DusanDNesic

PrincInt (PIBBSS) Op­por­tu­ni­ties: Sum­mer Fel­low­ship, Post­doc, and Ops Role (Dead­lines in Jan­uary)

• DusanDNesic 23 Dec 2025 22:53 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: Technoromanticism

  For safety I would go for a car made for the European market, as the testing is stricter and actually considers the damage your car can do to pedestrians and so increases overall safety, not just your own.

  I would be somewhat surprised if Tesla is really the safest car around, but it’s possible. Is it about having a battery instead of a gas tank + other features? I also assume you don’t mean cybertruck but some of the car models?

  My car is 13 years old, but I’ve seen newer ones still without touch screens. EU (I think) passed a law on phasing out smart screens in cars for things related to car operation so hopefully car manufacturers start making newer cars without the screens. I think the market is there. It’s a question of who’ll capitalize on it.

• DusanDNesic 19 Dec 2025 22:14 UTC

  2 points

  −1

  on: When Were Things The Best?

  Besides smart features in cars where I agree with John, I have the sense that fruits and vegetables while no longer seasonal and cheaper and more abundant are of lower quality and producers tell me the same (I’m in an agricultural country with farmers as friends of friends). The need to produce more and lower costs means each individual tomato gets less nutrients, less time, etc, to produce more of them. The quote also mentions raspberries, and since my country was top global exporter before China took over and since I love them dearly I can promise that the best tasting ones are now almost impossible to find (although it’s possible that whatever you’re eating in the US has gotten better!).

  It’s tricky with this topic (like with cost of living!) that data cannot capture immesurables and people miss them. Great job pointing them out, and I want to say that one that you missed is that some food was better tasting before commercial pressures (not most of it etc etc)

AI Safety Orgs Should Ap­ply for Govern­ment Grants

• DusanDNesic 18 Dec 2025 9:26 UTC

  6 points

  1

  on: Shal­low re­view of tech­ni­cal AI safety, 2025

  An amazing resource that every year helps me understand the layout of the field a bit better—thanks for all the hard work! Also thanks for the breaks with memes throughout, it helps :D

  Happy to help think through the possible presentations of this going forward. Also, PIBBSS alumni may be a good group to have on standby to add to stuff like this, let us know if you would benefit from partnering up!

• DusanDNesic 11 Dec 2025 8:04 UTC

  5 points

  2

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: How Stealth Works

  Thanks Linch, agreed on these points. I suppose if no sadness for bats was shown I’d look at it as an “emotionless piece on tech” and that’d be fine, but something about “and these kill bats” kicked me out of that and into noticing “and humans too, right?” Thank you for the empathy, I am looking forward to reading the whole thing!

• DusanDNesic 10 Dec 2025 21:22 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: How Stealth Works

  A part of me that lived through being bombed by F117 in my childhood and rejoicing at our military taking one down despite it’s stealth, cannot help but feel like the nerdy aspects of the post and comment (which excite me too) are more saddened by bats dying than the fact that these are weapons of war that kill sometimes civilians?

• DusanDNesic 13 Nov 2025 13:22 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Meetup Tip: Food

  A quick add—preparing food is also an activity that many people enjoy! If you want to have people volunteer as a way of getting them engaged with field building, bring some knives and chopping boards, and have them make carrot/​cucumber/​celery sticks for the dips, or cut fruits into cubes for people to eat. Also, generally, fresh food > packaged processed food. There’s just something about biting into a grape that is not replicated by Ferrero Roche or whatever fancy thing you get. Also, fruits and veg are usually non-allergen, vegan, acceptable by most religions, and have water in them—great all around! Nuts are also great, but allergy is problematic, so keep them separate, and ideally outside.

• DusanDNesic 10 Nov 2025 9:41 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: One Shot Sin­ga­long­ing is an at­ti­tude, not a skill or a song-difficulty-level*

  Yeah, this is hard, and important to making an event like this fun!

  A few random thoughts:

  In leadership training a warm-up exercise was “I’ll sing this [nonsense tune with lyrics on the whiteboard, similar to singing Game of Thrones tune, but people don’t know the melody already] as loud as I can. Your goal as a group is to be louder than one of me.” The presenter was obviously a loud guy, but it normalized everyone shouting as he would do it first and we’d just aim to match in a way that felt normal even in the corporate office setting. I’ve ran this a few times even with quite strong cultural gaps and nors against me, and it worked every time.

  This reminds me of Bring the Light which I assume was a warm up song with simple lyrics, still good meaning and fun to do (remotely at least! :) ). More like that!

  Music in clubs is repetitive, and at least Serbian Turbo-Folk has very predictable rhymes—from one line’s content and ending you can guess the likely next line, allowing you to sing along to a song you never heard before!

  I assume other cultures have songs like our Bećarac which have one person sing a line, everyone repeats, then they sing another line (usually a subversion of expectations theoug a pun or ending the line without a rhyming word because the rhyming word would have been naughty) and everyone repeats (with laughter). These can be also made on the spot alongside a canon of existing ones and are quite fun—kind of rap battles and disses of old, but much easier to craft.

  Anyhow, best of luck, shame I’ll miss it, but I’ll catch it one year!

• DusanDNesic 9 Nov 2025 18:01 UTC

  22 points

  4

  on: Mourn­ing a life with­out AI

  I deeply feel this, especially as I fear that my son has a chance of needing to cyborgize himself to compete in the new world more than I’ve had to (glasses and phone). I have a preference for him being human to non-human and I’m not sure what the future holds for him.

  At the same time, I cannot speak for anyone else and your calculus will be different in different situations, but if the world ended tomorrow I’d still have loved the two years I spent with him and he’d prefer existence to not having existed for that time. If your timelines give you move than 2 years of life of a child, I think it’s worthwhile, unless you have high S-risks fears.

• DusanDNesic 20 Oct 2025 19:25 UTC

  8 points

  2

  in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Hu­man­ity Learned Al­most Noth­ing From COVID-19

  For completeness, I’ve also seen mil., bil. and tril. - but never with o at the end.

• DusanDNesic 9 Oct 2025 9:52 UTC

  10 points

  0

  on: Mak­ing Your Pain Worse can Get You What You Want

  My past self is super guilty of this and for a decade now working on it—I’m a younger brother, and being unable to do a thing was a sure way to get someone else to do it (i.e. someone older), so I’d make myself unable to do it (through making myself tired, hurting myself in the process by doing it recklessly or other not-quite-conscious but actually beneficial to me strategies). It’s a pattern I noticed at 16, but didn’t fix until 23 or so, and I still find a part of me scheming to do similar stuff. An issue I have now is that my 2 year old has absolutely learned this—he wants to roll up his sleeves, he gives it a horrible effort, and starts crying at the failure, waiting for us to fix it. Instead I guide him to do it since he can do it with patience and effort, and he seems happy to do it, and for some things he just learned it and is now not having the pattern—but it doesn’t generalize, he does it for new challenges. It’ll just take time, but it really starts early.

• DusanDNesic 15 Sep 2025 19:57 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: KvmanThinking’s comment on: The El­dritch in the 21st century

  IMO the part about Bureaucracy is likely not true 10k years ago, although it is (as you cite) 6k years ago. The Academia part is not clear to me as a parallel—becoming a priest was (I would expect) mostly a thing of actual belief, as people used to actually believe things, in ways that our Academia (the Eldritch kind) is not.

• DusanDNesic 8 Sep 2025 19:05 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Nina Panickssery’s comment on: Breast­feed­ing and IQ: Effects shrink as you con­trol for more confounders

  AFAIK the breast milk also contains antibodies which reduces the number of sick days in infants, on priors that should also have a (small) positive effect.

• DusanDNesic 7 Sep 2025 19:15 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: When Both Peo­ple Are In­ter­ested, How Often Is Flir­ta­tious Es­ca­la­tion Mu­tual?

  Anecdata:

  My wife is usually much better at telling when a girl was flirting, and when bets are made, she confirms later with the person on the side (these are usually people she already knows and so people who trust her, but also she maybe can read their particular tells, confounding the result). I often would read the same signals as “she’s just having a good time with me/​the person” and be wrong. I’m not sure if I have the same advantage for men, I do more often bet on them flirting than she does, but I usual am unable to have independent confirmation, it’s random men we observe being possibly flirty.

  Maybe it’s just the case that both of us see our genders as more flirty than the other does, and that bet pays on average? I’m not sure, that doesn’t feel like it explains my wife’s accuracy or my inaccuracy in predicting female flirting (although my prediction did get better through time).

• DusanDNesic 26 May 2025 22:12 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Ori­ent­ing Toward Wizard Power

  As a father of an almost-two-years-old who is infinitely curious, I would benefit greatly from a write-up of what you found works and doesn’t. I also don’t live in the West and visit only occasionally so it is costly to buy things to try out; I’d appreciate learning from your experience!

• DusanDNesic 11 Feb 2025 10:56 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: What is malev­olence? On the na­ture, mea­sure­ment, and dis­tri­bu­tion of dark traits

  Oh, I didn’t notice, but yeah, just a link to it, not the whole text!

• DusanDNesic 10 Feb 2025 12:43 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: What is malev­olence? On the na­ture, mea­sure­ment, and dis­tri­bu­tion of dark traits

  I did somehow get this in my email, so it is curated?

• DusanDNesic 10 Jan 2025 22:48 UTC

  6 points

  −2

  on: Hu­man takeover might be worse than AI takeover

  Quicky thoughts, not fully fledged, sorry.

  Maybe it depends on the precise way you see the human take-over, but some benefits of Stalin over Clippy include:

  Humans have to sleep, have biological functions, and have need to be validated and loved etc which is useful for everyone else.

  Humans also have limited life span and their progeny has decent random chances of wanting things to go well for everyone.

  Humans are mortal and posses one body which can be harmed if need be making them more likely to cooperate with other humans.

• DusanDNesic 10 Jan 2025 22:41 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Some ar­gu­ments against a land value tax

  A crux I have on the point about disincentivising developers from developing parts of their own land—how common is this? In my own country, the answer is—not at all, almost all development comes from the government building infrastructure, schools, etc. and developers buy land near where they know the government will build a metro line or whatever to leech off the benefits. Is the situation in the US that developers often buy big plots of cheap land and develop them with roads, hospitals, schools, to benefit from the rise in value of all the other land?