Every five minutes, a Bash script called Ram-Altman checks how much memory your Linux machine has available. If it finds enough idle gigabytes, it fires off an email to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about it. Every single day.

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 — and yes, it's a joke. But a surprisingly well-engineered one.

"Quite Terrible": The Comment That Started It All

Let's be clear about what Altman actually said. He 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" that large amounts of the world's limited DRAM supply 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.

How the Script Actually Works

The mechanics are straightforward, and the variety keeps it from getting repetitive:

• A cron job runs the script every five minutes

• It samples available memory using Linux's MemAvailable metric

• When that figure exceeds the configured 10% threshold, it prepares an email — but limits itself to one outgoing message per day

• Messages rotate across eight subject lines, ten body text options, and six sign-offs

There's also a dry-run mode so users can preview an email without sending it. And crucially, the repository does not include a recipient address by default — meaning no message goes anywhere until a user actively configures one.

The Technical Detail That Complicates the Joke

Here's the part that makes this more than a meme: MemAvailable and free memory are not the same thing, and the script accounts for that distinction.

MemAvailable includes memory the operating system can reclaim from disk caches when an application needs more capacity. A high available-memory figure does not mean a system is wasting resources. That distinction sits at the center of what the script is satirizing — because memory that looks idle may already be doing useful work.

One Email a Day Is a Joke. Thousands Are an Attack.

The repository is explicit about where the line falls, and the warning deserves to be taken seriously.

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 includes a direct warning on this point — and the lack of a default recipient address reduces the likelihood that anyone runs it without making an active choice about where messages go.

The project is open-source and available on GitHub under IainKay's account. Curious users can inspect the output with dry-run mode without sending a single message.

The Takeaway

Ram-Altman is a rare thing: a joke that's technically literate, self-aware about its own limits, and honest about the difference between satire and abuse. Whether you find it funny or exhausting probably depends on how much RAM you have.

Would you run this script on your machine — or is one email a day already too many? Tell us in the comments.