James' World 2

Hmmmm ,,, Thanks Trump administration, for putting America Behind in Everything!

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A data center in Mongolia, for example, is connected to 200 megawatts of wind power, 100 megawatts of solar power, and 45 megawatts of battery storage. In remote Qinghai, a pilot data center runs fully on a solar microgrid. In another part of northern China, a data center is connected to 500 megawatts of solar and 1.5 gigawatts of wind power.

Some data centers in the U.S. also use clean power. But in China, they’re part of a national strategy. Inside eight large data center hubs created in China’s “East West Computing Strategy”—focused on building data centers in the areas where China has the most renewable energy—all new data centers need to source at least 80% of their electricity from clean sources. In another action plan the Chinese government released in May, it outlined 29 measures to boost the amount of clean power at data centers.

China’s latest five-year plan aims to keep building an extensive clean energy system for all uses, not just data centers, by 2030. That’s both for energy security, a long-term focus for the country, and because of climate change. “I think Chinese policymakers take climate change seriously,” says Kyle Chan, a Brookings Institute fellow who focuses on China’s technology development and industrial policy.

The country is the world’s largest emitter of climate pollution, but that also means that any improvements have an outsized impact. It’s now aiming for renewable generation to grow 53% by 2030, and for coal and oil consumption to peak by the same year. (The U.S. is moving in the opposite direction, as the Trump administration makes it harder to build clean energy and tries to bring back coal plants, despite the lower cost of renewables.)

Data centers are a key part of China’s broader plan. By one estimate, China will more than double the amount of electricity it uses at data centers by 2030. Another estimate suggests the sector’s energy use could triple to as much as 600 terawatt-hours—more than the whole country of Germany uses now.

Still, it will be a small fraction of China’s overall electricity demand, which is dominated by factories. And because China has been quickly building clean energy for industry for years, it’s in a good position to quickly build more. Compare that to the U.S., where electricity demand has been flat for decades, and the sudden demand from AI is a shock to the grid.

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A wind and solar-powered data center in Inner Mongolia [Photo: Li Zhipeng/Xinhua/Getty Images]

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Hmmmm ,,, Thanks Trump administration, for starting a war with Iran costing billions!

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American intelligence agencies believe that Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, is far more interested than his father and predecessor in pursuing a nuclear weapon, according to officials briefed on the assessments.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s father, who was killed at the start of the war in an Israeli attack aided by U.S. intelligence, had sworn off developing a nuclear weapon. While American officials long asserted that Iran wanted to be capable of building a nuclear weapon, many believed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s hesitancy was genuine.

His successor has never publicly called for Iran to build a nuclear weapon. But U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Mojtaba Khamenei and the harder-line government that emerged after the United States and Israel killed many of Iran’s previous leaders have ambitions to develop advanced nuclear weaponry.

The current government has already worked to assert greater control over the Strait of Hormuz and proved a difficult negotiating partner. If the U.S.-Israeli war has made Tehran more, rather than less, likely to pursue a nuclear weapon, it would amount to one more grave consequence of the killing of the supreme leader and the steps toward regime change the Trump administration initially pursued.

American officials caution that most of the intelligence on Mojtaba Khamenei’s views comes from before the war. He was badly injured in the first part of the war, and American officials said he has limited his communications and public appearances because of his injuries and also because he does not want to be targeted in an airstrike.

The officials assess that he remains in charge of the government but does not have the absolute authority and influence of his father, who ruled for more than 36 years.

The assessment comes as President Trump is weighing whether to intensify the military campaign against Iran. A determination that the supreme leader is potentially open to pursuing a bomb would provide additional justification for an escalation.

While U.S. officials insist Tehran has not made any moves to restart its nuclear program, Iran has taken some steps to preserve its nuclear assets after the U.S. strikes on key facilities last year or during pauses in fighting during the current war.

Iran has moved at least some centrifuges, according to American officials, to a heavily fortified underground complex in central Iran that the United States refers to as Pickaxe Mountain. The Wall Street Journal first reported this week that Israeli intelligence had tracked the movement of the centrifuges.

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A billboard in Tehran of Iran’s three supreme leaders, including Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei at right. A determination that he is potentially open to pursuing a bomb would provide additional justification for an escalation of the Trump administration’s military campaign. Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

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OpenAI just used its new large language model GPT-5.6 Sol to solve a math problem that humans have struggled with for more than a half-century. And all it took was telling the artificial intelligence not to give up.

The company timed the proof of the “cycle double cover conjecture” to the model’s full public release last Friday. The achievement shows how OpenAI and other AI firms are heavily investing in pure mathematics as a way to benchmark the technology’s ascent towards reasoning—and the strange directions those efforts often take.

“It is a well-known conjecture, which received a considerable amount of attention over the years—and surprisingly, the proof is short,” says Noga Alon, a mathematician at Princeton University. Alon calls the breakthrough “yet another impressive example demonstrating that AI tools will change—and are already changing—mathematical research significantly.”

The conjecture is about graphs. A graph is just a bunch of dots (called “vertices”) connected by lines (called “edges”). Mathematical proofs about graphs have been applied to all kinds of real-world networks, including the Internet. In the 1970s, several different mathematicians guessed that almost any graph you can imagine will have a “cycle double cover.”

A cycle is just a loop within a graph that ends where it started; a “cycle double cover” is a special set of loops that cover the entire graph exactly twice—each edge is part of exactly two loops. Over the years, a number of prominent mathematicians tried to prove this guess of their forebears. And prove it they did—for a number of specific cases, anyway, but never in general.

Last Friday’s AI-generated proof seems to have settled the question. It shows that any guess-applicable graph can be doubly covered with no more than eight well-chosen loops (for technical reasons, graphs with big sections connected by a single edge—like twin cities with a single road between them—are excluded). The proof, like other notable AI achievements in math, required surprisingly little in the way of new ideas. It just followed and combined methods humans had tried before and managed to squeeze a bit more out of them. As AI companies continue to scour the mathematical literature for open problems that their models can solve, they seem to keep digging out “easy” quandaries disguised as hard ones—conjectures for which a proof was always within reach but somehow never grasped by humans.

Once a problem gets a reputation for being “hard,” experts and students might spend less time on it, says Andrew Sutherland, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This can make perceived difficulty a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. “My guess is we will keep seeing examples of this—supposedly ‘hard’ problems having ‘easy’ solutions found by LLMs,” he says.

OpenAI also released the prompt that led to the successful proof. It reveals some of the quirky tricks that engineers have discovered for coaxing chatbots to grapple with math. “Most of that prompt is scaffolding aimed at getting the LLM to actually put in the effort needed to solve the problem,” Sutherland says. The prompters directed their model to delegate its tasks to as many as 64 agents working in parallel. Combining efforts of many AIs in communication with one another is a known way to mitigate false proofs and hallucinated references. They also told it not to simply dismiss the problem as unsolved and hence unlikely to yield a solution. Perhaps most importantly, they gave it some firm encouragement: “Spend at least 8 hours on this before even thinking of returning or giving up.”

This aligns with many mathematicians’ anecdotal experiences with LLMs, in which the AI will try to wriggle out of finding novel proofs by noting humans’ failed attempts. The right approach seems to be something like a schoolteacher’s—a mix of affirming praise and stern directions.

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Arguing a point has never changed my mind. As a philosopher, that’s a brazen thing to say. It’s pig-headed, closed-minded, and stubborn. But, it’s also very human. Of course, I’ve changed my beliefs over the years. I would have to have been an especially enlightened 10-year-old to have been right about everything from the get-go, talking in Confucian aphorisms over a bowl of cereal.

What I mean is that I have never changed my mind in the heated throes of a point-scoring debate. I’ve never paused midsentence to say, “Oh, yeah, you’re right” or “How could I have been so wrong?” I get too riled up. I feel my heart race and my blood starts to flow. I’m a philosophical bull seeing red.

It turns out that I’m not alone. While the supposed “backfire effect” — the idea that people tend to double-down on false beliefs when someone tries to correct them — is almost certainly exaggerated, it’s fair to say that who, when, and how someone says something are almost always more important than what they say. Our beliefs are formed adjacent to “the facts” but rarely depend on them.

So, what are we to do about those who hold radical beliefs? How can we help people who are ideologically extreme in a way that doesn’t involve locking them away or putting them on a watch list?

This is what I spoke to the political neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod about in our Mini Philosophy interview, where she explains that there are traditionally two “deradicalization” techniques. One is often the “official” program of many countries. But for Zmigrod, the other works better.

The moderate way

One of the most common approaches to deradicalization involves diluting a radical belief in steps. It’s a technique used in Saudi Arabia’s Munasaha (“counselling”) program and Western “EXIT” programs, beginning with Norway in 1997.

It works by getting the person talking — usually to someone they already trust, and, crucially, someone from inside their own world. “If it’s a religious fanaticism, bring in a more moderate preacher,” Zmigrod said. “If it’s a political fanaticism, you bring in someone they might consider as part of their group, but on a less extreme version of that doctrine.” It has to be someone who speaks the language, shares the references, and can’t be locked out as “the enemy.” These moderates then, gently and over many conversations, try to “pull [the extremist] away from the edges and towards a more mainstream, more peaceful view.”

EXIT programs like this can be effective. But they don’t fix the person’s underlying rigidity. They don’t turn a closed mind into an open one or break down the barricades. The idea that there’s an “us” and a “them” is part of the problem. Arguably, it’s the only problem. Any person who sees their ideology as pure or righteous and the enemy as corrupted or unrighteous can be motivated to do terrible things.

So, this technique helps with the immediate issue — violent, criminal, murderous extremism. But it doesn’t resolve the underlying cognitive habits.

The better way

If softening the edges isn’t enough, what’s the alternative? According to Zmigrod, the most effective move has nothing to do with the content of ideology at all.

“One of the best ways is actually to have them in contact with the people that they’ve dehumanized,” she told me. “Because once you have contact between groups and between individuals, you suddenly remember the other person’s humanity.”

In other words, you put the person in the same room as the very people they’ve been taught to hate. You get them to talk to the “enemy.” You get them working towards some shared task.

“Getting people who’ve been on opposite sides to do something creative together,” she said, “is a really effective way of reducing people’s prejudices against each other. It works better than just tackling the other person’s ideologies.”

Rigid ideologies will often feature a caricature of the enemy. The immigrant. The believer. The lefty. The other. It’s a stereotype that feeds on disconnect and lives only in the imagination.

The best way to banish the terrible, invented fears of the mind is to get outside. Meet reality. When you do, you often find it’s hard to hold on to your caricatures. Actual human beings are funnier, kinder, and more complicated than the invented image ever portrayed them.

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Credit: William Holbrook Beard / Public Domain / Artvee

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Hmmmm … Thanks to the idiotic Trump Administration, we are about to enter another nuclear arms race!

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When President Dwight D. Eisenhower went to the United Nations in 1953 to offer countries nuclear technology and know-how in return for a promise to use them peacefully, the policy went by a memorable shorthand, “Atoms for Peace.” Seven decades later, it could go by a less idealistic name: nuclear hedging.

President Trump’s civil nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia, announced this week, reflects a volatile world in which America’s allies are seeking nuclear capabilities to hedge against predatory neighbors, harmful energy disruptions and the shrinking security umbrella of the United States. It also reflects a White House, hungry for lucrative deals for American companies, that is willing to loosen nonproliferation standards for a favored partner in a dangerous region.

Saudi Arabia’s deal could eventually allow it to enrich fuel for nuclear reactors and limit the sites that international inspectors could visit to ensure its peaceful intent. Both of those concessions, unheard-of in recent American civil nuclear agreements, will feed fears that the Saudis could pivot to a nuclear weapons program.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto Saudi leader, has made no secret of that possibility. If Iran obtains a nuclear bomb, he has warned, the Saudis will follow suit.

Mr. Trump sought to allay such concerns on Thursday, declaring that the agreement was limited to civil uses of nuclear technology. But given the checkered history of such deals, and the lack of specifics about this one, his comments were unlikely to quell concerns about a new global arms race.

“We’re back in an era of nuclear hedging,” said Vipin Narang, a professor of nuclear security and political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You’ve got a lot of nervous countries facing a deteriorating security situation who are unsure they can rely on their formal or informal protectors.”

“We’re going to see a cascade of states looking for the capacity to pursue a military program” that could yield a weapon, said Professor Narang, who worked on nuclear policy in the Pentagon during the Biden administration.

Gary Samore, a professor of politics at Brandeis University who advised on arms control negotiations in the Obama and Clinton administrations, said those countries were sometimes referred to as “friendly proliferators.”

Not all, or even any, of them will ultimately pursue a bomb, the experts said. The last country to enter the club of nuclear-armed states was North Korea in 2006. But it does suggest a risky new period, in which the global nuclear market could become more freewheeling and less rulebound. Nuclear buyers, rattled by the shift in the global posture of the United States, are likely to make greater demands, while rival sellers, like Russia and China, could seize on the Saudi precedent to grant them.

“It’s very connected to the damage Trump has done to credibility of the U.S. as a guarantor of security,” Mr. Samore said.

In countries such as Germany and Poland, South Korea and Japan, governments without nuclear weapons are debating the need to pursue them. South Korea, menaced by the nuclear-armed North, has initiated a plan to develop a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, with the support of the United States.

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A French nuclear submarine. France has expanded its nuclear deterrence to cover some allies as the United States has pulled back on European security. Credit…Pool photo by Yoan Valat

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Elementary school students might memorize their times tables for single-digit numbers, but memorization won’t cut it when the teacher asks for three-digit multiplication. This requires an algorithm: students are taught to stack one number atop another and multiply each digit of the bottom number by each digit of the top one. For millennia, mathematicians believed this to be the fastest multiplication method, until a 23-year-old made a shocking discovery in 1960, which led to a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.

This mystery is critical to anyone who partakes in the digital world because multiplication is a foundational operation for computers. Encryption, robotics, artificial intelligence, audio processing, and pretty much everything else we task silicon chips with involves multiplication, sometimes of huge numbers many times over. At this scale, even a simple operation becomes a bottleneck, and any extra efficiency has global economic consequences.

To understand the nature of that bottleneck, observe how the grade-school algorithm handles growth. When you multiply two two-digit numbers, you perform four single-digit multiplications. If you bump that up to a three-digit pair of numbers, you do nine single-digit multiplications. The workload scales with the square of the number of digits (n², where n is the number of digits in the numbers being multiplied). When analyzing an algorithm like this, computer scientists don’t measure speed in seconds, because that depends on the hardware.

Instead, they count the computational steps. They also ignore minor bookkeeping details, such as the time it takes to carry a one when multiplying. When numbers get large enough, those lower-level operations cease to matter, entirely eclipsed by the more intensive operations involved. Computer scientists denote the number of steps using what’s called Big O notation: the grade-school algorithm, for example, takes O(n²) steps, which is read as “order n squared.” Broadly speaking, if the numbers are twice as long, the algorithm takes four times as much computational work to execute. If the numbers are a thousand times as long, it takes a million (1,000 squared) times as much work.

Since antiquity, mathematicians have suspected that O(n²) was an inherent speed limit for multiplication. The celebrated Soviet math professor Andrey Kolmogorov posed the O(n²) speed limit as a formal conjecture and mentioned it during a 1960 seminar at Moscow State University. Whenever mathematicians propose a conjecture, they are planting a flag of sorts and waiting for others to either prove or disprove them. It took just a week for Anatoly Karatsuba, then a 23-year-old student in the audience, to return and prove Kolmogorov wrong. Kolmogorov was stunned. The result was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the USSR Academy of Sciences, but amusingly, Karatsuba didn’t write it. Kolmogorov wrote the formal proof himself and submitted it for publication with Karatsuba listed as the lead author. Karatsuba only found out about the paper when he received the reprints in the mail.

Karatsuba’s genius was realizing that you can trade expensive, time-consuming multiplications for cheap, fast additions. Adding two n-digit numbers takes only O(n) time because it entails a single sweep through the digits rather than a complete sweep through the top number for every digit of the bottom number, as in multiplication. To see how Karatsuba traded multiplication for addition, let’s look at a small example. The method would be overly complicated for such a simple problem, but it saves a meaningful amount of time when numbers get larger.

First, we split both numbers into their tens and ones digits. Assign a = 1 and b = 2 (for 12), and c = 3 and d = 4 (for 34). Algebraically, we can rewrite 12 × 34 as (10a + b) × (10c + d).

Expanding this gives 100(ac) + 10(ad + bc) + (bd).

To solve the equation in the traditional way, one must perform four distinct multiplications: ac = 3, ad = 4, bc = 6 and bd = 8, which is exactly what the grade-school stacking method entails. (Note that we don’t count the multiplications by 100 or by 10 because those only involve plopping zeroes at the ends of numbers.) Karatsuba noticed a brilliant algebraic trick. Once you compute the first and last terms, ac and bd, you can figure out that pesky middle term (ad + bc) with one more multiplication step rather than two. You don’t need to calculate ad and bc individually:

(ad + bc) = ((a + b) × (c + d)) – ac – bd,

Or with our concrete numbers:

((1 × 4) + (2 × 3)) = ((1 + 2) × (3 + 4)) – 3 – 8 = 10.

Pause to notice the weirdness in the equation above. It suggests that to multiply 12 × 34 quickly, you should add the 1 and the 2 in 12 and the 3 and the 4 in 34. This is hardly a natural thing to do. No wonder it took so long for someone to figure it out. It ends up reducing the workload, however: because we’ve already computed ac and bd, the right-hand side only contains one more multiplication, plus some additions and subtractions.

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The sun rises behind the skyline of midtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building in New York City on March 10, 2026, as seen from Union City, New Jersey. Gary Hershorn—Getty Images

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Hmmmm … The Trump administration lies constantly!

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President Trump went to war with Iran in part to force compliance with two longstanding American demands: Tehran must stop enriching nuclear fuel for at least two decades, and it must allow international inspectors to go anywhere and see anything to verify the country is not producing a bomb.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump took the reverse approach to Saudi Arabia, its close ally in the region. To seal a deal for Westinghouse and other American companies to seize a big piece of the business in building two nuclear reactors on Saudi territory — and more to come — it opened the door to allowing the kingdom to begin enriching its own nuclear fuel after two years.

And it gave in to the kingdom’s demand that it not have to abide by an inspection agreement that applies to more than 140 other countries. Those rules, the Saudis said, are just too intrusive.

Now Mr. Trump will have to make the case to Congress, and to allies throughout the Middle East, that in loosening the nuclear standards for one close ally, he is not ushering in a new age of proliferation, especially in a region of the world already on fire. If the daily missile exchanges with Iran finally give way to resumed negotiations, there is no question Iran will seize on the concessions made to Riyadh and insist on the same.

Already on Wednesday, administration officials were arguing that there was nothing to worry about, and that the United States will be so engaged in Saudi Arabia’s nuclear future that there is no way the kingdom could divert its nuclear fuel and know-how to a secret bomb program.

They may prove right. But nuclear history is littered with examples of countries that pledged to obey the rules, and surreptitiously raced for a bomb.

Iran’s first research reactor was provided by the United States to the shah of Iran, complete with weapons-grade uranium — technology that fell into the hands of the mullahs who took over the country in 1979. India’s first nuclear test used plutonium from a heavy-water reactor that had been a gift from the Canadian government in the 1950s. Pakistan stole its centrifuge designs from a European firm that hired A.Q. Khan, now celebrated as the father of the Pakistani bomb. Taiwan and South Korea, stalwart American allies, had secret bomb programs of their own until American intelligence agencies discovered them and quashed the efforts.

Mr. Trump has many reasons to solidify the American relationship with Saudi Arabia these days. He can argue that if the United States does not provide the country with its best reactors and nuclear technology, Russia or China will. At a time when tensions have flared with the Saudis — for a while Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman prohibited the United States from launching attacks on Iran from U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia — anything that draws the Saudis deeper into the American technology stack makes sense to the White House.

“Rest assured, these agreements uphold the highest standards of nuclear safety and nonproliferation,” Chris Wright, the secretary of energy, said in a statement on Wednesday announcing the deal, “while relying on the world’s best nuclear technology and scientists, designed right here in the United States.”

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President Trump with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, at the White House last year. Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

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New, never-before-seen images provide a glimpse into the secretive lives of a clouded leopard species found in the dense rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra

The Sunda clouded leopard stalks the dense rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra in search of bearded pigs and mouse deer to prey on. Its tawny coat, accented by dark, cloud-shaped spots, blends into its surroundings. Beyond such basics, however, much remains unknown about these elusive big cats, sometimes called “ghosts of the forest,” including how long they live and how they spend their time.

But a new set of images and data, captured between 2007 and 2023 in three reserves in the state of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, reveal a never-before-seen glimpse into their secretive lives.

A recent study in Biotropica analyzing the 15 years of photos and other data observed 52 adult individuals, including 30 males and 22 females, helping to answer some of the questions about the species.

What really surprised the researchers was “how difficult it is to get females in front of the lens,” says the study’s lead author Katharina Kasper, a biologist with the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research.

That’s because females, it turns out, spend much of their time in the trees—much more time than males do. “Their physique hints at this, as their bodies are usually more slender and they have fluffier tails that help them balance,” Kasper says of the females. “Resident males, by contrast, spend much time circling and re-marking their territories [with urine], hence we capture them more often.”

The study, which was conducted by Kasper, as well as researchers from the global wild cat conservation organization Panthera and the Sabah Forestry Department, observed a single female over many years and determined that these cats may live up to 8.5 years in the wild—a new record for the species. (Although there are not enough members of this species in zoos to have solid numbers, a close relative, the mainland clouded leopard, lived to 20 years of age in a zoo, which aligns with the general trend of captive cats living about twice as long as wild ones.)

Kasper says the study has already helped the group tweak its research efforts to look at what factors influence the disturbance and survival of Sunda clouded leopards. In turn, this will help guide conservation efforts for this species, which is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—one step up from endangered.

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A clouded leopard species

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NEED TO KNOW

• Six men have been indicted for the alleged murder of influencer Ariela “La Langosta” last summer

• The 33-year-old content creator — whose full name was Ariela Mejia-Polanco — was found shot dead in her car on the Cross County Parkway in Westchester County, N.Y., on the morning of Aug. 17, 2025

• The six members of Bad Boys 7, a subset of the Trinitarios street gang, have all been charged with attempted carjacking resulting in death and could face the maximum sentence of life in prison or the death penalty if convicted

Six men have been indicted for the alleged murder of influencer Ariela “La Langosta” last summer.

The 33-year-old content creator — whose full name is Ariela Mejia-Polanco — was found shot dead in her car on the Cross County Parkway in Westchester County, N.Y., on the morning of Aug. 17, 2025.

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced on Monday, July 20, that it had charged 11 members of Bad Boys 7, a subset of the Trinitarios street gang, for a series of violent crimes between September 2023 and September 2025. Six of the 11 were charged for the alleged murder of Mejia-Polanco.

“Either the highways of this county belong to the criminal gangs, or they belong to the public,” said Westchester County DA Susan Cacace in a press release. “We can never allow our streets to be overtaken by organized criminal activity, and I thank all of our interagency partners for working in tandem to ensure this remains a durable promise.”According to the attorney’s office, six members of BB7 allegedly “attempted to commit an armed carjacking” of Mejia-Polanco’s vehicle as she drove from Manhattan to Westchester on Aug. 17, shooting and killing her during a high-speed pursuit.

The six men — Justin Martha, Michael Mercedes Marte, Jose Peralta Gomez, Manuel Abad Rivas, Wilfren Carbuccia and Jelin Portes Guaba — have all been charged with attempted carjacking resulting in death and could face the maximum sentence of life in prison or the death penalty if convicted.

The internet personality, who maintained a following of over 556,000 on Instagram, was known on the platform for her fashion and modeling content, in addition to her public friendship with rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine. She was survived by two young daughters.

Following the news of Mejia-Polanco’s death, 6ix9ine shared a series of posts to his Instagram Stories, remembering the late internet personality as the “queen of New York.”Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

“NY won’t ever be the same,” he added. “I loved you.”

Ikon New York — a Manhattan restaurant and lounge that previously confirmed to PEOPLE that she had been “at work” at the establishment the night before her death — also shared a tribute for the internet personality on Instagram, writing on the platform, “Your joy, your humility, and the way you treated everyone with so much care always made you stand out.”

Thank you for giving so much love and support to our home, which also became yours,” the restaurant continued. “To Ariela’s family, we are here for anything you need. We still can’t believe it… you were our smile, our happiness. We love you, and we will miss you forever.”

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Ariela “La Langosta”Credit: Ariiela La Langosta/Instagram

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