References · inspirations
Talks that shaped this one
The people whose work built the stack at the heart of the talk.
Inspirational talks
UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection
Leland McInnes
The canonical UMAP talk by its creator. Explains why the knobs behave the way they do — the foundation under the n_neighbors and min_dist sweeps in The Good. Same lab also brought us HDBSCAN and EVoC.
BERTopic: Topic Modeling with Transformers
Maarten Grootendorst
BERTopic's author walking through the design: embeddings → UMAP → HDBSCAN → c-TF-IDF. The "modern pipeline" argument in The Good traces back to this framing.
Podcast · Learning from Machine Learning
Learning from Machine Learning
My podcast on the insights behind a career in machine learning and data science — industry practitioners on what they've learned, what the field is becoming, and how it's reshaping the world around us.