Sam Altman’s recent comments on the Cheeky Pint podcast inspired developer Iain Kay to create a satirical script that allows users to email the OpenAI CEO once per day if more than 10 percent of their system RAM is reported as available. Ram-Altman is described by its creator as a “parody project” launched in response to Altman’s viral remarks about RAM in your personal PC.

As reported by The Verge, on the October 29 episode recorded with Stripe President John Collison, Altman said, “A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open source models, we’re going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center. But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5 percent of the time.”

Altman has since explained that his comments were taken out of context and briefly changed his display name to “RAM Altman” on X, which Kay calls on the project GitHub, “objectively excellent and where the project gets its name.”

In an email to Ars, Kay said, “Ram-Altman is a bash script that takes MemTotal minus MemAvailable from /proc/meminfo, so the figure includes page cache and reclaimable slab but leaves out tmpfs and shared memory.”

If the script only showed what Linux reports as “free” RAM, it would paint an incomplete picture. Linux often reports a surprisingly small amount of “free” RAM, as it doesn’t count memory that is currently claimable for use. Linux will fill available RAM caches with file data for quick access, but the kernel can reclaim that usage at a moment’s notice when needed. The MemAvailable figure is the kernel’s own estimate of how much memory it could hand over without swapping.

used = MemTotal - MemAvailable

Users can schedule the script to ask the kernel for a status update every five minutes, and if more than 10 percent of RAM is available, it triggers a joke email from one of several joke templates. The script limits outgoing emails to one per day.

The GitHub page for the RAM-Altman project includes a dry-run option that any Linux user with a Bash terminal should be able to paste and run without the need for email trolling. When the threshold is exceeded, each dry run output features one generated joke email, so repeated runs produce different amusing examples.

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

./ram-altman.sh --status    # see the evidence against you
./ram-altman.sh --dry-run   # preview an email without sending it

A test run of the script on my Fedora 44 KDE machine confirmed the author’s measurements. Inside the System – Info Center of my Fedora desktop, the system reports 14.9 GiB of total usable system RAM after the kernel and firmware take their needed slices of the 16 GiB of physical memory. This reflects the total amount of capacity the system has to work with, not the amount available at any given time. The Ram-Altman script shows that of that 14.9 GiB total pool, 10 GiB is used, with 4.9 GiB available (33.1 percent). That figure isn’t the simple sum of the “free” and “cache” lines that the script displays, but a kernel-calculated figure that accounts for the full amount of memory that can be reclaimed.

nick@fedora:~$ git clone https://github.com/IainKay/ram-altman.git
cd ram-altman
bash ram-altman.sh --dry-run
Cloning into 'ram-altman'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 9, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (9/9), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (9/9), done.
remote: Total 9 (delta 2), reused 3 (delta 0), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (9/9), done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (2/2), done.
Total:      14.9 GiB
Used:       10.0 GiB
Available:  4.9 GiB (33.1%)
  Free:     1.8 GiB
  Cache:    2.4 GiB

From: sender-not-set@example.com
To: recipient-not-set@example.com
Subject: Unused RAM detected in the wild
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 2026 10:10:43 -0600
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated

Hi Sam,

Daily status report:

  Total RAM:     14.9 GiB
  Available:     4.9 GiB (33.1%)
  Threat level:  someone at OpenAI might notice

Stay allocated,
A concerned RAM owner

--
Sent automatically, at most once a day, by a small script on one PC.
Reply if you'd like it to stop.

The project concedes the nuance that Altman was referring to how much time memory spends being utilized, while the script measures how much capacity is free at the time of measurement. While the script might tell Altman that 33 percent of your system RAM is available, it doesn’t outline how often that’s the case. The concession steps on the joke slightly, but it keeps everyone honest.

The GitHub is wise to point out that “--dry-run is the best way to enjoy this. It costs nothing and all the jokes are there.” Used irresponsibly, this cheeky joke could morph into a harassment tool, and Kay quickly points out that the script does not include anyone’s email, including Altman’s. Users who deploy their own operating version are encouraged to only use their own real email addresses and honor any requests to stop, as is outlined at the bottom of the script-generated output.

If you’re interested in taking a look at some of the emails generated without having to spin up a Linux machine that reports the system status every five minutes, the ram-altman.lol project website rotates through sample emails generated by the script. Kay writes on the website that, “In fairness, he says the remarks were taken out of context, posted ‘i want you to have so much ram’, and briefly went by Ram Altman on X. That makes this script a daily progress report.”