Sunday, 6th April 2025
Some friends are traveling to Japan, and in bombarding them with unsolicited tips to try to convince them to visit Huis Ten Bosch - the Dutch theme park near Nagasaki - I was reminded of my all-time favorite piece of travel writing, by Richard Hendy: Huis ten Bosch: Only Miffy can save us now - also part two and part three.
Monumental in its conception, extravagant in its execution, and epic in its failure, Huis ten Bosch is the greatest by far of all of the progeny of Japan’s Bubble era dreams.
There is so much good stuff in these essays, including a delightful divergence to cover the psychic toad that ended up responsible for more than $10 billion:
[...] late at night scores of black limousines would park up outside one of her restaurants, Egawa, disgorging bankers for séances, inspired by esoteric mikkyo Buddhism, on the fourth floor, overseen by a giant ceramic toad standing a meter tall.
Richard's essays convinced us to visit Huis Ten Bosch in 2014 and it was a highlight of our trip to Japan. Here are my photos on Flickr.
[...] The disappointing releases of both GPT-4.5 and Llama 4 have shown that if you don't train a model to reason with reinforcement learning, increasing its size no longer provides benefits.
Reinforcement learning is limited only to domains where a reward can be assigned to the generation result. Until recently, these domains were math, logic, and code. Recently, these domains have also included factual question answering, where, to find an answer, the model must learn to execute several searches. This is how these "deep search" models have likely been trained.
If your business idea isn't in these domains, now is the time to start building your business-specific dataset. The potential increase in generalist models' skills will no longer be a threat.