Every five minutes, a Bash script called Ram-Altman can check how much memory your Linux machine has available and, if it finds enough idle gigabytes, fire off an email to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about it. Developer IainKay published the open-source project on GitHub as a response to comments Altman made about personal computer memory representing a global allocation problem. The project takes its name directly from those events.
“Quite Terrible”: Altman’s DRAM Comment and the Backlash That Followed
The OpenAI CEO was arguing about data center economics, not telling anyone to strip RAM from their laptops.
During an appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast with John Collison, Altman described it as “quite terrible” for large amounts of the world’s limited DRAM supply to sit inside personal computers used only about 5% of the time. His argument centered on global memory allocation during a supply-constrained period. He was not issuing a consumer instruction about personal hardware.
After criticism landed, Altman clarified that he wanted people to have as much memory as they wanted and argued that global production should simply increase. He also temporarily changed his display name on X to “Ram Altman,” which directly inspired the repository name.
Cron Jobs, Thresholds, and Eight Different Subject Lines
The mechanics are straightforward, and the variety of messages keeps the script from repeating itself.
A cron job runs the script every five minutes, sampling available memory using Linux’s MemAvailable metric. When that figure exceeds the configured 10% threshold, the script prepares an email but limits itself to one outgoing message per day. The messages rotate across eight subject lines, ten body text options, and six sign-offs.
A dry-run mode lets users preview what an email would look like without actually sending it. The repository does not include a recipient address by default, which means no message goes anywhere until a user actively configures one.
The Technical Detail That Quietly Complicates the Joke
MemAvailable and free memory are not the same thing, and the script accounts for that distinction.
The script uses Linux’s MemAvailable metric, which includes memory that the operating system can reclaim from disk caches when an application needs additional capacity. A high available-memory figure does not mean a system is wasting resources. This distinction sits at the center of what the script is satirizing, because memory that appears idle may already be doing useful computer problems.
One Email a Day Is a Joke. Thousands Are an Attack.
The repository is explicit about where the line falls, and that warning deserves to be taken seriously.
The Ram-Altman repository includes a direct warning on this point. One daily email from one person is a joke; thousands of automated messages sent to any address would constitute a denial-of-service attack. The repository does not supply a default recipient address, reducing the likelihood that anyone runs the script without first making an active choice about where messages go.
The project is open-source and available on GitHub under IainKay’s account. Anyone curious about how it works can use the dry-run mode to inspect the output without sending a single message.
