One of the few consolations of the AI “boom” has been the swath it’s cut through the army of smug assholes who spent much of the 2010s telling everyone else to “learn to code.” But learning to code is good—not because it’ll get you a job, because nothing will get you a job in 2026, but because if nothing else, it lets you do useful things like, oh, I don’t know, writing a script that can send an annoying email to Sam Altman every day reporting exactly how much RAM your computer has available.

If you missed it, Altman told the Cheeky Pint podcast last month, while discussing people running AI models on their own computers, that “from a global allocation perspective… it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer” instead of making greater use of AI data centers. Given that it now costs a fortune to actually get hold of RAM to put into your own computer, and the price increases of the past couple of years have been driven in large part by Altman and his ilk hoovering up memory capacity for their plagiarism-driven dickhead machines, these remarks were pretty much the definition of adding insult to injury. (For what it’s worth, Altman has since argued that the quotes were taken out of context.)

) The script works by reading the Linux kernel’s “MemAvailable” value to estimate how much of your computer’s RAM is available for use.

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