Welcome to the Eventual blog
Join us as we explore innovative ways to handle multimodal datasets, optimize performance, and simplify your data workflows.
Turning robot video into training-ready data with daft-physical-ai
A Python library built on Daft for turning robot video into training-ready data, starting with hand tracking and reward scoring as UDFs, with more to come.
Daft v0.7.14: Parquet Reader Rewrite, Streaming Distributed Limits, and UUIDv7
Daft v0.7.14 rewrites the Parquet reader on arrow-rs for up to 17x faster remote reads, ships streaming distributed limits, and adds native UUIDv7 generation.
Daft v0.7.11 → v0.7.13: Bidirectional ASOF Joins, Arrow PyCapsule, and Iceberg Idempotent Commits
Three Daft releases cut May 12–15. Bidirectional streaming ASOF joins, Arrow PyCapsule, Iceberg idempotent commits and table properties, Spark month arithmetic.
Scaling As-of Joins
How we built, broke, and re-built our ASOF joins — 5.5x faster, half the memory of pandas, and scaled to a distributed cluster.
daft.VideoFile: Seek Lazily, Get Frames
daft.VideoFile decodes only the frames you need. Keyframes, time-sampled, or windowed seek, built for robotics datasets, dashcams, and moderation queues.
VLAs are dead, long live World Action Models - a summary of Jim Fan's Robotics End Game talk
Jim Fan argues robotics will follow the exact LLM playbook - and VLAs are already being replaced by World Action Models.
What is physical AI - is it more than just hype?
Physical AI has become a real trend, but is there something real here or is it just hype?
Daft Extensions Featuring daft-h3: Native Rust Performance, Community Owned
Daft now supports native extensions via Apache Arrow's C Data Interface. daft-h3 is the first community extension — 9 Rust-native H3 geospatial functions, 3–16x faster than Python UDFs.
Daft v0.7.10: 30 contributors, 41 new features, distributed asof joins
30 contributors shipped Daft v0.7.10 — the most participation in any Daft release to date. The result: 41 new features and functions across distributed joins, duplicate detection, temporal arithmetic,
Audio transcription at scale with daft.AudioFile
How to transcribe thousands of audio files with Whisper using daft.AudioFile — handling resampling, silence splitting, and worker-resident model loading without the boilerplate.