RAM-Altman is a tongue-in-cheek Linux utility that emails Sam Altman once a day with a report on computer memory not being used by a data center. It plays on remarks attributed to Altman describing personal computer RAM as used only a small fraction of the time and calling it “quite terrible” for people to keep scarce DRAM on their own machines. If more than 10% of a computer’s RAM is available, the script sends a message with the amount available and its share of installed memory, presented as RAM overlooked on someone’s desk. The wording changes between emails to keep the joke going. The project notes that Altman said his remarks were taken out of context, later wrote that he wanted people to have abundant RAM, and briefly used “Ram Altman” as a name on X.
The script is intended to run daily through cron, and can also be tested without sending anything: its dry-run mode reads the machine’s memory and prints the email it would generate. It treats free memory and reclaimable cache as available, and calculates used memory as total memory minus available memory. The displayed example reports 8.6 GiB available, or 56.2% of installed RAM, and signs off as a concerned owner responsibly hoarding it. The project is explicitly a parody and says it is not affiliated with Altman or OpenAI.
Summary generated by AI from the linked article. hn.today is not affiliated with Hacker News or Y Combinator.
Zebkit packages Chromium’s browser engine as a library that applications can link directly. It aims to provide a slim, cross-platform way to add browser capabilities without running a separate browser runtime. (github.com)
Office Engine processes up to 500 million CSV rows in a browser tab using about 1 GB of RAM, with no row limit, dependencies, or server. It also supports viewing and editing DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files in the browser. (github.com)
Gleam is a simple functional language that compiles to the Erlang VM or JavaScript and interoperates with Erlang and Elixir. Its approachable syntax and Rust-like feel make it appealing to try. (nchagnet.eu)
glibc’s malloc handles small allocations with internal bookkeeping, reducing costly system calls to the kernel. It can obtain heap space by moving the program break with brk, within a process address space that also contains code, libraries, and the stack. (benmandrew.com)
Ginux is an independent Rust-first kernel built in 11 days using human-directed AI engineering; it boots selected Linux programs and a Rocky Linux userspace with systemd. The research prototype has limited hardware and compatibility, lacks an independent security audit, and is not production-ready. (zenodo.org)
VM/370 Community Edition modernizes IBM’s classic VM/370 operating system with years of community fixes and added features. You can run it easily in Docker or Podman, while real mainframes offer an option that demands far more space, money, and expertise. (rbanffy.github.io)
Today's best Hacker News stories, summarized and screenshotted, one email a day.