Thursday Night Links

• Over the long run in infosec, the defensive side tends to win. There's a lot of deadweight loss in a hack, and hackers have a higher discount rate than defenders, so in an equilibrium state attacking needs to be massively easier than defending to be worthwhile. But that long-run equilibrium is driven by the changes in behavior that arise when attackers have a temporary advantage. And in a world where more code than ever is being written and a smaller proportion of it than ever is being read, the rewards for supply chain attacks targeting key libraries are unusually high. This is one reason for Anthropic's rather public-spirited approach to using Mythos to fix software vulnerabilities; exploits are typically chained together, so it's a race to break the links before they're misused. [Byrne Hobart]
• Only a few economists’ works have inspired eponymous schools. Marxism and Keynesianism come to mind, but almost memory-holed is an American, Henry George, whose “Georgist” movement was a major political force in the heady days of late 19th- and early 20th-century progressivism. George was the author of Progress & Poverty, a bestseller shortly after its publication in 1880. In the 1880s and 1890s, P&P outsold every English-language book except the Bible. Yet today, no major publishing house handles his works, and the best edition is a scanned reprint of the 1905 edition from tiny Dover Publications. His work is so obscure and forgotten, despite his historical popularity, that no mainstream publisher can be bothered to pay for new typesetting. [The Tom File] 
• For whatever number we came up with here, one must remember that in many ways the poorest Britons today live better than did Mr. Darcy regardless of which method for calculating income or wealth I used. For all his wealth, he still froze in winter, constantly stank of horse or pig or mud, had to travel very very slowly to town, died at 50 and likely saw several of his sisters, nephews or cousins die in childbirth or before they turned one, drank awful drinking water even when avoiding the many outbreaks of Cholera or the constant smog from the coal-burning fires in urban households (the Channel Four series The 1900 House is a good indication for how, then remove another hundred year of development). [Joakim Book]
• Visa’s second quarter net revenue growth of 17% was the highest since 2022, driving GAAP EPS up 36% and non-GAAP EPS up 20%. Consumer spending remained resilient, and our strategy and innovations fueled strong performance in consumer payments, commercial and money movement solutions and value-added services. [Visa Inc.]
• Seems to me that whenever you move somewhere that is "cheap," there will be massive drawbacks and difficulties, period. This is apparently even true in a Mediterranean paradise like Italy. You "pay" for your life in a cheap place by dealing with some element of life there that is not easy to deal with, be it isolation, high median ages, bureaucracy, clannish locals, harsh climates, lack of economic / cultural / religious opportunities, social problems, crime, etc. Most often, you deal with a combination of some or all of these. So when you do the "moving somewhere super cheap" thing, there WILL be times where you want to give up and leave. That's where the real question comes in: "just how much do I NOT want to do the high-cost, crowded, 4HL, working-to-pay-the-bills thing?" The only ones who will really be so averse to normalcy in an "easy place" will be those who are very eccentric, poorly adjusted to the salaryman life, likely kind of poor, and who expect to remain kind of poor indefinitely. [Hickman]
• From 1936 to 1939 there were two life-and-death struggles in Spain, both of them civil wars. One pitted nationalist forces led by Francisco Franco, aided by Hitler, against the Spanish Republicans, aided by Communists. The other was a separate war among Communists themselves. Stalin in the Soviet Union and Trotsky in exile each hoped to be the savior and the sponsor of the Republicans and thereby become the vanguard for world Communist revolution. We sent our young inexperienced intelligence operatives as well as our experienced instructors. Spain proved to be a kindergarten for our future intelligence operations. Our subsequent intelligence initiatives all stemmed from contacts that we made and lessons that we learned in Spain. The Spanish Republicans lost, but Stalin's men and women won. When the Spanish Civil War ended, there was no room left in the world for Trotsky. [Pavel Sudoplatov]
• In a March 16, 2026, decision in Fortis Advisors LLC v. Krafton Inc., the Delaware Court of Chancery adjudicated claims arising from the sale of a video game studio, Unknown Worlds, where Fortis alleged Krafton acted in bad faith to avoid a $250 million earnout. In enforcing the merger agreement and granting specific performance, the court cited evidence that Krafton’s CEO had consulted ChatGPT extensively, relying on the CEO’s chat logs with ChatGPT as evidence of his intent and planning in orchestrating the takeover. [link]
•  We examine how “sleepy deposits” affect competition, bank value, and financial stability. Using novel data on account openings and closures at over 900 banks, we show that only 5–15% of depositors open new accounts per year. More closures are driven by moving or death than rate-shopping. We develop an empirical model in which banks face dynamic invest-versus-harvest incentives. We find that depositor sleepiness accounts for 57% of average deposit franchise value, softening competition particularly for banks in low-concentration markets and banks with low-quality services. Sleepiness also enhances financial stability and significantly reduced default probabilities during the 2023 banking turmoil. [NBER]
• We have been excited to see a proliferation of vintage LM projects, including Ranke-4B, Mr. Chatterbox, and Machina Mirabilis. Alongside these efforts, we introduce talkie-1930-13b-base, a 13B language model trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text. Additionally, we present a post-trained checkpoint turning our base model into a conversation partner without relying on modern chat transcripts or instruction-tuning data. talkie is the largest vintage language model we are aware of, and we plan to continue scaling significantly. As a next step, we are training a GPT-3-level model, which we hope to release this summer. A preliminary estimate also suggests we can grow our corpus to well over a trillion tokens of historical text, which should be sufficient to create a GPT-3.5 level model—similar in capability to the original ChatGPT. [talkie]