Harold Fisk's meander maps
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__html__Harold Fisk (1908-1964) was a cartographer and geologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In the early 1940s, he spent three years tracing the paths of the Mississippi River. Not just the current path — every path it had taken in the thousands of years it has wandered from the American Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico. Fisk assembled his findings into a series of colored plates published as part of 1944's Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. The multicolored maps — tracing Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to Donaldsonville, Louisiana — became…__html__Harold Fisk (1908-1964) was a cartographer and geologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In the early 1940s, he spent three years tracing the paths of the Mississippi River. Not just the current path — every path it had taken in the thousands of years it has wandered from the American Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico. Fisk assembled his findings into a series of colored plates published as part of 1944's Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. The multicolored maps — tracing Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to Donaldsonville, Louisiana — became legendary for their beauty. (You can see the originals, of which only 1,000 were printed, here.)This embedding is trained on 30 segments of the Fisk plates — specifically, Sheet 7, along the Arkansas-Mississippi border — cooked for a total of 300 steps on base SD 1.5: 16 vectors per token, a 0.004 learning rate, a batch size of 6, and 5 gradient steps.For a far more advanced way of paying procedural homage to Fisk's work, check out Robert Hodgin's Meander project, which creates new Fisk-inspired landscapes from scratch.Your ratings, especially of the five-star variety, are very much appreciated.
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- 1Start at the floor.Why 7,000° and not zero: the scale runs from 0° to 9,999°, and the part below 7,000° is reserved for models no source reports on yet, which carry a stand-in number there so the lists stay complete and never outrank a model with data. 7,000° is where measured data begins. A model with real data but almost no downloads sits here; everything that follows is measurement, and the room above the floor holds ten tenfold steps in downloads at 300° each. The floor is the same for every model, so it decides nothing; the degrees above it do.7,000°running total
- 2Add the downloads.550 download-equivalents in all, from Civitai downloads. Ten times the downloads adds the same 300°, so size matters but never runs away with the score.+822°7,822°running total
- 3Add the likes.107 likes and thumbs up, at half the weight of a download.+305°8,127°running total
- 4Take off the age.The SD15 weights came out in 2022: 150° a year, up to 750°, growing until then.−609°7,518°running total
- =The heat score.Where this model stands on every list of this site. Nothing else adjusts it.7,518°
- Heat score
- One number for how much a model is used and wanted right now, from 0° to 9,999°. Every list on this site that says hottest is sorted by it and nothing else.
- Floor
- The 7,000° every model with real data starts from. The scale runs from 0° to 9,999°; the part below the floor is reserved for stand-ins (models without data), so that a model with data always ranks above one without. The floor is the same for everyone and decides nothing; the degrees above it are the measurement.
- Download-equivalents
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- Log scale
- Counting by tens, not by ones: going from 1,000 to 10,000 downloads adds the same degrees as going from 10,000 to 100,000. It keeps giants from crowding out everything else.
- Likes
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- Adoption rate
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- Measured and estimated
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- Seeder
- Someone who keeps a copy of the weights online for others to download over a torrent, or a hosted mirror doing the same. Each one counts as 1,000 downloads.
- AI Horde
- A volunteer network that generates images for free on donated computers. The number of images it has made with a model is public, and each counts as one download.
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- OpenRouter tokens
- A text model served through an API, such as Claude or GPT, has no weights to download, so its usage is measured in tokens: the pieces of text it read and wrote through OpenRouter, a gateway many apps use, over the last 30 days. Every 10,000,000 tokens count as one download. Source: OpenRouter (openrouter.ai/rankings), CC BY 4.0.
- Full model (checkpoint)
- The weights themselves, the file that generates on its own. It gets a bonus because add-ons depend on it.
- LoRA and embedding
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- Age
- Degrees taken off for how long ago the family's weights came out: 150° a year, up to 750°. It keeps old downloads that had years to pile up from freezing the top of the list.
- Family boost
- A small, bounded nudge for LoRAs of a family this site is pushing forward right now, always listed in the breakdown.
- Stand-in score
- A stable number below the floor given to a model no source reports on yet, so lists stay complete. It never ranks above a model with data.
- New! (grace period)
- A model less than 7 days old shows New! instead of a score and holds no place in the rankings. Its score is computed from day one, but a model one day old grows faster than anything, so without the wait the week's #1 would always be whatever came out yesterday rather than what held up for a week.
- Trend
- How a model's growth over a period compares with the typical model's growth over the same period. Faster than typical reads as a rise, slower as a fall.
- Typical model
- The middle of the catalog: half the models with a figure grew faster over the period, half slower.












