Senior software engineer. AI, emerging tech and occasional unfiltered commentary. Afrikaner preparing for a new chapter in the US.
Joined September 2017
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Deon Nel retweeted
✈️Rowan Tooth grew up in Kimberley, South Africa.
He was one of two relief pilots on flydubai flight FZ1073 when the co-pilot attacked the captain with the cockpit axe and the 737 went into a steep dive.
With a New Zealand colleague he got into the cockpit, fought the aircraft through the G-forces and the damaged controls, and helped bring it down safely at Tabuk.
All 182 people on board survived.
This week the UAE presented him with the First Class Order of Zayed for that work.
South Africa produced a pilot who did the job when it mattered most.
BEE was the reason he cannot work in his own country, so he went and saved hundreds of lives.
What an achievement!! Well done Rowan Tooth from Kimberley South Africa, one of the pilots that saved the crippled @flydubai 737
WATCH | Northern Cape pilot among those receiving UAE medals for foiling mid-air terror attack | NovaNews share.google/vDE84TFIHtMGANp…
Deon Nel retweeted
A black person in Mzansi will send their kids to whites schools; dine in Whites restaurants where there are no black people on sight; scream go bokkeee; trust private Healthcare owned by Whites; but cannot trust the same Whites to govern SA because Whites are racists.💔🇿🇦😭
Deon Nel retweeted
Wrote this some years ago describing how we dealt with South Africa when I was in the US Foreign Service. It was pathetic.
South Africa. Complicated place with a complicated history which few outside of the Boers and the Zulus seem to understand or appreciate. When I was at the UN in the 1980's I had to deal with the South African "Issue." Israel and South Africa, of course, were the greatest evils facing mankind, and the UN spared no effort to crush them both. I would, on occasion meet, quite discreetly, the harried and tired-looking South African diplomats assigned to New York and Geneva. I remember their Mission in NY had no identifying flag or symbol; you knew you were entering South African property only because the door handle read "Trek." A giveaway, that. The British, Israelis, and we were about the only ones who argued for a more moderate treatment of South Africa. In the end, of course, our policy likely would have produced the same thing that eventually happened, to wit, the death of Africa's richest and most productive country.
In dealing with South Africa back then, we viewed it as some sort of replay of our own civil rights struggle and fight against Jim Crow. That, of course, was nonsense, but few of us had the knowledge or courage to say so. The Boers, especially, had about as much claim to South Africa as did the Zulus. Both were conquering tribes. Traditional enemies of the British, the Boers and the Zulus, in fact, had reached a sort of accommodation and seemed tacitly united against the massive influx of outsiders that finally did alter irrevocably the demographics of South Africa. Immigration did the place in. Yes, evil South Africa under the evil Boers was a net recipient of immigrants and refugees, almost all black and Asian from other parts of Africa. For a time, of course, big business such as in the diamond, gold, and agricultural sectors welcomed these migrants as a source of cheap labor. Well, as we can see at home and in Europe, cheap labor can get very expensive very quickly especially once it gets politicized by "progressive" forces. So, evil apartheid was destroyed; Mandela and his ANC took power, and--Surprise!--South Africa has become a hellish place for everybody, black, white, Zulu, Boer, Anglo, Asian, etc.
We now see the South African parliament declaring that white-owned property (about ¾'s of the most productive agricultural land) can and should be seized without compensation, in the style of Zimbabwe. We have prominent South African politicians calling for the murder of whites. The world reaction seems, to say the least, muted. I see no calls for a meeting of the UNSC, or emergency human rights meetings in NY or Geneva. Silence in the face of genocide. White Lives Don't Matter!
Deon Nel retweeted
Seems the EFF “fighters” enjoy running away. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Unlike real heroes, these cowards do not run towards danger.
@EFFSouthAfrica
Deon Nel retweeted
The fate of Texas and America is at stake. Vote for @KenPaxtonTX today.
Deon Nel retweeted
My post about France went viral. Thousands of likes. Many Americans told me: "Democrats aren't socialists. America will never be France." I want to answer that seriously, step by step.
Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing.
What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation.
College. Washington lends students almost unlimited money. Universities know the money will always come, so they raise tuition and hire more administrators. The student pays the bill for twenty years. More government money, higher prices.
Housing. Why can't a nurse buy a home in the city where she works? Not because of capitalism. Because of zoning laws, permits, environmental reviews, years of procedure to build a single building. The most expensive places to live in America are the places where it's hardest to build. When building is nearly illegal, prices explode.
Healthcare. The patient almost never sees the price. A third party pays, regulations limit who can compete, and costs climb year after year with no one able to say no.
So here is the trap. The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you're being offered is more of the same.
That's the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears. The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion.
In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can't afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row.
If you're a Republican, share this with the Democrat in your life. Not to win an argument. To start a conversation.
If you're a Democrat, I'm not asking you to switch teams. I'm asking you to look at the pattern. Wherever the state took over, life became unaffordable. Don't fix the failures of government with more government.
Stay American. Ask for less state, not more.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
Deon Nel retweeted
If you have a kid who is a recent software engineering graduate and you are as excited as I am about the H1B scam finally ending, here's how it started...
IBM is almost singlehandedly responsible for the outsourcing of American engineering jobs.
It was the early 90s and IBM was getting nuked by Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Sun, Dell, and Intel. Massive losses and the existential dread of a dinosaur monopoly being devoured by younger, hungrier, more nimble beasts.
Using it's massive political clout and governmental relationships starting from all the way back in WWII, it smoothed the path for the 1992 partnership with TATA, the first and greatest tech outsourcer.
Indian based employee numbers surged from 9,000 in 2003 to 74,000 by 2007, surpassing U.S. headcount.
By 2006, IBM became the multinational with the most employees in India and by 2017 it overtook the U.S. as IBM's largest workforce location, with ~130,000 employees (one-third of global total) and today, IBM India employs ~150,000–200,000 people across 20+ cities.
Once IBM opened the floodgates and smoothed the political/legal landscape everybody in the Valley copied them, with Microsoft being the most aggressive. Think about it: billionaires running our most profitable companies have been gradually destroying our scientific and engineering edge by hiring indentured servants instead of American graduates so that they can build a bigger yacht. Our elites literally sold out our children's future to make more money.
But wait! It gets worse!
IBM also spearheaded the massive expansion of H1Bs so that, as essentially an Indian company at this point, it could import a captive workforce where on-prem was required. The follow-on effect was the creation of a local infrastructure primed for colonization. Check out the leaders of the massive number of Indian owned IT firms around DC, and they're almost always IBM or IBM adjacent. This is especially true of the older ones, while the newer ones are often nepobabies of former founders. It's a tikka masala mafia.
A personal aside: I have worked at Indian dev shops and with Indian partners and colleagues for decades. The caste system and the entrenched nepotism are 100% real things; it's literally how their culture functions, and it's why India itself is a non-functioning country. Also, I would not describe them as a particularly honest people. I can't count how many times I've been lied to by somebody with that weird bobbing head thing while they cheerfully smile. And the weirdest part is that they know that I know that they are lying, but they're lying and smiling anyway because they're not ashamed of doing it. There's a sense that if you are dumb enough to get cheated then that means that you deserved it, and it's an incredibly toxic and anti-western way to do business.
Then McKinsey (those bstrds) took the model to Walmart, GM, Verizon, Fannie-Mae...everywhere. Very often in my career I've been like: "Wait: Am I even in America right now?". Once, I even got hired because they explicitly needed a white engineer to attend client meetings, while "my" entire team was Indian and half H1B.
Nerd Aside: Remember IBM's UML and Rationale Rose, etc.? Those were created to communicate bugs and defects from US based analysts to Indian bases devs. IBM literally created the infrastructure of tech outsourcing, destroying (or never starting) the careers of American engineers. All so that they could make money selling a mediocre product using 3rd world labor.
It's FN treasonous. In the parlance of Creighton's excellent Airframe, IBM "gave away the wing"
Deon Nel retweeted
Software engineering was supposed to go away when low-code/no-code hit the shelves. It was supposed to go away when WYSIWYG IDEs hit the shelves. And it didn't.
And now, with AI coding agents, it's still the same. It lowers the barrier to entry. You can get started faster than ever. You can even build small personal projects and productivity tools with little or no SWE experience.
But as soon as you want to build software in earnest, you need to know the fundamentals: Security, maintainability, scale, reliability, etc. They do not go away regardless of how advanced the software-building technology becomes.
1. Oh shit, AI can do my job better than me
2. Software engineering is dead!
3. I can vibe code as much slop as I want!
4. Oh, things are not going well. Fable/Sol/Opus all suuuck
5. But what if I constrain the agent? Put it in a straitjacket?
6. Oh, the results are pretty good now. How do I go deeper?
7. *Orders 12 software engineering books from Amazon*
8. Software engineering is alive!
Deon Nel retweeted
Only Israelis — In a couple of minutes they smashed through the cockpit door after hearing the screaming, neutralized the terrorist co-pilot, dragged a passenger doctor in to save the captain, put another passenger pilot at the controls, landed the nearly crashing plane safely with no casualties, and stopped a second September 11th.
Fucking HEROES 🇮🇱
Deon Nel retweeted
so Anthropic files for IPO and then immediately drops a blog post calling one of their biggest open-weight competitors a danger to the world? classic!
now seems like a good time to point out that I built and run OBLITERATUS, an abliteration framework with over 8k stars and 1.5k forks on GitHub, using Anthropic’s very own models! 🤗
Deon Nel retweeted
When you strip away the revolutionary songs, the red berets, and the dramatic stage walks, what you're left with isn't a freedom fighter.
You're looking at one of the most successful commercial operations in modern African politics.
Julius Malema figured out a dark truth early on: in a country broken by poverty, selling hope and anger pays much better than actually fixing anything.
Think about the sheer contradiction of it.
You stand in front of a crowd of desperate, unemployed youth in a dusty township. You look people in the eye who don't know where their next meal is coming from, and you promise them that you're going to tear down the system and give them the land.
They cheer for you because they are desperate for a savior. They genuinely believe you are fighting for them.
But watch what happens the minute the cameras turn off.
The red overalls come off. The luxury German SUVs roll up. Malema goes back to a multi-million rand mansion in Sandton or Hyde Park, the most elite, capitalist suburbs in the country.
He sips five-figure French champagne, wears designer Italian shoes, and rocks watches that cost more than a family's lifetime earnings.
His kids go to elite private schools while his supporters' kids deal with broken public education.
How is this lifestyle funded? It's not from a standard salary. It's funded by the very systems of corruption and political tenders he claims to hate.
Look at the VBS Mutual Bank scandal.
That wasn't money stolen from the wealthy; that was money stolen from poor, elderly grandmothers in Limpopo who lost their life savings. And where did a chunk of it trace back to? Luxury boutiques and lifestyle funding for the EFF inner circle.
The wildest part is the followers, the useful idiots who will still jump to defend him.
They will live in a shack, drink dirty water, and attack anyone who questions their leader's luxury drip.
Malema isn't crazy. His behavior looks like a clown show to sober-minded people, but It's completely deliberate.
He keeps people angry and radicalized because if South Africans ever stopped, calmed down, and started thinking logically, his entire business model would collapse.
Being a sober, constructive leader doesn't buy mansions in Sandton. Exploiting the pain of poor people does. It's a beautifully executed scam.
Deon Nel retweeted
Trump is 80, with 5 children, 11 grandchildren, and more money than he could ever need. He could spend every minute with his family. Instead, he works around the clock for the American people. Thank you. 🇺🇸
Deon Nel retweeted
“Thousands of people have been murdered on farms in South Africa… really brutal tortures… actively encouraged by politicians… openly celebrated by people on the left… and the president of South Africa saying it’s all a lie, none of this is happening.”
@ErnstRoets says the media has downplayed violence against white farmers in South Africa, often dismissing it as a conspiracy theory.
Roets is organizing a September 26 vigil on the National Mall, where 3,000 white crosses will be installed—each bearing the name of a victim of a South African farm murder. A display that cannot be ignored.
Watch The Matt Gaetz Show on OAN Live Today!
Deon Nel retweeted
BREAKING: President Donald J. Trump announces complete and permanent American security control over Greenland, and excludes any adversary from Greenland and the surrounding region.
Deon Nel retweeted
I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them “alive.” Seems like corruption to me!), from the White House as a result of their constant “reporting” FAKE NEWS! Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Deon Nel retweeted
🚨 AWESOME! Donald Trump just posted this white South African farmer who FLED to America and immediately assimilated
Jason Bartlett is now running a FARM and providing food to Americans 🇺🇸
The best part: he doesn't have to worry that an oppressive group is going to come m*rder him over his race!
BRAVO, @Jason2bartlett 👏🏻
"I'm living in North Alabama and I'm thriving in the United States of America, living my very own American dream."
"There's no one coming to break in and sl*t your throat because you white."
Trump met with the leader of South Africa last year and CONFRONTED HIM in the Oval Office for NEGLECTING the obvious racial discrimination against white farmers
In that meeting, Trump was very clear that the South African government is not doing enough to stop it.
Nearly 10,000 white South Africans have fled to America under Trump
And just this week, Sec. Marco Rubio enacted VISA restrictions against South Africans who are enabling this evil
THIS is how you assimilate!
