Something you learn in 13 years of video game journalism is that some people react poorly to reading things they said. Being quoted can be scary. Now the words sound the way they did leaving your mouth, not the way they may have sounded inside your head.
Anyway, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman recently complained that his remarks on a podcast, in which he bemoaned the inefficiencies of RAM sitting in personal PCs and not cooking away in AI data centers, were "taken out of context."
"From a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everyone have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and be used 5% of the time," he said. Later, Altman insisted, after quite some outcry, that "I actually do want the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers."
Clearly, one software developer took this as a challenge. Enter: Ram-Altman, "A bash script that emails Sam Altman once a day to report the RAM he missed."
Developed (and shared on GitHub) by self-described network operations manager Iain Kay, Ram-Altman is a simple script that automatically informs Altman, at his email, that you have RAM and you are not using it.
"There is RAM in your computer. Right now. Just sitting there, in a personal computer, being personal. You may have thought of this as 'a computer working normally.' On a recent episode of Cheeky Pint, the CEO of OpenAI offered another view," the tool blurb reads.
"So we wrote a script. If your machine has more than 10% of its RAM available, it sends one email a day to let Sam know. It seemed only fair. He can't fix the problem if nobody tells him where the RAM is."
A sample message that might be sent to Altman, signed "a concerned RAM owner," reads: "Please don't be alarmed, but there is 8.6 GiB of RAM on my desk that isn't in a data centre. That's 56.2% of what's installed here, and as far as I can tell it has no plans today."
If you're wondering, the tool only looks at 10% unused RAM or greater because, "below that, your machine has suffered enough." If you need me, I'll be closing 47 browser tabs.
