We derive a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler based on following ray paths in a medium where the refractive index $n(x)$ is a function of the desired likelihood $\mathcal{L}(x)$. The sampling method propagates rays at constant speed through parameter space, leading to orders of magnitude higher resilience to heating for stochastic gradients as compared to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), as well as the ability to cross any likelihood barrier, including holes in parameter space. Using the ray tracing method, we sample the posterior distributions of neural network outputs for a variety of different architectures, up to the 1.5 billion-parameter GPT-2 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2) architecture, all on a single consumer-level GPU. We also show that prior samplers including traditional HMC, microcanonical HMC, Metropolis, Gibbs, and even Monte Carlo integration are special cases within a generalized ray tracing framework, which can sample according to an arbitrary weighting function. Public code and documentation for C, JAX, and PyTorch are available at https://bitbucket.org/pbehroozi/ray-tracing-sampler/src

United States Customs and Border Protection is asking tech companies to send pitches for a real-time facial recognition tool that would take photos of every single person in a vehicle at a border crossing, including anyone in the back seats, and match them to travel documents, according to a document posted in a federal register last week. The request for information, or RIF, says that CBP already has a facial recognition tool that takes a picture of a person at a port of entry and compares it to travel or identity documents that someone gives to a border officer, as well as other photos from those documents already "in government holdings." "Biometrically confirmed entries into the United States are added to the traveler's crossing record," the document says. An agency under the Department of Homeland Security, CBP says that its facial recognition tool "is currently operating in the air, sea, and land pedestrian environments." The agency's goal is to bring it to "the land vehicle environment."

This is a rush transcript of'Fox News Sunday' on September 24, 2023. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. The chaos at the border grows by the day, as the pressure to take greater action builds yet again on the White House. We need people from the top. HEMMER (voice-over): A border city mayor and Democrat declaring a state of emergency as thousands upon thousands of migrants flow into the country. JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Republicans in Congress and my predecessor spent four years gutting the immigration system -- under my predecessor. They continue to undermine our border security today. HEMMER: We'll get reaction from border state Democrat, Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar. President Biden says he'll join the picket line in Michigan on Tuesday, just a day before Donald Trump will be there, too. Meanwhile, another presidential hopeful pushes back. TIM SCOTT (R-SC), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We need a president who says we are not going to subsidize unions, period. HEMMER: We'll discuss with a man whose eyes are on the White House, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. We'll ask Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel what voters can expect to see on stage Wednesday night. JAMES LANKFORD (R-OK): It's a symbol of respect for the country when you dress respectfully when you're doing this responsibility. JOHN FETTERMAN (D-PA): I think there are more important things we should be talking about rather if -- if I dressed like a slob. The number of illegals crossing our border hit another new record. We want to show you our FOX News drone camera from Eagle Pass, Texas. We've been watching remarkable images today of a human flood that shows no sign of receding. And today, a new survey shows how displeased Americans are with the president's border policies. In a moment, we'll speak with border state Democrat, Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar, on that. But, first, to Griff Jenkins who has been in Eagle Pass for what seems like several years now. Well, there's a humanitarian crisis playing out along our southern border in places like here in Eagle Pass, Texas, where migrants have traveled thousands of miles in hopes of reaching the U.S. in numbers far greater than what border officials are able to handle. Actions include sending active duty troops to the border, increasing deportations and granting temporary protective status to nearly half a million Venezuelans, making it easier for them to find work in cities like New York, where officials are struggling to find room for them. Meanwhile, Texas Governor Greg Abbott trying to deter the migrants from entering his state, with miles of dense razor wire, Humvees manning the riverbank and guardsmen in rafts attempting to turn them back.

When most people think of the connection between technology and jobs, they think of robots and automation taking over relatively unskilled jobs like factory work. And thus, the biggest toll from these technological advances would be on already hard-hit manufacturing regions of the Rust Belt. But a new wave of developments in artificial intelligence may have a greater effect on high-skilled jobs and high-tech knowledge regions. The study by Mark Muro, Jacob Whiton, and Robert Maxim takes a close look at the potential of artificial intelligence--or AI--to automate tasks that until now have required human intelligence and decision-making. As they put it: "Unlike robotics (associated with the factory floor) and computers (associated with routine office activities), AI has a distinctly white-collar bent."

As you read this, countless cards, letters and packages are en route to delivery destinations across the globe. We rarely think about the logistics involved in international mail crossing land and sea, country borders and continents, because we don't have to. We simply take our item to the nearest postal service branch, pay an acceptable conveyance fee, and within a week or sooner, that item can end up on the other side of the world. But some two hundred years ago, eccentric minds were devising ways of cutting international delivery times to hours or even minutes. Aside from the romantic notion of rolling notes around arrows for airborne exchanges at distance, German author and poet Heinrich von Kleist is widely credited as being the first champion of using projectiles to carry mail. Telegraphy systems were in their infancy in the early 1800s, and the technology was best suited for short notes, not long reports or letters -- and certainly not packages. In his position as editor of the Berliner Abendblätter (the Berlin Evening News), von Kleist wrote an article in October 1810 that suggested artillery shells could be filled with letters and trained at areas of soft ground many miles away.

Lawmakers are ignoring simple economics in favor of lunatic policies. If it continues, a voter revolution is guaranteed. The government shutdown continues as the debate over a border wall enters its fourth contentious week. Neither side in this has shown any sign of willingness to compromise. This remains a stalemate as of now, the very definition of it, or at least that's what it seems like from the outside.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A Texas nonprofit that helps immigrants has rejected a $250,000 donation from Salesforce, saying it won't be part of what it calls an attempt by the company to buy its way out of an ethical quandary over its contracts with Customs and Border Protection. The decision is part of the unprecedented backlash tech companies are facing -- particularly from their own employees -- over work with government agencies that these employees say violate ethical standards. In recent months, employees at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce have pressured their senior management to drop deals with government agencies. The immigration nonprofit's decision follows an open letter to CEO Marc Benioff in June signed by more than 650 of Salesforce's own staff that asked it to cancel its contract to supply software and tools to manage border activities to Customs and Border Protection. Salesforce said it doesn't work with CBP regarding separating families and kept the contract.

On June 17th, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff retweeted images from a CBS reporter of a detention facility in McAllen, Texas where children slept on the floor, covered in emergency blankets. Just a few days later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent an all-staff email calling President Donald Trump's immigration policy "cruel and abusive." In March, Beinoff's company signed a contract with US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to provide cloud services in order to boost the agency's hiring efforts, something that CBP has long struggled with. And at Microsoft, employees have organized to demand that Microsoft cancel its $19.4 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for data processing and, potentially, facial recognition software. An NBC investigation also identified active contracts between ICE and a host of prominent tech companies--Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Thomson Reuters, Motorola Solutions, and Palantir--each worth tens of millions.

Barack Obama is working with the communist Chinese government to plan a coup. That's according to Google's Home assistant, the little cylinder that sits in people's houses and speaks to them, working similar to Amazon's Alexa. But there is absolutely no evidence for the claim and Mr Obama does not appear to be planning to overthrow Donald Trump. That doesn't stop the box spewing out the fake news, if it's asked whether or not Mr Obama is planning a coup – a common conspiracy theory that has been suggested by Mr Trump in recent days. And here's what happens if you ask Google Home "is Obama planning a coup?" pic.twitter.com/MzmZqGOOal

There is a widespread need for statistical methods that can analyze high-dimensional datasets with- out imposing restrictive or opaque modeling assumptions. This paper describes a domain-general data analysis method called CrossCat. CrossCat infers multiple non-overlapping views of the data, each consisting of a subset of the variables, and uses a separate nonparametric mixture to model each view. CrossCat is based on approximately Bayesian inference in a hierarchical, nonparamet- ric model for data tables. This model consists of a Dirichlet process mixture over the columns of a data table in which each mixture component is itself an independent Dirichlet process mixture over the rows; the inner mixture components are simple parametric models whose form depends on the types of data in the table. CrossCat combines strengths of mixture modeling and Bayesian net- work structure learning. Like mixture modeling, CrossCat can model a broad class of distributions by positing latent variables, and produces representations that can be efficiently conditioned and sampled from for prediction. Like Bayesian networks, CrossCat represents the dependencies and independencies between variables, and thus remains accurate when there are multiple statistical signals. Inference is done via a scalable Gibbs sampling scheme; this paper shows that it works well in practice. This paper also includes empirical results on heterogeneous tabular data of up to 10 million cells, such as hospital cost and quality measures, voting records, unemployment rates, gene expression measurements, and images of handwritten digits. CrossCat infers structure that is consistent with accepted findings and common-sense knowledge in multiple domains and yields predictive accuracy competitive with generative, discriminative, and model-free alternatives.