Rebuilding the Robot Stack: Why Robotics Needs a New Real-Time OS with Guillaume Binet (Copper Robotics)

Rebuilding the Robot Stack: Why Robotics Needs a New Real-Time OS with Guillaume Binet (Copper Robotics)

In this episode, Nitay and Kostas sit down with Guillaume Binet, founder of Copper Robotics, to dig into one of the most overlooked problems in modern robotics: the software stack that runs the robots. Guillaume traces his journey from tinkering with old computers in the 80s and 90s, to telecommunications, to the dot-com era, and finally into more than a decade in robotics, including roles at Trilio, Google, Motional, Argo AI, and as CTO at Skyways building long-range carbon-fiber logistics drones. Along the way, he discovered a recurring gap: while cloud software has matured into a rich ecosystem of tools and frameworks, the software powering real-world robots is still surprisingly broken. That insight led him to start Copper Robotics, where he is building a new operating system and runtime designed specifically for real-time robots. We talk about: * Why robots are fundamentally different from cloud services and laptops, and what "real-time" actually means when sensors, perception, and actuation all have to meet a fixed time budget * The mismatch between microservice-style architectures (and ROS) and the constraints of an autonomous system that has to react in milliseconds * How Copper builds a statically described, deterministic operating system around your robot, with a scheduler tailored to the exact shape of the system * Running the same Rust codebase across heterogeneous compute, from Linux hosts to bare-metal MCUs, with a single self-contained executable * Why TCP/IP is usually the wrong answer inside a robot, and how to think about latency, bandwidth, and dropped data in a real-time context * The trade-off between compile-time and runtime flexibility, and where Copper draws the line versus ROS * Safety certification for autonomous systems (ISO 26262, aerospace, medical) and why 100% deterministic replay is a game-changer for proving that what you tested in simulation is what runs on the robot * The community forming around Copper: students, new robotics startups, and teams who have already "hit the wall" with existing tooling * A fun detour into restoring 80s and 90s computers, floppy disks, and the lost art of magnetic media If you have ever wondered why we see so many incredible robot demo videos but so few robots actually deployed in the real world, this conversation is for you. Learn more about Copper Robotics and join the community via their open source project and Discord.

Physical AI and the Future of Robotics with Sergey Arkhangelskiy of Positronic

In this episode, Nitay and Kostas sit down with Sergey Arkhangelskiy, founder of Positronic, to dig into the state of physical AI and what it will really take to bring general-purpose robotics into the real world. Sergey shares his journey from a decade at Google Search, where he worked on ranking and helped build the "Tetris" layer that unified web, image, and map results, to co-founding Wanna (a computer vision AR company acquired by Farfetch), and most recently launching Positronik to focus on robotics and physical AI. The conversation explores why robotics is approaching but has not yet hit its "GPT-3 moment," the data and hardware bottlenecks that make physical AI fundamentally harder than LLMs, and why measurement and evaluation matter so much. Sergey walks through Positronik's newly released Physical AI Leaderboard (fail.ai), which benchmarks open-source vision-language-action (VLA) models on real hardware using production-grade metrics like throughput (units per hour) and mean time between failures, rather than simple success rates. They also discuss why commercial and industrial applications (manufacturing, logistics, pick-and-place) are likely to lead before household robots, the economics of automation and the "cost of intelligence," the role of human-in-the-loop systems, latency and cloud-vs-edge tradeoffs for running VLA models, and the growing importance of open source in both robotic software (ROS) and hardware (OpenArm). Topics covered: * Sergey's path from Google Search ranking to robotics * Why physical AI is harder than LLMs: data, hardware, and the real world * The Physical AI Leaderboard and how it evaluates VLA models on real robots * Throughput and mean time between failures as production metrics * Why commercial use cases will lead household robotics * The economics of automation and the "cost of intelligence" * Human-in-the-loop and the realistic path to full automation * Cloud vs. local inference, latency, and bandwidth constraints on the factory floor * The role of open source in robotics hardware and software * What the ecosystem needs next to accelerate adoption

Building the Open Lakehouse for the AI Era with Shubham Baldava from DataZip / OLake

In this episode of Tech on the Rocks, Nitay and Kostas sit down with Shubham Baldava, co-founder of DataZip and creator of OLake, to trace the evolution of the modern open lakehouse — from the early days of Apache Hudi to today's Iceberg-centric world. Shubham shares stories from a decade of data engineering at scale, including building near real-time pipelines at Japanese fintech giant PayPay, scaling a TikTok-style social platform at ShareChat from 10M to 160M monthly active users, and the cost and complexity pressures that pushed teams to adopt lakehouse architectures in the first place. From there, the conversation digs into the table format wars: why Hudi was the early pick for truly open, vendor-neutral lakehouses, how Iceberg has caught up and pulled ahead on integrations, where Delta fits in, and what the Tabular acquisition means for the community. Shubham explains why he believes all the major formats are converging — single-file commits, deletion vectors, variant and geospatial types, Z-indexes — and why integration breadth, not features alone, is now the deciding factor. The discussion then turns practical: what the four real pillars of a lakehouse are (ingestion, optimization, query, governance), why Debezium is so hard to replace, what it takes to hit 10-minute CDC latency for fintech reconciliation, and how OLake is rethinking ingestion with Arrow-based writes, exactly-once semantics built on Iceberg metadata, multi-phase compaction, and watermark-based parallel backfills. Finally, Shubham looks ahead to a future where Iceberg becomes the single substrate for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data — powering multi-engine analytics and AI workloads on top of formats like Lance and Vortex, now that Iceberg has decoupled from Parquet. Topics covered: • Lessons from PayPay, ShareChat, and indie app entrepreneurship • Hudi vs Iceberg vs Delta — history, trade-offs, and convergence • Why fintech reconciliation needs sub-10-minute CDC • The real cost of running BigQuery, Trino, and Spark side by side • Debezium's staying power and why Go (not Rust) for next-gen CDC • How OLake uses Arrow, equality and positional deletes, and multi-step compaction • The decoupling of Iceberg from Parquet and what Lance/Vortex unlock for AI • Where to build in-house vs adopt managed lakehouse tooling

From Session Replays to Autonomous Improvement: Shipping the First AI Product Engineer with Milana

In this episode, we sit down with Rohan Katyal and Raghav Sethi, co-founders of Milana, to discuss the shift from passive analytics to the world’s first AI Product Engineer. Rather than just providing another dashboard to monitor, Rohan and Raghav are building an agentic partner that you add to your product to bridge the gap between discovery and deployment. Drawing on their experience at Meta, Yelp, and Airtable, they explore how Milana enables autonomous improvement - turning deep user intelligence into shippable code and structural refinements that act as a tireless extension of your engineering team. The conversation dives into why session replays — a mature but historically underused technology — are now a powerful data asset thanks to vision LLMs. Raghav explains how session replays are really just high-granularity logging of DOM changes, not screen recordings, and why feeding them through AI unlocks insights that traditional event-based analytics simply can’t capture. The team breaks down how they use just-in-time structuring to extract meaning from dense, unstructured session data without requiring upfront instrumentation. Rohan shares hard-won lessons from building Yelp’s experimentation platform — including how teams that simply ran more experiments consistently outperformed those with better data resources. They discuss the tension between A/B testing rigor and iteration speed, why most experiments never ship, and how lowering the cost of generating and testing hypotheses changes everything about product development velocity. We also get into the technical details of semantic clustering across millions of sessions, why video is actually a more compact representation than raw DOM for LLM reasoning, and how Milana analyzes sessions from multiple perspectives — user researcher, PM, founder — to surface real pain points. Plus, a bold prediction: analytics dashboards are dying, and the future belongs to agentic systems that don’t just deliver insights but actually own and drive your OKRs. Topics covered: * Why session replays are the ultimate untapped data asset for product teams * How vision LLMs unlocked AI-powered analysis of user sessions * Just-in-time data structuring: querying unstructured sessions without upfront instrumentation * Lessons from building experimentation platforms at Yelp and Airtable * Why running more experiments beats having better data * Semantic clustering: separating signal from noise across millions of sessions * Video vs. DOM vs. events — the best data representation for LLM reasoning * Analyzing agent behavior through session replays * The death of dashboards and the rise of agentic growth systems * User research horror stories and the surprising things users do Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Rohan and Raghav's Journey 04:47 The Importance of User Research 08:03 Making Solutioning a Science 11:09 Understanding Session Replays and Experimentation 14:50 Defining Sessions and Experimentation Platforms 18:54 The Need for Consistent Metrics 22:11 The Role of Events vs. Session Replays 29:46 Leveraging LLMs for Enhanced Insights 35:04 Determinism vs. Non-Determinism in Data Analysis 37:57 Understanding User vs. Agent Behavior 39:47 The Art of Structuring Data 45:25 Semantic Clustering and Its Importance 47:09 Building Infrastructure for Complex Data 51:24 The Future of User Simulation and Experimentation

From Exabyte Storage to Reactive Backends: Jamie Turner on Building Convex After Dropbox

Jamie, a seasoned startup founder and former Dropbox engineer, shares insights on building distributed systems, scaling storage solutions, and the impact of AI on infrastructure and application development. Discover practical lessons from scaling Dropbox, the evolution of data storage, and how Convex is shaping the future of app development.