IainKay/ram-altman

What it does

Ram-Altman is a parody monitoring script inspired by Sam Altman's remark that it is "quite terrible" to have the world's DRAM sitting idle in personal computers. It reads Linux memory statistics, tracks total and used RAM, and sends at most one email per day to a recipient you configure when available memory exceeds a threshold. The memory accounting is real; the correspondence is the joke.

The script handles page cache via MemAvailable, so reclaimable cache counts as available memory, and it falls back to an estimate from free memory plus reclaimable cache on kernels older than 3.14. Every sample is logged to CSV, and the email text rotates through several subject lines, messages and sign-offs so repeated reports do not read identically.

Quick start

Requirements: Linux, Bash, and a working sendmail, msmtp or mail command. The script reads /proc/meminfo, so macOS is not supported.

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    # show current memory figures
./ram-altman.sh --dry-run   # preview an email without sending it

The status output in the README shows total, used and available memory, with free memory and cache broken out. To send reports, add the script to your crontab with crontab -e, setting the recipient and sender variables:

RAM_ALTMAN_TO=recipient@example.com
RAM_ALTMAN_FROM=you@example.com
RAM_ALTMAN_FROM_NAME=Your Name

*/5 * * * * /path/to/ram-altman.sh

The script samples every five minutes and sends at most one email per day. A failed send is retried on the next run. RAM_ALTMAN_THRESHOLD defaults to 10 percent available memory, and state plus the usage.csv log default to ~/.local/state/ram-altman. You can inspect accumulated usage with the provided awk command, and run ./test-ram-altman.sh to exercise the tests with simulated memory and a fake sendmail.

If you only want to see the joke, the sample emails cycle through real correspondence without installing anything.

Constraints and etiquette

This is a joke wrapper around real memory accounting, not a tool for the DRAM shortage. Use --dry-run for entertainment, use your own real sender address, avoid spoofing or fleet-wide deployment, and stop if a recipient asks. One email per person per day is the intended scale; many recipients would turn the joke into a nuisance. Released under the Unlicense.

HotRepo's take

On the 2026-11-08 new-project snapshot, the repository recorded 209 stars with 105 stars gained in a roughly six-and-a-half-hour window, and the sampled star count rose from 104 to 209 between 06:45 and 12:45 UTC. That is a short burst around a timely joke rather than an established monitoring tool. The README's own fairness note about Altman clarifying his remarks keeps the parody grounded, and the script's real value for readers is the small, readable Linux memory-accounting example plus the dry-run mode, not a serious RAM-management solution.