old tungsten filament lamps", which given that these were only about 5% efficient at best was fair comment and a very good idea. Tungsten halogen lamps were all that was needed to comply with the EU regulation; gold-plating this regulation and foisting discharge lamps onto an unwilling public was going a bit far.
Then there's the question of negotiation in Brexit; the recriminations about poor deals having been struck presupposes that the EU side were minded to be helpful to the exiting UK; they were not so minded and have remained unhelpful ever since. That the areas that have had the most EU have also fared least well economically is something that the EU member states would prefer not to be reminded of.
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