Vuk Dinic

Now

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What I’m focused on right now. Last updated: 29 May 2026.

This is a now page — a snapshot of what has my attention at the moment, rather than a full archive.

Work

PhD researcher in the Datavysts Marie Skłodowska-Curie network, hosted at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana.
Building trustworthy AI tools to increase political participation.

Currently reading

Zgodbe o slovenskih znanstvenikih in znanstvenicah by Anton Gradišek

On my mind

Fine-tuning Gemma 4

If anything here overlaps with your own work, reach out, I’d like to hear from you.

Why this notes section exists

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I kept treating every post like an essay, so when the PhD got busy, the blog went quiet for months. This is the fix: a place for short, rough notes I can write in five minutes. A paper I read, a thought, something that surprised me. No pressure to be polished, that’s what the posts are for.

If a few notes start clustering around the same idea, that’s usually the seed of a real post.

New Beginnings

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t written in a while, a lot has happened! I’ve started a new life chapter in Ljubljana, Slovenia, as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD network Datavysts, with my host institution being the Jožef Stefan Institute. My project here focuses on building trustworthy AI tools to increase political participation.

Even though I’ve been here less than a month, everything has been great so far. One of my biggest fears was loneliness, moving somewhere new without knowing anyone. But that fear turned out to be unnecessary. In just a couple of weeks, I met so many amazing people, grabbed a beer or food (or both) with many of them, and somehow, even as someone who’s not very social, my social life is thriving.

Hope is Necessary

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Andy: *Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.*
Red: *Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.*
The Shawshank Redemption

Both are right; hope can be dangerous, but without it, nothing worth building ever happens.

Why the Future Feels Dark

When I talk to young people, or scroll through online posts, I hear things like:

“I’ll never be able to retire.”
“You will own nothing and be happy.”

These anxieties aren’t groundless. Climate change, wars, extremism, inequality, unstable jobs, and housing markets, the list is long. The rise of the “doomer” meme around 2018 captured this perfectly: a young man who has given up on life. But giving up is the one guaranteed way to make the future worse.

Culture, Politics, and the Machines We Build

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

I follow the news about AI not as much as I should, but enough to stay well-informed. When I say “news,” I’m not talking so much about new tools and techniques but about emerging use cases, implications, misuse, and broader impact. Most of the articles I come across focus on AI’s influence on business or, more recently, on psychology. However, I rarely, if ever, see articles discussing how AI could influence our political system.

The Myth of Direct Democracy

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Direct democracy feels empowering in a broken system. But unless we fix the trust and accountability mechanisms within a representative democracy, we’ll just keep repeating the same cycle.

In Serbia, we’re witnessing the largest anti-government protest in the last 25 years, possibly the largest ever, despite ongoing population decline. The immediate trigger was the collapse of a canopy that killed 16 people. But I don’t want to focus on why the protest started or speculate about the movement’s future.

Why social science needs to embrace machine learning

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Quick note: This is just the first post in a series; think of it as a short introduction.

I’m a social scientist, and unlike many in my field, I genuinely enjoy math and statistics. My friend Petar jokes that statistics isn’t real math, but I’ll leave that debate for another time.

What matters is that social science has long struggled to explain society’s complexity. We rely heavily on methods like surveys, interviews, and content analysis. These are useful but often fall short when predicting or uncovering causal relationships. Society is messy, and humans are unpredictable.

4 Parts of Preparation for Public Speaking

Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Person/Audience:
- Their prejudices, foreknowledge, expectations, interests, and needs.
Context:
- Time: How much time I have and when it happens.
- Space: Online, room, props.
- Bigger Picture: How this performance fits into the larger context.
Goal/Outcome:
- NOT what I will talk about, but the explicit and implicit goals (internal, external, open, and hidden), including the minimum, optimal, and maximum outcomes (pessimistic, medium, and optimistic).
Content:
- What I am saying/asking and in what order, and the key points.

Books I Have Read and can Recommend

Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Of course, this isn’t a complete list.

1. Classical & Stoic Wisdom

Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
Seneca – On Anger
Miyamoto Musashi – The Book of Five Rings
Jonas Salzgeber – The Little Book of Stoicism
Donald J. Robertson – How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning

2. Psychology, Habits & Decision-Making

Dale Carnegie – How to Win Friends and Influence People
James Clear – Atomic Habits
Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga – The Courage to Be Disliked
Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass Sunstein – Noise
Morgan Housel – The Psychology of Money
Spencer Johnson – Who Moved My Cheese?
Mark Manson – The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Mark Manson – Everything Is F*cked

3. Modern Productivity, Purpose & Minimalism

Tiago Forte – Building a Second Brain
Cal Newport – Digital Minimalism
Simon Sinek – Start with Why
Simon Sinek – Find Your Why
Simon Sinek – Leaders Eat Last
Simon Sinek – The Infinite Game

4. Risk, Uncertainty & Complex Systems

Nassim Nicholas Taleb – The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Antifragile
Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Skin in the Game
George S. Clason – The Richest Man in Babylon
Robert Greene – The 48 Laws of Power
Robert Greene – The 33 Strategies of War
Robert Greene & 50 Cent – The 50th Law
Sun Tzu – The Art of War

5. Society, History & Economics

Yuval Noah Harari – 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, and Steel
Mary Beard – SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
Peter L. Berger – The Capitalist Revolution
Srdja Popovic & Matthew Miller – Blueprint for Revolution
Henry Hazlitt – Economics in One Lesson
Frédéric Bastiat – The Law

6. Science & Technology

Bill Bryson – A Short History of Nearly Everything
Carlo Rovelli – The Order of Time
Hannah Fry – Hello World
Max Tegmark – Life 3.0
Hans Rosling et al. – Factfulness
Vaclav Smil – Numbers Don’t Lie
Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont – Fashionable Nonsense
Aurélien Géron – Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow
Hadley Wickham & Garrett Grolemund – R for Data Science

7. Memoirs, Biographies & Personal Stories

David Goggins – Can’t Hurt Me
Edward Snowden – Permanent Record
Mihajlo Pupin – From Immigrant to Inventor
Dean Nicholson – Nala’s World
Fredrik Backman – Anxious People
Marc-Uwe Kling – Qualityland
Phil Knight – Shoe Dog

Programs I Install After Setting Up a New OS

Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Whenever I install a new operating system, these are the programs I always set up first:

Program
Anaconda
Bitwarden
BleachBit
Brave
Calibre
Chrome
Jamovi
Lunatask
Mullvad VPN
Obsidian
Okular
OnlyOffice
Python
qBittorrent
R
RStudio
Signal
Spotify
Steam
VLC
VSCodium
Zenbrowser

Serbian Parliamentary NLP Analysis

Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Political discourse shapes policy, and policy shapes lives. But how do politicians actually speak? What topics dominate their agendas? And do their words reflect the concerns of everyday citizens? Using NLP, we can answer these questions with data not assumptions

Introduction

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become a central pillar of AI, especially with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). At its core, an LLM is just NLP applied at scale—processing massive amounts of text to generate human-like responses.

Resume

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

VUK DINIC

WORK EXPERIENCE

Teaching Assistant/Junior researcher
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš - October 2020 - Present

Assisted in developing lesson plans and coordinated research activities for 500+ students annually, resulting in measurable improvements in academic outcomes.
Designed and implemented data-driven feedback systems, leading to a 20% improvement in curriculum quality.
Spearheaded the creation of a new methodology course, significantly enhancing student participation and engagement.
Applied quantitative and qualitative research methods to improve instructional strategies based on student feedback.

Data Analyst
Students For Liberty - September 2020 - February 2024

About

Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hi! I’m Vuk Dinic, a social-science researcher using machine learning and AI to study society, politics, and digital culture.

I’m currently a PhD researcher in the Datavysts Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral network, hosted at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. My project focuses on building trustworthy AI tools to increase political participation.

This site is part blog, part lab notebook. You’ll find:

Posts — essays on data, society, and politics.
Notes — shorter, rougher thoughts and reading notes.
Projects — research and data-science work, like my NLP analysis of the Serbian Parliament.
Now — what I’m working on at the moment.

Research interests

Computational social science & political discourse analysis
Natural language processing for low-resource languages (e.g. South Slavic Languages)
Trustworthy/explainable AI and its role in democratic participation
Human - Computer Interaction

Elsewhere

GitHub — @realvuk
LinkedIn — vukdinic
Bluesky — @vukdinic.bsky.social
Google Scholar — Vuk Dinić
ORCID — Vuk Dinić

If your work touches any of the above, I’d be glad to connect or collaborate. Reach out via any of the links above.

My opinion about sociology

Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I first embarked on my journey into the field of sociology, I was driven by a single burning question: Why do some societies thrive and prosper while others, like Serbia, struggle? The answer seemed straightforward: prosperity was linked to the presence of individual freedom. Societies with citizens free to make their own choices tended to flourish, while those burdened by government control and restrictions on personal liberties often suffered. After realizing that sociology wasn’t fun anymore, I decided to change my career to something more meaningful. Changing one’s career might seem like a daring move, but the beauty of life is that you can always make changes and pursue what you love.

Once, a student asked Margaret Mead...

Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Once, a student asked Margaret Mead (a well-known anthropologist) where civilization began. The student expected answers like the wheel, clay pottery shards, fish hooks, or other ancient tools. But Mead’s answer was surprising: “In a cave where a healed and mended femur was found,” she replied with a smile. To the question: Why? She explained: Because in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You can’t hunt, you can’t escape from predators — you simply can’t survive. But a healed femur means someone stayed. Someone helped. Someone cared enough to protect you, feed you, and wait with you. Someone was patient. The first sign of civilization is not an invention, my dear ones, she told them — it is compassion and patience. The heart.