That line is worth a dollar of subscription,

[flagged]

That's kind of what the article is talking about. You can do it in a ferromagnetic material (like in your link) but then you've got the problem that it's a magnet and screwing up everything around it.

The idea here is that you can do it in something that is overall neutral.

I'm Dutch and I have a bachelor's degree in arts, so it probably won't surprise you that have :). And yes, it is!

It's a New Scientist diagram, so it's still going to be wrong somehow. We have the quantum "up" and "down", which are not actual directions. The diagram has arrows pointing up or down. Redundantly, every atom with an up arrow is red and every atom with a down arrow is blue. The article also speaks of "enough atoms with magnetic moments pointing in the same direction" to create a strong field, which I think is a literal direction. Then it speaks of "magnetic arrows", presumably a term invented for the article which could mean anything. Then it also speaks of "rotated atoms". Does an atom have a direction? The diagram has oval blobs around the atoms. These rotate alternatingly in the altermagnet. But the arrows don't rotate. So what are the blobs, and what are the arrows?

So any read operation would likely have to be a read-write operation in practice, essentially?

even if its not faster than DRAM I wonder at what point would it just not make sense to have two separate modules. Like all the volitile storage in a system could be in the L-cache/s on the CPU and for most things that plus this faster non-volitile storage would do the trick. I wonder what kind of optimizations would have been made in a world where stuff like DRAM just didnt exist and we just had to deal with the bottlenecks of non-volitile storage media

> but which country has made the most for it's citizens from [technology] IP?

Post-1950 this is unambiguously the United States.

Norway basically. Nearly every other country just throws the money back into the general fund or accumulates it at the top.

This is not true. In most of the top journals you need at least three other practitioners in your field to read it and sign off on it. The editor finds the appropriate reviewers, manages the process, does some basic format and other types of vetting, and also will accept or reject it based on the reviews from the reviewers.

The reviewers here are the "peers", and generally are expected to be qualified experts in the area that the paper deals with.

  > This is not true. In most of the top journals you need at least three other practitioners in your field to read it and sign off on it.

  > The reviewers here are the "peers", and generally are expected to be qualified experts in the area that the paper deals with.

I pretty much agree with you but wanted to nitpick this part

  > mainly the editors, who pushed for correctness and novelty.

I don't want to use the word correctness here[0], because no one checks if the work is correct. Rather, I'd say the goal is to check for wrongness. A peer reviewer cannot determine if a work is correct simply by reading it. The only way to do this is replication or by extension (which is the case of the work here. The physical verification was an extension of the earlier work). It's important to make this distinction because, as you say, it doesn't mean the work is right. Nor does it even mean the the readers think it is right.

In the past, many journals published as long as they did not think there were serious errors and were not plagiarized. Editing is completely different, where we want to make sure works are communicated correctly.

But I purposefully didn't say "novelty"

It is a trash word that means nothing. The original intent was that work wasn't redone. That you can't go in and take credit for discovering something someone else did, which we'd cal plagiarism. You could change all the words and still plagiarize.

It is VERY easy to find problems/limitations with works. All works have limitations. All works are incomplete. But are these reasons to reject? Often, no... You see the same thing on HN and it's a classic bias of STEM people. Hyperfixate on the issues. We're trained to, because that's the first step to solving problems! But that's not what matters in publishing, because we're not trying to solve all problems. We do it iteratively! It also runs counter to quickly publishing ("publish or perish") as what, you want to wait to publish till we got a grand theory of everything? And don't get me started on how bad we are at predicting impact of works and how impact often runs counter to the status quo (you can't paradigm shift by maintaining the paradigm). So we don't explore...

AND very frequently, we DO NOT WANT novelty in science. Sounds strange, but it is *critical* to science existing.

- Our goal is to figure out how things work. The causal structure of things. So this means works need to be reproducible. We *want* reproductions, but we also don't want them ad infinitum.

- We *also* want to find other ways to derive the same thing. Some reviewers will consider this novel while others won't, typically inversely related to their expertise in the field (more expert = more likely to consider novel while less expert means you can't see the nuanced differences which are important).

This greatly stifles innovation and reduces how well papers communicate their ideas.

The problem here is as we advance, nuances matter more and more. Think of it as with approximations. Calculating the first order term is usually computationally easy, with computation exponentially increasing as the order of accuracy increases. The nuances start to dominate. But by focusing on "novelty" (rather than plagiarism) we face the exact problem you mention.

  > most editors are nowadays completely out of their depth when evaluating papers,

So authors end up just making their works look more convoluted, to look more impressive and make it look less like the work that they are building on top of. High experts can see right through this and as grad students usually groan but then just become accustomed to the shit and start doing the same thing. Because, non-niche experts cannot differentiate the work that's being built upon from the new work.

It is a self-inflicted problem. As editors/reviewers we think we're doing right, but we're too dumb to see the minute (but important) differences. As authors we're just trying to get published, keep our jobs, and it's not exactly like the reviewers are "wrong". But it often just becomes a chase and does nothing to help make the papers actually better. This gets even worse with targeted acceptance rates, as it incentivizes reviewers to reject and be less nuanced. Which they're already incentivized to do because there's just so much stress and time crunch to the job anyways (including needing to rewrite papers because others did exactly this).

The targeted acceptance rates are just silly and we see the absurdity in domains like Machine Learning[1]. We have an exponentially increasing number of papers to review each year. This isn't just because there are new works, but because works are being resubmitted. Most of these conferences have 30% acceptance rates but the number of "wrong" papers is not that low. We also know the acceptance rate is very noisy for the majority of papers, where a different set of reviewers would result in a different outcome (see the multiple "NeurIPS experiment"s). You can do an easy model to see why this is bad. It just leads to more papers and if the number of reviewers stays the same, this is more reviews that need to be done per reviewer, which just exacerbates the problem. If you have 1000 fixed papers submitted each year and even a low percent of rejected works resubmitting the next year, like 10%, you actually have to review ~1075 papers. With a more realistic ~50% of rejected works getting recycled, you need to actually review ~1500 per year. Most serious authors will try a few times, and it is a common to say "just keep trying".

We don't have to do this to ourselves... It helps no one, and actually harms everyone. So... why? What are we gaining?

It's just so fucking stupid

/rant (have we even started?)

[0] I'm pretty sure we're going to agree, but we're talking in public and want to make sure we communicate with the public. Tbh, even many scientists think "correctness" is the same as "is correct"

[1] It is extra bad because the primary publishing venue is conferences. To you submit, get a review (usually 3), get to do a rebuttal (often 1 page max), and then the final decision is made. There is no real discussion so you have no real chance to explain things to near-niche experts. Worse with acceptance deadlines and overlapping deadlines between conferences. It is better in other domains since journals have conversations, but some of these problems still exist.

> That’s because we’ve basically reinterpreted what “peer review” is.

Who is "we" in this scenario? Because that's certainly not how I've seen peer review work.

The editor would ask a small group of people in the field to act as reviewers and then send them the papers. They review it and send it back with any requests for changes prior to publication.

So they're the peers that are reviewing, not the editor.

  > in the early 20th century, "the burden of proof was generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas.

  > Peer review doesn't reject papers because they don't agree with the orthodoxy; they reject them because they're not competent.

> I think you need an invitation to create an account,

Anybody can create an account on arXiv.[1][2] However, having an account and uploading are different things. Strictly speaking, you have to be endorsed to submit a paper. But some endorsements are granted automatically, based on various criteria. So not everybody has to go explicitly ask people for an endorsement:

arXiv requires that users be endorsed before submitting their first paper to a category.

arXiv may give some people automatic endorsements based on subject area, topic, previous submissions, and academic affiliation. In most cases, automatic endorsement is given to authors from known academic institutions and research facilities.

Generally speaking, the "word on the street" is that it's as simple as "register with a .edu email address and you get auto endorsed, otherwise you don't." But I think the reality is slightly more complex than that. Although the exact details are kept private, probably at least in part to prevent people from gaming the system.

Note that the page encourages you to register with an "institutional" email address, but doesn't specifically say it has to be a .edu one.

arXiv submitters are therefore encouraged to associate an institutional email address, if they have one, with their arXiv account. This will expedite the endorsement process.

[1]: https://info.arxiv.org/help/registerhelp.html

[2]: https://arxiv.org/user/register

I think you're right to nitpick, but nitpicking the wrong thing.

  > and not send it to any journal.

This, doesn't matter.

The main point of my comment is "journal != peers reading the work". Which, of course, you could even say is true about ArXiv (fine to nitpick[0]). You can put on ArXiv and no one will read it or the only people who read it are not peers. You're right that submitting to a journal or conference (nearly) guarantees someone has read the paper.

The thing though is "peer" is weakly defined. I recognize that it is contextually defined, but I'd hope from the context of my comment you can tell that I'm using "peer" to mean "another person well versed in the niche topic of the paper." This is different from "a person well versed in the topic of the paper." The niche matters. I explain more in this comment[1]

Or to put it differently, just because someone read it doesn't mean they /read/ it.

[0] I'll revise the quoted text to "Just because it is on ArXiv doesn't mean peers aren't or haven't reviewed it". Though we can nitpick a little more and say that if there are more than one author on the paper, a peer has been much more likely to have reviewed the work (not all co-authors review the works they are authors on...)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44587535

Technically speaking, being published means at least the editors have reviewed. The quality of their reviews is another thing entirely.

You're right. You can publish into the void.

I was hoping what was said would be easily interpreted but I was incorrect. I'll revise to "putting on ArXiv doesn't mean peers haven't reviewed it."

For what constitutes "a peer", I describe more here[0]. The definition varies wildly, and it is not an easy problem to determine who is even qualified to review a work. Hell, it can be hard to determine if you yourself are qualified to review a work!

While I advocate for mostly abandoning the journals and conferences (or dramatic restructuring), I won't act like there's no problems with just publishing to ArXiv (or more preferably, OpenReview, since it allows commenting). But the truth is that there's no globally optimal solution to this problem. I just think the benefits outweigh the costs here. Frankly, most authors aren't publishing (posting on ArXiv or whatever) in bad faith. If anything, I think our current system incentivizes bad faith publishing, but that's a larger conversation (coupled with this one but requires talking about a few other factors).

Frankly, we just waste a lot of time and effort for little to no gain (possibly even for losses).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44587535

Obviously journals vary in their standards, but many of the more respected ones do require other scientists read and critique the paper. You can argue about the quality of these reviews, certainly it's a process that needs improving, but this is what "peer reviewed" means.

Trying to claim ArXiv papers are "peer reviewed" is utter nonsense. As you correctly point out, the only requirement to being on ArXiv is that someone with an account uploaded it there. There are no requirements that it passes any sort of verification or vetting process whatsoever, let alone having other scientists read and critique it.

There is a very vocal movement these days that is trying to argue that we should do away with the traditional peer review process. Apparently that sometimes includes trying to redefine the very definition of "peer review" as the OP did.

  > There is a very vocal movement these days that is trying to argue that we should do away with the ***traditional*** peer review process. Apparently that sometimes includes trying to redefine the very definition of "peer review" as the OP did.
  (emphasis my own)

  What is the point of publishing?

  > A 2003 editorial in Nature stated that, in the early 20th century, "the burden of proof was generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas."

Reminds me of this quote from the esteemed Leslie Claret

> Sell them on the structure. You can talk about it with confidence. Keep it simple. A little something like this, John. Hey. Let me walk you through the Donnelly nut spacing and crack system rim-riding rip configuration. Using a field of half-C sprats, and brass-fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps, and splay-flexed brace columns vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of one half meter from the damper crown to the spurve plinths. How? Well, we bolster twelve husk nuts to each girldle-jerry, while flex tandems press a task apparatus of ten vertically composited patch-hamplers. Then, pin-flam-fastened pan traps at both maiden-apexes of the jim-joist. A little something like that, Lakeman.

Can it be used to supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors while also being capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters?

That would be TNG. The original Star Trek didn't use <insert technobabble here> in the scripts.

Reads like Turbo Encabulator... maybe on purpose?

> "In condensed matter physics, altermagnetism is a type of persistent magnetic state in ideal crystals.

Real crystals have impurities so they are harder to reason about. An ideal crystal is just one where we pretend it's perfect.

> Altermagnetic structures are collinear

The structure is lined up, like the diagrams in the article

> and crystal-symmetry compensated, resulting in zero net magnetisation.

And the alternating lines are symmetrical so they "compensate" for each other and cancel out.

> the electronic bands in an altermagnet are not Kramers degenerate... (etc.)

The spin is different like in the diagram. Ok, that's a bit lame. Anyone else can give a simple but mostly accurate explanation?

The writing on Wikipedia science and math articles tends to be absolutely indecipherable trash.

Trecknobabble often makes more sense than Wikipedia, at least within the context of the show.

"the crystal structure results in zero magnetisation."

?

This makes me want to write a conference talk "Towards a turbo encabulator"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator

I haven't said anything about magnetism. Read my comment again.