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Daily Mirror
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Ginny and Georgia fans fume at Netflix as awkward age leap 'ruins' new series
Fan favourite show Ginny and Georgia has returned to Netflix for an all new series which sees more dramatic storylines than ever but not all viewers are happy with the new episodes Ginny and Georgia fans have all said the same thing about brother's age leap in new series. The show has returned to Netflix for its third series, which viewers have waited two years for. Season three picks up just hours on from season two's finale - but not everyone looks the same. Many have pointed out that Ginny's brother Austin has grown up a lot since the last season. Fans have noticed that the actor who plays Austin looks a lot older than nine-years-old which is what he is meant to be in the show. Actor Diesel La Torraca who plays Austin is actually 14-year-old in real life so is five years older than the character he is playing. Many took to social media to point out the ridiculous age gap thanks to the huge break between filming the two series. The show has not aired for two years but has picked up where it left off in season two meaning there should be no age change in the character. Taking to X, one viewer wrote: "I fear ginny and georgia is going to have to recast the little brother because this is deeply unserious." As a second said: " #ginnyandgeorgiaS3 know they wrong for having this 14 year old boy play his 9 year old character. They let too much time pass in between filming and it's p***ing me off." "It's so ridiculous cause austin being so young made georgia's reckless choices hit harder. Now he looks the same age ginny's supposed to be playing and it just doesn't give the same effect," a fan pointed out. As a fourth added: "Netflix should stop taking 2+ years between seasons because wdym these two scenes are supposed to be only a few months apart? #ginnyandgeorgia." Diesel took to his own TikTok page back in May and shared a video of himself which he captioned: "My tryna convince people that Austin is still 9." The Australian-American actor has acted in several roles already despite just being in his teens which include in The Secrets She Keeps, Lambs of God, La Brea and Little Monsters. Actress Antonia Gentry who plays the main character of Ginny commented on how quickly the actor who plays her little brother has grown up. When season 3 filming began in 2024 she shared a side-by-side photo of herself and Diesel after filming season 1 compared with now which showed how much he had grown. He was originally much shorter than the actress and now he towers above her. Ginny and Georgia first arrived on Netflix back in 2021 and quickly became a fan-loves show. It is now in its third series and has got even more dramatic than before. Series two left off with a murder which mum-of-two Georgia is now being accused of, despite it actually being her son who committed the crime.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The City of Lynn Haven announces its annual 4th of July Celebration
LYNN HAVEN, Fla. (WMBB) – The City of Lynn Haven has announced one of the largest Independence Day events in Bay County, the annual Fourth of July Celebration. According to a news release, the celebration will start with the America: Stars & Stripes Parade Opening Ceremony at 8 a.m. on Friday, July 4, at the junction of 9th Street and Highway 77. 'I'm thrilled about this year's celebration—it will be one to remember. Our Fourth of July Celebration is one of Bay County's largest, and we invite everyone to Lynn Haven to celebrate our nation's Independence Day. We encourage everyone to come out and enjoy the entire day,' City Manager of Lynn Haven Vickie Gainer said. Those who want a prime viewing spot along 5th Street for the 9 a.m. parade are encouraged to arrive early, as over 60 decorated floats will travel their way down Hwy 77, culminating at 11th Street. Also kicking off at 9 a.m., Sharon Sheffield Park will be transformed into a festive hub. It will include activities for all ages that include carnival rides, axe throwing, a mechanical bull, stilt walkers, balloon artists, face painting, vendor booths, food trucks and a wide variety of games and entertainment. The celebration will continue into the evening with the Let Freedom Ring Finale at A.L. Kinsaul Park. The Gr8ful Dads will perform at 6 p.m., followed by a headline performance by Jamie O'Neal, the award-winning Australian-American country music star, at 7 p.m. The evening celebration will also involve food trucks, vendor booths, yard games, glitter tattoo artists and free photos from the Gypsy Belle Photo Bus. To end the night, there will be a 25-minute fireworks show that will start at 9 p.m. For event updates, click here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Indian Express
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Influencer Tayo Ricci poses with Kiara Advani, asks who she is; offended desi netizens ask ‘Who the hell are you?'
The Internet is no stranger to surprising celebrity collaborations, but a recent one has gone viral for being completely unplanned, and hilariously one-sided. A now-popular video shows influencer Tayo Ricci and Bollywood star Kiara Advani appearing at the same event for beauty brand Tira. But here's the twist: Ricci had no idea who she was. In the clip, which Ricci posted to Instagram a month ago, he's seen sporting an Indian cricket team ODI jersey and casually posing next to Advani during a photo session. The caption? 'Anyone know who this girl is?' That one line was enough to spark an internet frenzy. A post shared by Tayo Ricci (@tayoricci) The video has since racked up over 13 million views, and while some found it funny, many Indian fans were quick to clap back. One user shot back, 'We all know her, but who are you da?' Another wrote, 'I'm watching you for the first time in my life just because of her.' One user commented, 'She was Dhoni's wife in the movie! Thala for a reason.' Another comment pointed out, 'Someone who has 5 times more followers than you lol.' In the comment section, Ricci tried to play along, writing, 'She follows me on Spotify.' Ricci, 27, is an Australian-American content creator and musician, originally from Melbourne but now based in Los Angeles. Ricci has built a massive following across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and is known for his shirtless interviews, pranks, and bold fashion choices, including his love for the Indian cricket jersey. On TikTok alone, he boasts more than 9.8 million followers, and he has also released a number of songs and EPs under his name. Kiara Advani was recently seen in the War 2 teaser. The Ayan Mukherji directorial is the new installment in the YRF Spy Universe. The movie stars Hrithik Roshan and Jr NTR is the lead roles. Advani is set to make her entry into the YRF Spy Universe in this film, marking several 'firsts' for her, including her first action film, first YRF film and her first on-screen bikini shot.
The Star
04-05-2025
- Science
- The Star
Contradictheory: The false flags of AI
How hard is it to draw the Malaysian flag? Easy enough to ask a computer to do it for you, but hard enough that it'll probably get the stripes, the star, and the moon on the design wrong. I'm referring, of course, to not one but two recent débâcles: First, a national newspaper ran a front-page image of the Malaysian flag that was missing the crescent moon. Then the Education Ministry distributed an SPM examination analysis report with a flag that had too many stars and too few stripes. Now before I get into it much further, let's admit that all of this could have been avoided if the humans in charge had paid a little more attention. But perhaps we are beginning to trust artificial intelligence (AI) just a little too much. It is computing, but not as we know it. Renowned Australian-American mathematician Terence Tao said in a lecture about the future role of AI in science and mathematics that AI is fundamentally a 'guessing machine'. We're used to computers giving the right answer, every single time. But AI doesn't do precision. It doesn't always get it right. It doesn't even always give you the same answer, just something that vaguely resembles what it's seen before. For the AI machine, the Malaysian flag isn't a precise star and crescent adorned with 14 red and white stripes. It's a yellow blob-ish star thing on a blue background, with some colourful lines thrown in somewhere. This 'best guess' strategy makes AI wonderfully flexible for tasks we used to think computers couldn't handle, like generate a photo of something vaguely described, but also dumb at some things humans find easy. But here's my suggestion: Instead of getting more humans to double-check AI's clever outputs, maybe we should just use more computers – specifically, old-school computers that just do what we ask them to and don't guess at anything. I know what some of you are thinking: Using computers got us into this mess, why would using more get us out of it? To try to explain this, let me step away from art into mathematics. Back in 1976, two mathematicians proved something called the Four Colour Theorem. It basically says that any map can be coloured with just four colours such that no two neighbouring countries share the same one. While it's easy to understand and demonstrate with a box of crayons, it's actually very hard to prove. (This, by the way, is the difference between solving maths problems and proving theorems. Solving problems means getting answers to sums. Proving theorems means constructing airtight arguments that work for any map, anywhere, ever. It's also why a maths degree often involves very few numbers and a lot more phrases like, 'But it's obvious, isn't it?') What made the 1976 proof of the Four Colour Theorem so contentious was that it relied heavily on thousands of hours of computer work that no human could realistically verify. Was a proof valid if no human in the world could check it? Conceivably, they could have asked thousands of other mathematicians to go over various parts of the work done by the computer. But maths traditionally resists large groups of people, if only for the reason that mathematicians don't trust others to do the work properly (or as they say, 'They're not mathematically rigorous enough'). Then, in 2005, another pair of mathematicians used a program called Coq to verify that the original 1976 work was correct. Coq is a proof assistant, which is a computer program that checks the logic of a proof step by step. This may seem counterintuitive. They used a computer to confirm that a computer-assisted proof from 30 years ago was valid? But mathematicians have slowly embraced computer proof assistants over the years. They are built around a small, trustworthy 'kernel', a tiny piece of code that performs the actual logic-checking. If the kernel is verified, then we can trust the results it produces. It's like having an employee who is so reliable that if they say the blueprint is flawless, you believe them. Most of these kernels are just a few hundred to a few thousand lines of code, which is small enough for human experts to inspect thoroughly in a variety of ways. In contrast, modern AI systems use machine learning, which is akin to a mysterious black box that even their creators don't fully understand. Who knows why an AI thinks what a flag is supposed to look like? Now, the hardest part of using a proof assistant is in 'formalising' the original proof. This is the laborious process of translating a human-readable proof into a precise format the computer can understand. Mathematicians love to say 'It's obvious that...', which computers hate. Computers need everything spelled out in excruciating detail, and formalising a proof can take anything from a few weeks to several years, because if you input it wrong, it just doesn't work. The maths don't maths. So Tao suggests that we may soon be able to employ 'beginner' mathematicians who aren't particularly strong at maths – because the proof assistant will vet their input and reject it if it's not correct. And his point is that we can combine this with AI. Let the AI guess how to formalise a proof, and let the proof assistant tell it if it got it wrong. You get the power of creativity with the safety net of rigour. That kind of rigour is exactly what's missing as we clumsily stumble to embrace the use of AI tools in the workplace. We already accept spell-checkers, and those weren't built with AI. So let's build systems to flag potential problems in AI-generated output. For instance, imagine an editor sees a giant blinking red box around a photo marked 'AI-generated', warning that it might not be accurate. Or a block of text that's flagged because it closely matches something else online, highlighting the risk of plagiarism. As usual, it's not the tools that are dangerous or bad, it's how you use them. It's OK to wave the flag and rally users to the wonderful new future that AI brings. But just remember that computers sometimes work better with humans, rather than instead of them. In his fortnightly column, Contradictheory , mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi explores the theory that logic is the antithesis of emotion but people need both to make sense of life's vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at lifestyle@ The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.
SBS Australia
02-05-2025
- Business
- SBS Australia
More former Australian politicians are becoming lobbyists. What does this mean for democracy?
More and more former politicians are building careers in lobbying. Will this affect Australia's democracy? Credit: Supplied Former West Australian Premier Mark McGowan is one of the few Australian politicians who can claim to have had popstar treatment. During the COVID years, the Labor leader had an approval rate of around 90 per cent in his state. Under his leadership, WA's most profitable sector – the mining and resources industry – had a major boost. One of the members of his cabinet was Ben Wyatt, the state representative for Victoria-Park and Minister for Indigenous Affairs. Wyatt had been a state member of parliament since 2007, and was the first Indigenous treasurer of any Australian state. In 2021, Wyatt resigned. McGowan followed two years later. While the pair have retired from politics, they maintain professional connections with industries that operate in WA. McGowan has ties to mining giants BHP and Mineral Resources, and holds a senior advisory position at Bondi Partners, who service clients from the resources sector. Wyatt founded his own the consultancy company, WM. He serves on the boards of Rio Tinto and Woodside Energy, among others. The track record of WA's former cabinet members is far from uncommon in Australian politics, and it's legal. The federal government has specific for this type of activity between lobbyists and Australian government representatives. Wyatt told SBS Examines that lobbying is part of democracy. 'We all have the right to express a view to members of Parliament and governments, and the key is transparency,' he said. 'Most Australian parliaments now have registration processes for lobbyists, and I think that is appropriate. Experts lobby members of Parliament and governments in the same way as any other person. 'Transparency around lobbyists' activities has become very common in Australia and I think that is a good thing for democracy." Relationships like these are far from unusual. Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison sits on several company advisory boards, including DYME Maritime, an Australian-American capital fund that invests in technologies for AUKUS – the military alliance his government formed with the U.S. and U.K. Former Labor Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon is a registered lobbyist for Serco, a British multinational, and a special counsel for CMAX Communications. Bondi Partners is a consultancy company run by Joe Hockey, a former Liberal MP and Treasurer under Tony Abbott's government. Bondi Partners has other former politicians as advisors, including former Nationals MP Peter McGuaran and former Liberal Senator Marise Payne. Iemma Patterson Premier Advisory is a company run by former Labor NSW Premier Morris Iemma and Chris Patterson, a retired Liberal member of the NSW Legislative Assembly. According to the Australian Financial Review, the company actively lobbies for property developers in NSW. Pyne and Partners, the lobbyist firm of ex-Liberal Defence Minister Christopher Pyne, was hired by Elbit Systems of Australia, a major private supplier of military technology to the Australian Defence Force, which was awarded tens of millions of dollars of government contracts while Pyne was in government. SBS Examines is not alleging or suggesting any wrongdoing by those named. Emma Webster is a director at Hawker Britton, one of the oldest lobbying companies in Australia. She previously served as the Senior Media Advisor for Daniel Andrews, the former Premier of Victoria. She told SBS Examines that people often have misconceptions about lobbying. 'A lot of people think of lobbying as sort of opening up doors and setting up meetings, and that's part of it. But a lot of it is that explanation of government and the inner workings of government', she said. 'If you think about someone going to court, for example, you wouldn't go to court if you didn't have a lawyer. And similarly, if you're going to make an approach to government, it would make the experience more efficient and effective with a lobbyist. 'We are almost like a translation service.' Still, experts have raised concerns that the thin line separating the public sector from the companies' interests could harm our democracy. Anna Carballo is the head of International Programmes of Transparency International Australia. She said lobbying in Australia is 'extensive, strategic, and highly resourced'. 'There are major industries, including mining, gambling, defence, and fossil fuels, that spend millions of dollars every year trying to influence government policy,' she said. 'While we do have a lobbyist register, there are countless more in-house or informal lobbyists who are uncovered by current regulations at all levels of government. It has very limited transparency. The system allows it without sufficient checks and balances.' The federal government defines a lobbyist as any person who acts on behalf of third-party clients to lobby Australian Government representatives. They are legally required to register and comply with the code's requirements. 'In-house' lobbyists are generally understood to be professionals seeking to communicate with and influence public officials on behalf of their immediate employer. The code does not apply to in-house lobbyists. This is because the interests that these lobbyists represent will be evident. Dr Jill Sheppard is a political economics and elections expert at the Australian National University. She said this is a common problem for democratic nations. 'We're probably too relaxed about it in Australia. The closeness of the networks between politicians, staffers, former staffers, current lobbyists, is quite a small gene pool of people,' she said. While there are rules for lobbying by former politicians, Dr Sheppard questioned their effectiveness. 'There is a rule [for ministers and members of Parliament] for 18 months after leaving Parliament. If you're a parliamentarian or just working for a politician, it's 12 months in which you can't work for a big company or a lobbying company on the same issues that you were responsible for in Parliament,' she said. 'This rule has helped a little, but all it does is delay people's transition into those industries'. However, Dr Sheppard acknowledged that politicians face personal challenges after retiring from public office. 'Some of them will be thinking about what they're going to do after the election. If I lose, where will I go? And how will that affect my decisions today? It's hard to legislate that away'. The Australian Institute examined 20 of the country's most influential trade associations. In a released in December 2024, they identified potential misalignments between lobby groups' interests and their member companies' shareholders, including climate action, public health, and resistance to competition and regulation. Experts have termed one of the lobbying industry's main trends as the 'revolving door': the movement of high-profile employees and elected representatives, from public sector positions to private sector posts related to their previous areas, and vice versa. According to researchers, this can lead to conflicts of interest, and influence legislation in favour of powerful companies. 'At its worst, it means people taking the inside information and the network of favours that they've developed in one role, and taking it to an entirely different situation, which can put the interests of the public at risk,' Director of the Democracy and Accountability Program of the Australia Institute, Bill Browne said. Currently, the Attorney-General has the power to prevent registration and remove a lobbyist if they consider that they are in breach of the code, having the power to remove a lobbyist from the register. Centre for Public Integrity director, Professor Joo-Cheong Tham, believes there's room for improvement. 'The problem with this regulation is that its weaknesses are twofold,' he said. 'One is that it only applies to direct lobbying, so when people meet the ministers. It doesn't prohibit the former ministers from giving advice to those who engage in a face-to-face meeting. 'And also the length of time, 18 months is too short'. Professor Jill Sheppard said it may come down to skillset. 'There is a problem with transitioning out of Parliament. The skills they learn in Parliament don't necessarily lend themselves to being a teacher or a doctor … they lend themselves to more politics. And so we don't necessarily have what we might call a sort of off-ramp for politicians,' she said. 'This was less of a problem when politicians were retiring older, but as more politicians seem to be leaving parliament a little bit younger, they still have 20 or 30 years of their career left, and they need something to do.' Head of Transparency International Australia's Accountable Mining Programme, Dr Ana Carballo told SBS Examines there are several measures that could improve the transparency of Australia's lobbying system. 'The first one is that we need to expand the lobbyist register to include in-house lobbyists and industry associations,' she said. 'We need to require the publishing of minister's diaries so that we can see who they're meeting, and we need to have real-time disclosure of these lobbying meetings, and the topics discussed and outcomes. This is similar to what is happening in other jurisdictions worldwide.' Dr Carballo said a 'cooling off period' of at least three years for former ministers and senior officials would be beneficial. 'In some jurisdictions, like the US or Canada, cooling-off periods [are] much higher, five years,' she said. 'We also need a legislating lobbying code with real enforcement powers, which is unlike the one that we currently have. 'These are all safeguards that will help us ensure that government decisions are made in the public interest and that will help us build up our confidence in our democracy.' Share this with family and friends
