The comma isn’t part of the default iPhone keyboard (you need to press another key to be offered it) but has that affected what people type? CC-licensed photo by Rasmus Olsen on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Punctual. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Punctuation is dead because the iPhone keyboard killed it • Android Authority

Rita El Khoury:

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Open any social media site today, and you’ll find a slew of tweets, shorts, messages, videos, photos, and more — almost all written with lower capital letters and barely any punctuation. For me, that phenomenon started as a fun observation many years ago, became very irritating as I noticed it more and more, and eventually settled into an unavoidable reality.

People these days don’t use punctuation like they should, despite how much this can irk sticklers for grammar like me. This is especially true for the younger generations, who grew up in the mobile-first age with a smartphone in their hands before they ever saw a full physical QWERTY keyboard.

But I posit that the trend isn’t due to some teenage rebellion, coolness factor, informal texting, or lack of understanding of what the Shift or Caps Lock key can do. No, I think the real reason is a mix of laziness and smartphone use, particularly the iPhone and its terrible keyboard without accessible period or comma keys.

See, even the most grammar-fanatic user, like me, ends up dreading using punctuation when it takes extra taps to add it. I’ve noticed this so often because I always use Gboard on my Android phones, so I punctuate my sentences properly. But on the rare occasion that I dig out my test iPhone 13 to check an app or feature, I end up hating every second of my typing experience because of how tedious it is to add periods or commas to my sentences. So I start skipping them here and there — sometimes, everywhere. So much so that the auto-capitalization stops getting triggered, and I end up with very Gen Z-looking sentences with a random string of lower-cap words separated by nothing more than spaces.

Pundits will say that it’s just an extra tap to add a period (double-tap the space bar) or a comma (switch to the characters layout and tap comma), but it’s one extra tap too many. When you’re firing off replies and messages at a rapid rate, the jarring pause while the keyboard switches to symbols and then switches back to letters is just too annoying, especially if you’re doing it multiple times in one message. I hate pausing mid-sentence so much that I will sacrifice a comma at the altar of speed.

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I don’t really buy this, but it might be worth someone doing some sort of study into this.
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LG’s new stretchable display can grow by 50%, bendy panels can be deformed into new form factors • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

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LG Display, one of the global leaders in display technologies, unveiled a new stretchable display prototype that can expand by up to 50%. This makes it the most stretchable display in the industry, more than doubling the previous record of 20% elongation. LG Display showcased the new screen at the LG Science Park in Seoul as part of the Stretchable display national project, with over 100 stakeholders taking part in the event.

This stretchable technology goes beyond expanding its size, though, as you can freely twist, extrude, and fold it without damaging the screen. This gives the technology a limitless number of applications — from clothing and wearable technologies to extruded touchable automotive panels. LG even showed a concept where the stretchable display is sewn or attached directly to firefighter uniforms and displays real-time information to the rest of their team.

The prototype being flexed in the top image is a 12-inch screen with a 100-pixel-per-inch resolution and full RGB color that expands to 18-inches when pulled. LG Display said that it based the stretchable display on a “special silicon material substrate used in contact lenses” and then improved its properties for better “stretchability and flexibility.” It also used a new wiring design structure and a micro-LED light source, allowing users to repeatedly stretch the screen over 10,000 times with no effect on image quality.

The Stretchable display national project is one of the programs spearheaded by the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (MOTIE) and the Korea Planning & Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology. This move has allowed LG Display and South Korea to gain a foothold in the next-generation display market, as well as ensuring that the research, development, and manufacturing supply chain will benefit local companies and organizations. In fact, aside from LG Display which took the lead, the current stretchable display prototype involves over 19 domestic industry and research institutions. So, its commercial success will likely benefit the South Korean economy as a whole.

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The photos in the article really are remarkable.
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How weight loss drugs took over Instagram • Financial Times

Hannah Gordon:

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In one hand, a slender young woman holds up a bottle of clear liquid. The words “Skinny” and “GLP-1” — a new class of weight loss drugs — are visible on the label. In the other hand, she raises up a pipette filled with the liquid, as if to drop it in her open mouth. “Lose up to 15% of your body weight,” reads the caption on the Instagram post. 

The marketing, from a little-known online pharmacy called Skinny Rx, is one of thousands of advertisements that are targeting young women on social media, promising users they can get their hands on “affordable” anti-obesity or anti-diabetic medications in just a few clicks.

In recent weeks, I’ve found my own Instagram feed taken over by the adverts despite never having purchased the drugs. Up to eight consecutive ads will appear for weight loss pills, oral liquids or injectables.

Looking on Meta’s Ads Library, it’s clear I am not the only one. There are more than 5,000 active adverts listed that contained the phrase GLP-1, plus more than 3,100 campaigns that mentioned the GLP-1 drug “semaglutide” and over 4,000 referencing “Ozempic”. As a comparison, popular beauty product terms, such as nail polish and blusher, featured in fewer ads — around 3,000 and 1,100 respectively.

The value of these drugs in treating obesity and diabetes is clear. And marketing for legitimate prescription medications is legal here in the US. But allowing people to be bombarded with advertising that promotes rapid weight loss — at a time when social media platforms face increased pressure to take more responsibility for the content shown to users — is irresponsible, say experts. 

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How much will Twitter matter to Donald Trump this time? • Business Insider

Peter Kafka:

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the big unknown I’m thinking about right now is a pretty simple one: Does Donald Trump know, or care, about what’s happening on Twitter?

Trump famously loved Twitter during his first term in office. But he wasn’t addicted to it the way many of us are — constantly scrolling for things to enrage or delight or distract. Instead, he was using it like a remote control — to program the media’s coverage, and reality itself.

Here’s Trump in 2019 talking to Fox News about the way he used Twitter:

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I have destroyed bills that were going to be voted on that were bad, and I’ve gotten bills passed that were good by using Twitter. And Twitter is really a typewriter for me. It’s really not Twitter — it’s — Twitter goes on television, or if they have breaking news, I’ll tweet, I’ll say, “Watch this — boom.”

I did the Golan Heights to Israel, and I put it out on Twitter. If I put out a news release, nobody’s even going to see it. Today’s Huawei, I put it out on Twitter. People see. That’s not to build Twitter. That’s to say that as soon as it goes out, it goes on television, it goes on Facebook, it goes all over the place, and it’s instant — it really is, to me, it’s a modern way to communicate.

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But note whom Trump was talking to in that interview: Fox News.

Trump 1.0 was a president who understood that digital media was important. But he was first and foremost a president who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s, and his media diet reflected that: print newspapers and magazines, which he would scrawl notes on using a Sharpie. And, above all else: TV.

Trump was the TV president. Trump was transfixed by TV, and that meant TV was the most important medium during his first presidency. If you wanted to communicate with the president, the conventional wisdom became, you did it by going on TV because you knew he’d see it there. Fox News in particular.

That was four years ago, and since then, the TV landscape has continued to bleed money and audience. Election-night ratings last week were down 25% from 2020. Newish mediums and platforms like podcasts, YouTube, and TikTok are ascendant, and Trump and his campaign spent a lot of time and effort over there.

So is it possible that Trump, who is approaching 80 and played songs from 1978 at his rallies, has changed his media diet, too?

I mean, sure? I guess it’s conceivable that he went on Theo Von’s podcast/YouTube show because he’s a big Theo Von fan.

My hunch, though, is that he’s getting his information the way he always has — by watching and reading Old Media. And, as The New York Times reports, by asking whoever’s in his orbit at the moment:

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We need internet culture journalism more than ever • Passionfruit

Steven Asarch:

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During Donald Trump’s election-night victory speech, UFC owner and Trump supporter Dana White thanked several people, including YouTubers the Nelk Boys, podcaster Theo Von, streamer Adin Ross, and podcaster Joe Rogan. 

For those with little internet presence, these names might not be notable. But for the internet-addicted young men who helped carry Trump to four more years in the White House, this was a congratulatory shout-out. These internet edge lords with millions of followers — some who spew antisemitic conspiracy theories and make grand sweeping gestures and endorsements for Trump — are now some of the most powerful creators in American culture. 

Though there is no clear single reason as to why Trump won the election, there’s no doubt that the internet and the chaos it evolved into fueled the anger of young men over the past decade and played a major role. According to exit polls, men between the ages of 18 and 29 shifted rightward by eight percentage points since the 2020 election, citing the economy as a top issue. 

…At Passionfruit, I’ve covered the rise of the conservative gamer, the controversial (and childish) content of Adin Ross, as well as dozens of other stories about how right-wing creators are exploiting the frustrations of young men and rotting our social fabric. Complaints about Star Wars or Marvel making bad TV get shoehorned into the overall culture war, blaming bad writing or dialogue on the “woke mind virus.” That rhetoric becomes a slippery slope, leading young men down rabbit holes to more conservative voices like Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro.

But at other newsrooms I’ve worked with, getting anyone to care about internet culture journalism has proven to be a herculean feat. One editor at an outlet (that shall not be named) told me to “focus on more mainstream personalities” since those are the ones “that get clicks.”

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The real missing link, I think, is podcast culture journalism. The problem, though, is that it takes so long to listen to them.
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What are the most commonly used movie clichés? • Stephen Follows

Stephen Follows:

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Last week, a group of friends and I watched Last Action Hero (1993). The script started life as a satire on dumb action moves (its original title was “Extremely Violent”) but was so heavily re-written during development and production that (a) its original writers lost their full writing credit, and (b) it became the exact thing it was looking to send up – i.e. a forgettable dumb action movie.

During the many dull moments we had to chat while the movie draaagggggggged on, the conversation turned to dialogue clichés. Last Action Zero included a number of classics, including “This is not happening”, “I’m just doing my job”, and “Did you hear something?”.

This movie gets a pass on clichés as its intent is to be a semi-parody, so some of those uses could be aimed at being self-aware and (intended at least) for comedic effect.

But what of the whole pantheon of movies? How many cite familour clichés? And which are the ones coming in and out of fashion?

I turned to my database of subtitle files to find out. I generated my long list of 138 dialogue clichés after consulting with screenwriters, reading blogs, and talking it through with Jack Malvern from The Times. With my list in hand, I tracked their appearance in over 72,000 movies released since 1940.

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It’s all very, very American. (Unsurprisingly.) He also looks at those phrases in rapid decline: “We meet again” has fallen off very quickly. “You’d better come in” is basically dead.
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DNA shows Pompeii’s dead aren’t who we thought they were • Ars Technica

Jennifer Ouellette:

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Four Pompeii victims were found in 1974 in what is known as the “House of the golden bracelet.” Three (two adults and one child) were found at the foot of a staircase leading to a garden and the seafront. Archaeologists thought this was likely a father, mother, and their child because of the arrangement of the bodies, as well as a golden bracelet worn on the arm of one of the bodies. But it wasn’t possible to definitely determine the sex of any of the bodies. The hypothesis was that the trio had taken shelter in the stairwell but were killed when it collapsed. A fourth body of a child, about age 4, was found nearby, presumed to have died while trying to escape to the garden.

This new DNA analysis showed that this conventional interpretation was incorrect. All the bodies were male, including the one with the golden bracelet, and none of them were genetically related. It wasn’t possible to glean much information about physical characteristics, but one person had black hair and dark skin, and two others probably had brown eyes. The ancestry of all four was consistent with origins in North Africa or the Mediterranean.

In 1914, nine bodies were found in the garden in front of the “House of the cryptoporticus,” so named because there is an underground passage running along three sides of that garden. Only four were preserved in plaster, including two bodies that seemed to be embracing. Archaeologists suggested they were lovers, mother/daughter, or two sisters. The authors were only able to extract DNA from one of those bodies, revealing that it was male, excluding two of those possible interpretations. His ancestry was of Near Eastern/North African origin.

Pompeii plaster casts in the House of the Golden Bracelet. Credit: Archeological Park of Pompeii
Several bodies were found in the “Villa of the Mysteries” in 1909–1910, known for its decorative frescoes dedicated to Bacchus, the god of wine, religious ecstasy, and fertility. The villa even had a wine press, since it was common for wealthy families to make their own wine and olive oil, among other products. The authors focused on one particular body found lying on top of a layer of ash, wearing an engraved iron and carnelian ring on the left hand. Archaeologists suggested he was probably the custodian of the villa rather than a family member.

The DNA analysis confirmed that this body was a male of mixed genetic ancestry, primarily Eastern Mediterranean and European origin. In short, “The scientific data we provide do not always align with common assumptions,” said co-author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University. “These findings challenge traditional gender and familial assumptions.”

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The Matter smart home standard gains support for more devices, including heat pumps and solar panels • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

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However, the launch of the Matter 1.4 specification this week shows some signs that the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA, the organization behind Matter) is using more sticks and fewer carrots to get the smart home industry coalition to cooperate.  

The new spec introduces “enhanced multi-admin,” an improvement on multi-admin — the much-touted interoperability feature that means your Matter smart light can work in multiple ecosystems simultaneously. It brings a solution for making Thread border routers from different companies play nicely together and introduces a potentially easier way to add Matter infrastructure to homes through Wi-Fi routers and access points.

Arguably, these should have all been in place when Matter launched. But now, two years later, the CSA is finally implementing the fixes that could help move the standard forward. 

Matter 1.4 also brings some big updates to energy management support, including adding heat pumps, home batteries, and solar panels as Matter device types.

Disappointingly, security cameras didn’t make it in this time. The CSA’s CTO, Chris LaPré, tells The Verge that while support for cameras is still part of the plan, there’s no timeline for a release. However, he points out that Matter 1.4 now covers almost every other device category in the home, which should provide a solid foundation to move the standard forward.

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One of the things that Pete Warden didn’t mention in his article quoted yesterday was interoperability, but that’s a big thing too: buying a lightbulb that refuses to work with your ecosystem or loses functionality all matters (ha) too.
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If I want to get fitter, should I wear a fitness watch? • Tim Harford

Tim Harford got a new smartwatch, and wondered whether its quantification of many fitness elements would make him get fitter:

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In 2022, Lancet Digital Health published a systematic review that tried to bring together all the credible research done to that date, covering 164,000 people. The study came to exactly the conclusion you might expect, if you weren’t tying yourself in knots of counterintuition: fitness trackers do help people to be fitter.

More specifically, wearable activity trackers lead people to walk more — 1,800 steps or 40 minutes of extra walking per day — and to lose some weight (1kg) on average. There is also evidence, albeit weaker evidence, that fitness trackers lead people to burn more calories, improve blood sugar and cholesterol, improve wellbeing, reduce disability, and lower levels of pain, anxiety and depression. Emotional wellbeing improves and resting heart rate falls.

Some of these apparent benefits are small or uncertain but, broadly speaking, the picture is what you’d hope: people who were given fitness trackers in a randomised trial were more active than those who, at random, were not. That extra physical activity led to all the benefits we might expect.
None of these studies was designed to answer the question, “If I want to get fitter, should I buy a fitness watch?” Instead, they answer the stranger question, “If I was given a fitness watch as part of an academic study, would I get fitter?”

Consider the parallel pair of questions: “If I want to take up running, should I buy some running shoes?” and, “If I was given some running shoes as part of an academic study, would I run more?” For most purposes, the answer to the first question is obvious and the answer to the second is irrelevant.

Perhaps that’s how I should view my fitness watch. It’s like a gym membership or an exercise bike: great if you use it, pointless if you don’t.

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I can also recommend a dog if you want to increase the number of steps per day.
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Editor’s Note: What’s Next for WIRED • WIRED

Katie Drummond:

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I won’t sugarcoat it: The outcome of last week’s US presidential election wasn’t the one WIRED wanted. As I wrote last week, several of the core values that underpin our publication and inform our journalism—unwavering respect for democratic institutions, a commitment to human rights and bodily autonomy, recognition that climate change is a dire emergency—are at odds with those of Donald Trump and the incoming GOP administration.

Our values aren’t changing, and our commitment to rigorous, independent reporting and investigative journalism across WIRED coverage areas remains steadfast, particularly as the US navigates this new and uncertain political chapter. But as I reminded our team last week, there’s one more value that we hold dear here at WIRED, and it’s one I want to share with all of you today: hope.

At WIRED we believe that technological progress and scientific discovery will, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly—often turbulently, too often inequitably—improve human lives and introduce possibilities that were once unfathomable. We believe in the potency and creativity of the human mind, and we love nothing more than to introduce all of you to the ingenious ideas and inventions that emerge from brilliant people across so many fields of inquiry.

We believe that the internet can still, amid the AI slop and trolls of it all, be a place to find community, to connect across physical borders, to be informed, and to be entertained. We believe in being weird. We believe in fun. At WIRED we will always choose to believe that the world’s best days—maybe the galaxy’s best days, when we all live on Mars—are still to come. So yes. Yes, dammit. We believe in hope.

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Perhaps it’s my distance from the event, but I find this announcement – which was prominently on the top left of the Wired home page, so I wasn’t cherrypicking it – strange. Why does Wired’s editor think we would think a different president is going to change its journalism, or approach to same? American journalists really are an odd bunch sometimes.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified