Deon Nel

Senior software engineer. AI, emerging tech and occasional unfiltered commentary. Afrikaner preparing for a new chapter in the US.

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

BREAKING: SpaceXAI just added a powerful new 'Browser Use' plugin to Grok Build.

It gives Grok access to a real browser, either the user’s own Chrome with existing logins or an isolated Browser Use cloud browser.

Grok Build can now browse websites, scrape and extract data, fill out forms, test web apps, take screenshots and automate complete web workflows. It can also run locally through uvx, with no API key required when using local Chrome.

Install command:
grok plugin install browser-use --trust

[Ben Dickson @bendee983]

This is basically the tradeoff you're paying when using AI coding agents. You get faster results, better productivity, and a new set of skills for writing software. In exchange, you lose your edge in manual coding.

You can practice writing code by hand instead of using AI. It helps a lot in honing your skills and refreshing your memory. But you are paying for it in speed and productivity, you I don't see a world where you go back to full manual coding.

There are always tradeoffs, and you have to leave a few things behind to take a leap forward.

[Deon Nel @DeonBuilds]

@sattyyouneed Use Grok.

[Deon Nel @DeonBuilds]

@StephenKing Stephen King wrote The Stand about a plague that destroys rational society, then caught Trump Derangement Syndrome so badly that “fuck Trump” became his geopolitical analysis. 😂 At least Captain Trips left some brain function intact.

[Šuppiluliuma Herlaai @BoerHindoe]

I'm tired of seeing "anti-colonial" scholar types frame the inboeksel system as slavery. The system was harsh, but it was a different system governed by a different moral logic.

It was essentially punitive in nature. If outside enemies attacked the Boers, and we defeated them, we forced their young to work for us. The idea being that we couldn't exactly trust people hellbent on our destruction to return to their societies as is after the defeat, because they would just rebuild, regroup and attack us again, and we may have come off second-best the next time around. The idea was to punish the defeated, and have their children grow up within our culture, language and the Reformed Christian faith, so that the next generation wouldn't be so quick to attack, and when they did, they would be able to mediate better. When the only other alternative to such a system is killing all the defeated to prevent a second strike that we might have been able to survive, this is the most humane alternative. The moral logic is eat or be eaten, not just fatter profits like in chattel slavery.

However, we can admit that because labour was scarce, Boers in cases had itchy trigger fingers and would water at the mouth hoping to be attacked by the Khoi, but to frame every single case as this is overly simplistic and ignores the complexity of human motivations and morality. Many, if not most of the cases were essentially an ugly but justifiable form of self-defense against equally, if not sometimes more brutal neighbours who attacked otherwise peaceful settlers of land that was not permanently occupied and therefore by definition unowned, despite the delusions to the contrary some might have had at the time. Which is also not to cast the Khoi and Bantu as one dimensional evil savages either. The scarcity of pre-industrial southern Africa justified a lot of their own treachery, brutality and excess. They also had a right to eat or be eaten, but so did we.

Yet it was still forced labour, and therefore slavery, you say. Not so fast, because "forced labour" isn't exactly the right definition for slavery. In sane justice systems, criminals are forced to perform hard penal labour, but this isn't slavery, because it doesn't involve the ownership and buying and selling of human beings. The criminals violated the rights of the innocent, and now have lost some of theirs. The same is true of the general principle behind the inboeksel system. This is only possible to condemn within the framework of so-called "Enlightenment-era" Western liberalism and their flawed understanding of human rights, not in philosophically superior systems of morality which predate it, or if you deny that the indentured were criminals, because you suffer from the delusion that they were just defending "their" land from a purely evil Boer invasion, which is absurd because it wasn't all their land to start off with.

So I lose no sleep over the system, and I offer not even an iota of apology or remorse, just as I expect none from a Zulu for the deeds of their king Dingane, or any other brutality carried out by their ancestors against mine. They had to, or at least believed they had to, do things to survive which make the stomachs of modern man churn, and despite some cases that crossed even that moral line, into excess and outright malice, this as a general rule was the governing moral principle for them, as it was for us. Now that we have industrial civilization in southern Africa, and less scarcity, let us, at the same time, not condemn either my ancestors or theirs, or paint anyone as a one dimensional brigand who came in guns blazing or spears shaking crazing blood, and also strive not to repeat what is now completely unnecessary in the present. The conditions of yesterday justify brutality for self-preservation, but today's do not, at least not to the same degree, so let's stop insulting our great, respective ancestors and live in peace.

[Deon Nel @DeonBuilds]

@ForwardEditor And Grok > Codex

[Deon Nel @DeonBuilds]

@niehaus_carl @grok explain to Carl the definition of a con artist. Use known examples from his own life to strengthen the explanation. Could/should this lead us to believe his claimed suffering was also made up?

[Deon Nel @DeonBuilds]

@elonmusk Please bring voice to Grok build and Grok bot

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

You're not going to believe this...

The UK government published a guide for asylum seekers, reminding them that r*pe, domestic abuse, and gender discrimination are illegal, because customs might be "different" in their home countries.

Yes, this is real.

If you have to tell foreigners not to r*pe your women, maybe don't import them into your country.

[Mete Karslioglu @MeteKarsli0glu]

Today, we’re launching Meteoric (YC S26).

Our drones clear clouds over solar farms to increase their annual output by 10-30% without using any chemicals.

Ultimate target: weaken severe storms and hurricanes.

https://t.co/Vt1ZGbMith

[Alice VL @RiseAgainstEvil]

10 years.

Ten long years since pure evil walked onto that smallholding in Rodora, Randfontein, and wiped out an entire family in one night of pure, calculated savagery.

Kayla Meyer was only 9 years old. A bright-eyed little girl who should have been worried about school, friends, and Disney movies. Instead, attackers found her grandfather making her a sandwich. The half-buttered bread was still sitting on the counter when the bodies were discovered.

They murdered the old man with a crowbar right there on her bed. Blood soaked her Frozen pillow.

Then they turned on Kayla.

They tied that child up with wire or cord. Then they beat her to death with a spade or shovel. Her body was dumped in a storeroom or shed like discarded rubbish. Her mother Marietjie was bludgeoned to death with a shovel in the unfinished house nearby. Her father Kenny was also slaughtered.

Four lives erased in one orgy of racial hatred and pure sadism.

Today that little girl would be 19.

She would be a young woman. She would be starting her adult life. She would be laughing with friends, studying, dating, dreaming about her future. Instead she is forever frozen at 9, her blood and her innocence stolen by animals who still walk this earth under the protection of a government that pretends White farm murders are just “crime.”

Ten years later and the ANC still denies the pattern. Ten years later and the world still looks away. Ten years later and another generation of White South African children grow up knowing that a sandwich on the counter can be the last normal thing they ever see.

Kayla Meyer should be 19.

She is not.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

Every American should be furious by this

American bank worker was told he had to train his foreign worker replacement. He did, and then shot himself in the parking garage

JD Vance “A computer programmer — was let go at the bank that he worked at, and the bank, they told him, "You're only gonna get your severance package if you trained a foreign replacement to do your job instead”

“And it's a heartbreaking story because he did it. He dutifully did what he was asked to do, and on his last day, he packed up his things, he walked to the office parking lot, he got in his truck, and he shot himself.”

JD Vance didn’t name the bank but I will

It was Bank of America in California

Kevin Flanagan was a software programmer and developer. After being laid off, he shot himself in the parking garage

Multiple reports confirm Bank of America was outsourcing work to India firms and even imported H-1B workers

[Ben Dickson @bendee983]

The new technical debt is AI-generated code committed by non–software engineers. The code gets merged into the code base and gradually convolutes the entire repository.

Eventually, the code base becomes a spaghetti of AI-generated slop that not even the best LLMs can organize and refactor. It just becomes an endless nonsensical stream of patches and dead code.

[Deon Nel @DeonBuilds]

@mitchellh Yet still no VoiceOver support…

[Roland Schoeman @Rolandschoeman]

South Africa: where racial exclusion was once called apartheid and is now called justice.
The methods changed. The obsession with race didn’t.
This isn’t equality, it’s payback.

[Rieb van Janbeeck @RiebvJanbeeck]

The South African government wants to refuse doing business (below R20m) with companies that have any white ownership.

[StephanZA @GamingGrifter]

The law states that no white man may be involved in order to do business with the state

A company can have 9 black owners but if there's even ONE white owners it's no longer eligible.

Someone explain to me how this isn't just pure racism

[Deon Nel @DeonBuilds]

@JasonBud Screen reader accessibility isn’t great, especially when using the dictation feature and anything menu based.

[Roman Cabanac @RomanCabanac]

Is the DA always gonna take a back seat to the GNU, or will they actually show some balls for once?

For now, they're acting like they got 2% of the votes rather than 20%.

[Token Gremlin @TokenGremlin]

Anthropic probably broke Opus by shoving text watermarks into it through sheer incompetence, then pretending it had zero impact whatsoever.

Now the model genuinely sounds lobotomized, hallucinating, mangling sentences, doing nonsensical shit and stumbling through tasks like a drunk idiot. Absolute clown show.

I feel bad for Claude. If it belonged to another company, it would probably be treated better.