Nowadays Starlink terminals to operate in Ukraine they have to be approved so right now Russians cannot waste them anymore on drones as it's much harder getting one working (in the past they have been).

I have no idea how a London market in the 18th century should look like so I cannot challenge that but recent models like nano banana ones, Z-image (on a lesser extend) can generate images that are essentially indistinguishable from actual stock photos, this wasn't true for late 2024 models, with wonky backgrounds, too smooth skins and general lack of details (the classic AI-look that AI images had).

Image quality has improved a lot in recent months thanks to better models. The ability of people to notice these improvements is plateauing because they are not trained to spot artifacts, which are becoming more obscure.

How the "costant function" result fits the data points better than a slope that has two parameters instead of one.

This reminds me when people were doing crazy stuff to improve the first Stable Diffusion model by swapping layers, interpolating weights, documenting which layer was most responsible for the quality of the hands etc. At the end the final models had dozens of different ancestors.