Could a self-monitoring system for criminals replace prisons one day? Future Chronicles is our regular speculative look at inventions yet to come. In this latest installment, we journey to 2050, when technology had been developed so that criminals could be monitored at home. "It's no surprise that the first countries to abolish prisons were Scandinavian " In the 2020s, the US was spending an eye-watering $182 billion a year on locking up its citizens. No other country imprisoned as many people or spent as much in doing so.

The recent rise of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has significantly improved multi-step reasoning performance, but often at the cost of generating excessively long reasoning chains. This paper revisits the efficiency of such reasoning processes through an information-theoretic lens, revealing a fundamental trade-off between reasoning length and semantic efficiency. We propose two metrics, InfoBias and InfoGain, to quantify divergence from ideal reasoning paths and stepwise information contribution, respectively. Empirical analyses show that longer reasoning chains tend to exhibit higher information bias and diminishing information gain, especially for incorrect answers. Motivated by these findings, we introduce an entropy-based Adaptive Think strategy that dynamically halts reasoning once confidence is sufficiently high, improving efficiency while maintaining competitive accuracy. Compared to the Vanilla Think approach (default mode), our strategy yields a 1.10% improvement in average accuracy and a 50.80% reduction in token usage on QwQ-32B across six benchmark tasks spanning diverse reasoning types and difficulty levels, demonstrating superior efficiency and reasoning performance. These results underscore the promise of entropy-based methods for enhancing both accuracy and cost-effiiciency in large language model deployment.

Strict laws, lack of shops and pandemic-related delays are making it harder for Americans to purchase guns in crime-ridden cities; attorney and gun rights activist Colion Noir weighs in. Authorities said a man from Boston had a stun gun pulled on him Tuesday morning, as he was being robbed by a woman he met through an online dating app. The unidentified man rendezvoused with the young woman at a local hotel, the Associated Press reported. He told police the two talked for about 30 minutes before she pointed a Taser stun gun at him and began rifling through his pockets. She allegedly stole $100 in cash before law enforcement was called in.

Erich Stelzer, 25, died after being arrested for stabbing a woman, authorities say. A Massachusetts man whom police spotted outside a home, as he was on top of a woman and repeatedly stabbing her, suddenly died after being arrested Thursday night, according to reports. The man, identified as Erich Stelzer, 25, of Cohasset, reportedly died on the way to a hospital after police used a stun gun in an effort to subdue him, Norfolk District Attorney Michael W. Morrissey's office said in a statement Friday. The woman had suffered "extensive stabbing and slashing injuries," the statement said. Prosecutors said she managed to escape from Stelzer and seek medical treatment, the Boston Globe reported.

It's been awhile since we've talked about the remote controlled robot jockeys used in Arabian camel racing, but a recent scandal that has rocked the camel-racing world compels us to revisit the topic. The Dubai police discovered that some shady characters have been selling robot jockeys equipped with stun guns to "encourage" camels to run faster. We're pretty sure that the animals don't need any more incentive to run -- they already have a robot whipping them -- and it's good to see that the powers-that-be agree with us, as the two men selling the machines were arrested. Now that our dromedary friends need no longer fear being tased in the name of sport, we only have to worry about over-zealous peace officers using them on all of us.