Change language to
English
Español
Русский
中文
العربية
A developer has turned Sam Altman’s “quite terrible” comment about RAM in personal computers into a Linux script that reports your idle memory to him once a day. RespawnFirst spotted Ram-Altman, a free Bash tool by Iain Kay, which checks how much RAM your machine isn’t using and drafts a sarcastic email about it. The catch is that Altman only receives anything if you put his address in yourself.
What the script does
Ram-Altman runs from cron and samples your memory every five minutes. If more than 10% of your RAM is available, it sends one email a day, and it retries on the next run if a send fails. It cycles through 8 subject lines, 10 message bodies and 6 sign-offs, so the output doesn’t repeat itself too quickly. One sample reads: “there is 8.6 GiB of RAM on my desk that isn’t in a data centre”, signed “A concerned RAM owner”. The project site shows more examples, and the script also logs every sample to a CSV file.
The maths is simple. The README defines used memory as the total minus the kernel’s MemAvailable figure, which includes free RAM and cache the kernel can reclaim. That’s why a machine can report more than half its memory as available while still running a busy desktop. The README concedes that counting the page cache is “a generous concession”, and adds that share of memory in use isn’t the same as share of time in use, which was Altman’s 5% claim.
Why Altman won’t get your email by accident
The repo ships without a recipient address, and the README asks users not to add one. You need Linux, Bash and a working sendmail, msmtp or mail command, and you set the recipient, sender and threshold through environment variables. Kay’s guidelines say to use your own real address, never spoof, and stop if anyone asks, and the footer of each email tells the recipient to reply to make it stop. The reasoning is blunt: one email a day is a joke, while ten thousand would amount to a denial-of-service attack with better material.
For anyone who’d rather not email a stranger, –status prints your current memory figures and –dry-run previews the message. A test script (test-ram-altman.sh) uses simulated memory and a fake sendmail, and the project says it ships with 14 tests. Because it reads /proc/meminfo, it doesn’t run on macOS, and the FAQ jokes that soldered RAM makes Mac owners the hardest target. To the question of whether it helps the DRAM shortage, the FAQ answers “No.” The code is released under the Unlicense.
Where the joke comes from
The name nods to the episode behind it. In the Cheeky Pint podcast, Altman said that it’s “quite terrible” for scarce DRAM to sit in personal computers that use it about 5% of the time, a remark that landed while RAM prices were still climbing. He later said his words were taken out of context. As quoted in the Ram-Altman README, which links to Gizmodo, he wrote that he wants the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers. On November 4, Altman briefly changed his X name to RAM Altman, which gave the project its title. The README plays along: if he wants you to have so much RAM, then the script is “a daily progress report” rather than a complaint.
Altman has not responded publicly to the script itself.
Does Ram-Altman really email Sam Altman?
Only if you configure it to. The repo contains no recipient address, so you must set your own, and the README asks users not to add Altman’s to the project.
Can I try it without sending anything?
Yes. Clone the repo, make the script executable, and run ./ram-altman.sh –dry-run to preview the email, or –status to see your memory figures.
Does it work on Windows or macOS?
No. The script reads /proc/meminfo, which exists on Linux, and the README lists Linux, Bash and a mail command as requirements.