Man Builds Automated Sam Altman Annoyance Machine, Begs Internet Not to Abuse It

One of the few consolations of the AI “boom” has been the swath it’s cut through the army of smug assholes who spent much of the 2010s telling everyone else to “learn to code.” But learning to code is good—not because it’ll get you a job, because nothing will get you a job in 2026, but because if nothing else, it lets you do useful things like, oh, I don’t know, writing a script that can send an annoying email to Sam Altman every day reporting exactly how much RAM your computer has available. If you missed it, Altman told the Cheeky Pint podcast last month, while discussing people running AI models on their own computers, that “from a global allocation perspective… it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer” instead of making greater use of AI data centers. Given that it now costs a fortune to actually get hold of RAM to put into your own computer, and the price increases of the past couple of years have been driven in large part by Altman and his ilk hoovering up memory capacity for their plagiarism-driven dickhead machines, these remarks were pretty much the definition of adding insult to injury. (For what it’s worth, Altman has since argued that the quotes were taken out of context.) Developer Iain Kay clearly thought about as much of this argument as the rest of us, and his response is a simple Bash script for Linux systems that he’s calling “RAM Altman” (a name inspired by Altman’s brief stint as “Ram Altman” on Twitter last week.) The script works by reading the Linux kernel’s “MemAvailable” value to estimate how much of your computer’s RAM is available for use. When scheduled with cron—Unix-like operating systems’ job-scheduling tool—it takes such a sample every five minutes. If the sample finds more than 10% of the system’s total RAM is available, it sends an automatic email reporting on this lamentably inefficient state of affairs to, um, an email address of your choosing. Only one such email gets sent on any given date, and we would never encourage anyone to alter the script to circumvent this limit. The email itself is probably the best part of this whole thing: as per the project GitHub, the script “rotates 8 subject lines, 10 messages and 6 sign-offs, so the joke gets old at a carefully managed pace.” (Is Kay British? Why, yes, indeed he is, and we’re not at all sure why you asked.) The subject line that reports “[x]% of my RAM remains at large,” and the message explaining to the recipient that “I thought you’d want to know before someone tries to train something on it” are probably our favorites, but they’re all pretty amusing. If you’re thinking of spamming Altman and encouraging your friends to get in on the fun, Kay specifically requests that you don’t. “One email a day from one person is a joke,” the dev writes. “Ten thousand of them is a denial-of-service attack with better material.” The script is available via GitHub, and it’s a brief moment of levity in a terrible world. It doesn’t work on macOS, if you’re wondering, but I bet that someone who does, in fact, know how to code could use something like this to whip up an alternative implementation by now.