As we previously reported,The OpenAI CEO said it’s “too wasteful” for people to buy memory for their own use—they should all just give it to us.This could be said to have caused a lot of dissatisfaction. In response to this remark from Sam Altman, a developer overseas came up with an idea and developed a free open-source tool called Ram-Altman. It not only silently monitors the computer’s RAM usage in the background, but whenever available memory exceeds 10% of the total, it automatically sends an email to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to report that your computer has RAM sitting idle unused, which is really funny.
Your computer’s RAM isn’t fully used, and you actually have to report to Sam Altman? The prank tool Ram-Altman automatically sends an email when more than 10% is idle.
For readers who aren’t aware of the previous Sam Altman incident, here’s a quick explanation.
One day, Sam Altman appeared on the Cheeky Pint Podcast hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison. The main topic of their conversation was how to make AI compute cheaper, and they also discussed memory shortages, soaring prices, and the trade-offs between local AI inference and data centers. At around the 29-minute mark of the interview, Sam Altman said the remark that set off the buzz.
He first mentioned that “many people want to run AI inference locally,” then said that from the perspective of global resource allocation, having a bunch of DRAM—which is in limited supply worldwide—sitting in everyone’s computer and being used only about 5% of the time is “actually quite terrible.” What he meant is that with supply so tight, concentrating memory in the cloud and maximizing utilization as much as possible is the better way to allocate it.
Image source:Cheeky pint and Stripe
Once these words appeared, the internet began filling with various jokes mocking “Sam Altman wants your RAM,” and even Elon Musk posted a meme on November 1 that read, “The people have the right to own RAM too!”
The people deserve to have their RAM too! https://t.co/q6dwauALw4
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
And this model Ram-Altman A free open-source tool created by developer Iain Kay. On the official website, he wrote: Since Sam Altman cares so much about whether everyone’s RAM is being put to good use, send him a “progress report” every day:
The way it works is roughly like this:
- Regularly monitor RAM: Use Linux’s built-in scheduling feature cron to automatically check memory usage every five minutes.
- 10% threshold: By default, the email condition is met as long as available RAM exceeds 10% of the total. This threshold can also be adjusted.
- At most one email per day: No matter how many times it is triggered in a day, the same computer sends at most one email per day; if sending fails, it will retry on the next check.
- Email content changes randomly: 8 built-in subject lines, 10 body texts, and 6 closings, randomly combined each day.
- Use real RAM data: directly read the Linux system’s memory information, calculate the total, used, and available amounts, and include them in the email.
- Logging usage: The results of each check are saved as a CSV file, and the author also includes a command for calculating the average RAM usage percentage, making it easy for you to analyze yourself.
The official website even includes a sample letter titled “You missed a spot,” roughly: “Hi Sam, don’t panic—I have 8.6 GiB of RAM on my desk that isn’t in the data center, accounting for 56.2% of this computer’s installed RAM, and as far as I know, it has nothing scheduled today.” It signs off, “Responsibly hoarding, a worried RAM holder.”
Of course, this is just a prank; the developer did not include Sam Altman’s email address in the project, and specifically asks people not to add it themselves, recommending that they just use preview mode.
If you really must send emails, you must use your own real mailbox, must not forge the sender, and should not run on many servers at the same time; if the other party asks you to stop, you must stop. The author also reminds that if many people each send a lot of emails, it will turn into a denial-of-service attack.
One more thing to note is that Ram-Altman only supports Linux. It reads memory information files from the Linux system, so it cannot run on Mac. If Windows users really want to try it, they can use it through WSL (the feature that runs Linux inside Windows), or use the PowerShell version instead.
Source: KOCPC Chinese