Sunday, August 23, 2026
Train a robot policy in simulation and put it on real hardware, and some of what it learned survives the trip while some quietly doesn't. The Reality Gap is a monthly seminar we're starting September 1 at Mission Robotics that takes that problem one piece at a time: perception, contact and manipulation, data collection, locomotion, world models. Session one opens with the question the whole series hangs on: what actually transfers today and how we can measure it, then a working discussion over dinner. If you train in simulation and deploy on hardware, request a seat and tell me what you're trying to transfer.
Tuesday's Physical AI night at Niantic Spatial is being recorded for the Rally YouTube channel. Builders Night is tomorrow at 6:30 at The Commons, bring a project, and Degrees of Freedom, our bring-your-own-robot night, opens August 31. See you there.
Lee
Coming up at Rally
Builders Night
2026-08-24 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Bring a project and work on it beside people doing the same, every Monday. Show up with a goal, leave with momentum.
Physical AI: What's Working (and What Still Breaks)
2026-08-25 · 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Niantic Spatial, Coco Robotics, and RLWRLD on what they built and where it still fails, robots out on the floor. Talks go up on Rally's YouTube channel.
Degrees of Freedom: Bring Your Own Robot @ Mission Robotics
2026-08-31 · 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Twice-monthly working night for people building physical AI without a lab around them. Bench time beside builders who have probably hit your bug.
The Reality Gap: A Sim-to-Real Seminar
2026-09-01 · 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Session one kicks off the series over dinner: what everyone in the room is trying to transfer, and where it breaks.
Around SF this week
Monday, Aug 24, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Getting tokens out fast and cheap is its own engineering discipline, and vLLM conference week brings that crowd to town. Short talks from vLLM and NVIDIA Dynamo, then the inference community over food.
Monday, Aug 24, 7:30 PM - 12:00 AM
Working late next to other people in the zone is its own kind of focus, and this one runs 7:30 to midnight with barista coffee and pastries. Bring a laptop and the project you keep putting off.
Tuesday, Aug 25, 5:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Five hidden challenge environments, a baseline agent for each, and under two hours to make it measurably better. A judged build night on Hexo Labs' open-source SIA framework, with a leaderboard running all night.
Tuesday, Aug 25, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Hearing the founder explain why the tool works the way it does changes how you build with it. A fireside with n8n's Jan Oberhauser, plus a demo of the n8n MCP driven from Claude Code or Lovable.
Tuesday, Aug 25, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Arguing about open weights at a meetup settles nothing, so this one makes it a sport: 1v1 debate rounds, the audience votes the winner live. Qdrant and Neo4j host, 21 and up, a Nintendo Switch on the line.
Wednesday, Aug 26, 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
A lightning panel first, then the rest of the evening is döner and conversation on the One Kearny rooftop. Malte Ubl of Vercel, Nikita Shamgunov of Databricks, and Max Stoiber of OpenAI.
Wednesday, Aug 26, 5:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Generating code is easy now and writing code that survives review is the contest. Hidden bugs seeded in a repo, you open the fix as a PR, and the best merged one wins a Mac mini.
Thursday, Aug 27, 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Engineer-to-engineer, with debugging disasters on the table, fifty-eight floors up in Salesforce Tower. A demo from Rob Mee of Mechanical Orchard, then a panel with Anthropic and Ode; confirmed by name, and doors close at 6.
Thursday, Aug 27, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Forward deployment is the job that appeared when shipping an AI product came to mean shipping it inside a customer's company. Factory on Droids at Blackstone, Reducto on engineers winning customers, Exa on evals as the product spec.
Saturday, Aug 29, 9:00 AM - 7:00 PM
Inference on the robot with no cloud, footing on ice, hardware that survives minus 20 degrees and 200 km/h winds: two days building for a real Himalayan deployment. The winning team gets flown out on the expedition.