[EuroPython 2026 - Keynote - S1 on 2026-07-15]

🎤 *How Complex Systems Taught Me To Fail by Imogen Wright*

🔗 https://ep2026.europython.eu/session/how-complex-systems-taught-me-to-fail

📝 Abstract:

This talk traces a meandering story of twenty years of invention, triumph and disaster, touching on theoretical physics, cloud computing, viral genetics, pandemic responses, and nearly dying in an NHS A&E queue. You'll pick up four generally applicable laws of complex systems, gain some superpowers for averting an apocalypse, and hopefully laugh a bit along the way. This isn't much of a technical talk and it is neither sanitised nor triumphant — expect sarcasm, most of all during the rough patches. My hope is that you'll leave seeing your own work differently, especially if it's quiet and unglamorous. Resilience is a property of systems, not their components, and it's the people who notice small changes and tend locally who make the biggest differences of all.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

This episode was recorded LIVE during Berlin Buzzwords 2026

Charlie's site and blog: https://thesearchjuggler.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliehullsearch/

Charlie's panel at bbuzz, featuring yours truly among a group of distinguished search and ML people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StaPk0k-52Y

Time codes

00:00 Intro

00:42 Charlie's take on this year's Berlin Buzzwords

01:55 Based on the panel: Charlie's first encounter of AI

04:55 Is preserving search still a question?

5:48 Charlie's "old" search technique to improve quality of search

7:58 Explainability gap

9:03 Did LLMs change Charlie's life

12:07 Query Understanding is still a complex topic

13:14 Vector search or not

17:28 Meetups and places to learn with Charlie

19:25 Charlie's message to the search makers

23:00 What is fundamentally missing in our space

26:03 Where to follow Charlie's work

Show notes:

- Upcoming Vespa conference: http://www.vespaai.live/

- Where find Charlie? On meetups: http://www.searchmeetups.com/

- http://www.thesearchjuggler.com/

- https://searchmeetups.com/

- A neat trick for protecting numbers when using fuzzy search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s34afYwYqyM

Chuquimamani-Condori announces Los Thuthanaka to release new booklet and music on April 3. Hear unreleased music from WNXP set.

This talk will gives a brief introduction to BitTorrent and a side project Arvid started 20 years ago, along with lessons learned along the way. Especially in network programming.

Recorded at StockholmCpp 0x2F, https://www.meetup.com/stockholmcpp/events/301321428/

The event was hosted at Berotec, https://berotec.se/

More information about C++ Usergroups in Sweden at https://swedencpp.se

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Eskil Steenberg's talk at BSC 2025 on the importance of finished software.

Eskil's links:

- https://quelsolaar.com

- https://x.com/eskilsteenberg

- https://twitch.tv/quel_solaar

BSC links:

- https://BetterSoftwareConference.com

- https://x.com/BetterSoftwareC

- https://www.twitch.tv/BetterSoftwareConference

Chapters:

0:00:00 Talk

0:39:07 Q&A

Organization: Internet Archive The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls. At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer. View the web archive through the Wayback Machine. Collection: Wikipedia Outlinks July 2011 Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started July, 2011. These files are currently not publicly accessible.

Organization: Internet Archive The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls. At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer. View the web archive through the Wayback Machine. Collection: Wikipedia Outlinks July 2011 Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started July, 2011. These files are currently not publicly accessible.

After we finish reading a book, our memories of it quickly fade and can even get distorted. Andrew Elfenbein has studied how the things we read get transformed in memory. What we remember may diverge from what’s in the book, but that doesn’t mean we’re sloppy readers – we’re actually using highly sophisticated skills without even noticing. By understanding this process we can better appreciate how books live on in our minds long after we’ve read them. Bonus clip

Click here to listen to a bonus clip of Andrew discussing how people we meet in real life reshape our memories of fictional characters – and vice versa.

Works mentioned

– Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Further reading

Erica Wickerson at The Independent – Detective fiction: Why do we care whodunnit?

The Guardian – Top writers choose their perfect crime

Ian Crouch at The New Yorker – The Curse of Reading and Forgetting

Website of Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA – links to radio and podcast interviews on childhood literacy and the psychology of reading

Daniel Willingham – Cool Reading Facts 3: Reading Is Self-Taught. Partly.