A project satirising Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, over comments about PC memory is drawing attention in the Linux community. A script has emerged that can be set to send Altman daily emails when a computer’s spare RAM exceeds a certain level.

On Nov. 9, IT outlet Ars Technica reported that developer Ian Kay recently released a Bash script called “RAM-Altman”. The script works by emailing Altman once a day if more than 10 percent of system RAM remains available.

The project began with remarks Altman made on the podcast “Cheeky Pint” on Oct. 29. He said it was overly simplistic to claim that data centres would become less important once open-source artificial intelligence models could run on personal computers.

He said, from a global resource allocation perspective, “It’s pretty terrible if everyone stockpiles limited DRAM supply on their own PCs and uses only 5 percent.” He was criticising a situation in which memory resources are dispersed across personal computers and not used effectively.

The remarks later became controversial online. Altman said his comments were taken out of context and at one point changed his display name on X, formerly Twitter, to “RAM Altman”. Kay mentioned this in the project’s introduction and called it “objectively excellent”.

The script uses Linux’s approach to memory management. Instead of relying on the “free” figure that simply reflects unused memory, it uses the “MemAvailable” value provided by the Linux kernel. This represents the amount of memory the system estimates it can allocate to new work without swapping. Because it considers memory that can be reclaimed when needed, such as file cache, it is better suited to gauging available RAM.

Users can set the script to check memory status every 5 minutes. If the share of available RAM exceeds 10 percent, it selects one of several joke phrases and sends an email. Emails are limited to once per day. It also offers a “dry-run” function that shows results without sending an actual email.

In a test case shared by the developer, a computer running Fedora 44 KDE showed 14.9GiB as usable out of 16GiB of physical memory installed. Of that, 10GiB was in use and the remaining 4.9GiB was calculated as available. The available share was 33.1 percent, above the script’s 10 percent threshold for sending an email.

The project does not precisely reproduce Altman’s remarks. Altman referred to time efficiency in how often memory is actually used, but the script measures only the share of available memory at a given moment. The developer acknowledged the difference and described the project as a kind of “daily progress report”.

It also includes safeguards to prevent email abuse. The script does not come with a default email address for Altman or any other person, and users must set the recipient address themselves. The developer said users should use only their own email address and comply if recipients ask them to stop.

While the project began as simple satire, it is drawing interest in developer communities by showing Linux’s memory management and how available RAM is calculated.