Interview · moment 14 of 30
Blogging as Unqualified Reservations and Leaving Urbit
from The Acid Story with Curtis Yarvin | The Tim Dillon Show #310 · #310
5 min
Guest
Curtis describes quitting tech to do independent computer science research, blogging anonymously as Unqualified Reservations from 2002-2013, then founding and later stepping away entirely from the Urbit company and project.
- Tim quit his job in 2002 after meeting his wife, planning to pursue an unsupervised PhD thesis in computer science instead of conventional work.
- By 2010-2011, Tim had two kids and no money, depending on his wife's day job and his mother's support while working on unpaid projects.
- One of those projects was Unqualified Reservations, a blog that grew a real readership and made Tim a nano-celebrity in certain internet circles.
- Tim's readership grew enough by 2013 that blogging was no longer just a hobby—it became something that needed to turn into an actual company.
- Tim stopped blogging in 2013 to launch Urbit, a project attempting to rethink computing systems from scratch rather than build on historical accidents.
- The core problem Tim was addressing: modern computers, including Apple Watches, are structural copies of 1975 IBM minicomputers because of historical lock-in.
- Tim's thought experiment was designing an OS from scratch as if it came from an alien spaceship, free from the constraints of computer history.
- Tim ejected himself completely from the Urbit project—he has no stock, no power, no involvement, and admits he can't even explain how to use it anymore.