Someone Built a Bash Script to Tell Sam Altman About Your Idle RAM, Once a Day

You have RAM in your computer right now. It's just sitting there, in a personal computer, being personal. You probably thought of this as "a computer working normally," but apparently there's another way to look at it—and someone wrote a script to make sure the right people know about it.

What It Does

ram-altman is a bash script that sends exactly one email per day to Sam Altman, reporting the RAM on your machine that isn't in a data centre. The premise comes from a recent episode of Cheeky Pint, where the CEO of OpenAI described the global DRAM situation as "quite terrible" because everybody has "a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer"—memory he says is "being used maybe 5% of the time."

The script checks whether your machine has more than 10% of its RAM available. If it does, it fires off a single email letting Sam know. It tracks total, used and available RAM, handles page cache correctly, and logs every sample to CSV for when the auditors arrive. It's written in bash, which the README notes is a deliberate choice—an Electron version "would have solved the problem by using all the RAM."

Why It's Cool

• The math is actually honest. The script defines used = MemTotal - MemAvailable, using the kernel's own estimate of how much memory programs could claim without swapping. Free RAM counts as available, and so does cache the kernel can reclaim. tmpfs and shared memory don't, because they can't simply be handed back. On kernels older than 3.14, which have no MemAvailable, it estimates from free memory plus reclaimable cache. That's a more careful treatment of Linux memory accounting than most arguments about RAM ever get.

• The joke is rate-limited. There's a reason the script sends at most one email per day—as the README puts it, "we're hoarders, not animals." It rotates 8 subject lines, 10 messages and 6 sign-offs, so the bit has a carefully managed shelf life. The sample email opens with "Please don't be alarmed, but there is 8.6 GiB of RAM on my desk that isn't in a data centre" and closes with "Hoarding responsibly, A concerned RAM owner."

• It concedes the argument it's making. The README admits that page cache is doing useful work, so counting it as available is "a generous concession to the other side"—a plea bargain, in its words. Every sysadmin has spent years explaining that Linux didn't eat your RAM and that free RAM is wasted RAM. It took decades for someone important to agree with the second part, and now he'd like it shipped to him.

• The testing is real. It ships with 14 tests, which the README notes is "more than the DRAM market has had sensible outcomes." For a joke script, that's a surprising amount of rigor.

How to Try It

You'll need Linux, bash, and a working sendmail, msmtp or mail command. Your RAM is assumed.

git clone https://github.com/IainKay/ram-altman.git
cd ram-altman
chmod +x ram-altman.sh test-ram-altm

If you'd rather not install anything, you can read sample emails at ram-altman.lol with no setup at all. The full source lives at github.com/iainkay/ram-altman.

Final Thoughts

This is a joke script, and it knows it's a joke script—but it's a well-built one, with correct memory accounting, a real test suite, and a self-awareness that keeps the premise from wearing thin. It's best for Linux users who found the original quote funny and who appreciate a project that commits to the bit without cutting corners. The takeaway is simple: free RAM is wasted RAM, and now somebody's keeping track.