I described some problems with Tallinn's attempt here - under that analysis, we ought to find ourselves a fraction of a second pre-singularity, rather than years or decades pre-singularity.
We seem pretty damn close to me! A decade or so is not very long.
(Think of simulations and sims-within-sims as like a branching tree; in a finite tree, almost all civilizations will be in one of the leaves, since they greatly outnumber the interior nodes.)
In a binary tree (for example), the internal nodes and the leaves are roughly equal in number.
Remember that in Tallinn's analysis, post-singularity civilizations run a colossal number of pre-singularity simulations, with the number growing exponentially up to the singularity (basically they want to explore lots of alternate histories, and these grow exponentially). I suppose Tallinn's model could be adjusted so that they only explore "branch-points" in their simulations every decade or so, but that is quite arbitrary and implausible. If the simulations branch every year, we should expect to be in the last year; if they branch every second...
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.