RAM Altman: Linux Script Emails Sam Altman Daily How Much Unused RAM in Your PC | Hacker News Reader

RAM Altman: Linux Script Emails Sam Altman Daily How Much Unused RAM in Your PC

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163 pointsrandycupertino56 comments

IMO his comments are blown way out of proportion. He says "from a global allocation perspective" it's better to have RAM in the cloud where it can be used much more efficiently. I think there's an argument to be made that this is more than just economics to most people, it's about ownership and freedom, but he's clearly just talking economics.

Sure, but he's also insinuating that the economics of the situation is more important than the other, unmentioned aspects. In short, that his interests weigh more in what "best" means.

People at his level are typically mindful of how their words are perceived when doing interviews to the public at large.

Maybe we should be talking about the global allocation perspective of wealth then. Since Altman is so keep to optimize allocation, perhaps he should start with this aspect first, and then move to RAM, as wealth would impact a wider area of economics than RAM.

Absolutely, I agree that money is better centralized in the goverment where it can be put to use for the benefit of all society instead of being concentrated in billionares.

the ridiculous "no ad blocker" full-screen modal that's unclosable led me down a rabbit hole there - turns out there's some obfuscated script from "Ad Shield" which replaces the whole site with an iframe if you dare to block their domain, "html-load.com", which proxies ad networks.

fortunately one can just run debugger; to stop it early

I noticed it on several completely unrelated sites since a few days. I've never seen it before.

I was wondering if they're was some kind of consolidation/buyoff of pro-ad-protection services.

Or... one run noscript

if you're on ubo lite, move from 'optimized' to full for that page and it shoooould dump adshield out.

I'm not getting it either, nor have I seen it in other sites. I wonder if this is because of Firefox not having neutered uBO?

That is correct, uBO Lite is A Chrome-only thing since they finally neutured uBO recently.

Interesting. I'm using Firefox Focus and the page loads and is ridiculously free of distractions, err, ads.

uBlock Origin + NoScript does the trick.

Ah, I was complaining about the modal slide-in and other pester-widgets.

I am glad to not be the only one who hates that. Modern websites are so scummy.

Or one could find the original post here <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50412766>, which leads to <https://ram-altman.lol>

We’ve had this idea before.

Back in the 1800s, we had this idea called Manifest Destiny. There was a famous painting about it, _American Progress_, painted by John Gast in 1872. It depicts Columbia, bringing civilization and liberty - telegraphs and railroads - for creating a great nation. It was devastating for the Native Americans.

https://youtu.be/HCZmBMo_jhM

Similar ideas now, though it doesn’t have broad support. People are angry and fighting back against data centers.

I would hesitate to say the memory used by the filesystem cache is unused.

Dupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50414839

That's a dupe too. This is the original https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50412766

I didn’t think we’d get to the point where all compute is headed for the data centre and normal people don’t get to have anything bigger than a phone but here we are.

Kind of inevitable when you realize how much people are naturally willing to give up computational sovereignty for the sake of convenience and psychological safety espousing values claiming the opposite, and it's still the case despite everything that's happened so far

I don't think there is a lot of conscious choice here: If at some point, anything more complex than a phone would be phased out or become unaffordable for consumers, that's not because consumers had somehow collectively voted they only want phones from now on.

Well sure someone could argue that the market isn't an actually reasonable set of choices that people can vote on, but how can it not be considered at least some form of voting? There's been at least 30-40 years in which consumers could try to find out. Unfortunately there's only a finite amount of resources in the market and consumers have to compromise on what takes priority in the tech industry, like getting work done or tackling issues that are visible only in front of them. When people collectively vote for politicians they also have to compromise

I don't feel extremely on either end, but I would prefer if consumers could own their choices and not try to pretend otherwise

Well, ok, what would you do in the current situation to "vote" for affordable RAM?

In a perfectly free and fair market and in a world where companies would plan their product strategy exclusively based on current consumer data, this would be true. But neither holds in the real world: The current AI gold rush is now something that is largely decided between investors, boardrooms and hardware vendors (*) with little input from small everyday consumers. And I wager this has been the case for many "tech trends" before that seem more forced on users than being a reaction on them - such as forced updates, mandatory accounts, subscriptions, in-app purchases etc.

(* if you want to be provocative, in the US mostly by the people in this photo: https://apnews.com/article/ai-safety-openai-tech-week-32064f... )

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50412766

Just what is the point?

To rub Altman's nose in the fact that we have RAM that he wishes he had.

Or, more likely (since I doubt he's ever going to see one of these emails), to make us feel a bit better about ourselves after Altman said (in effect) that what we want doesn't matter.

Have you not seen the endless posts pointing out that the RAM story was fake exaggerated nonsense?

I have no unused RAM; if any shows up I spin up some nested Alpine VMs. I got 20 layers deep the other day.

Fucking Cry Harder, AI bros.

All your RAM are belong to us

I am an old-school guy. I don’t send them emails with unused RAM, I just fax them a printout of the script so they have to physically look at it and remove it before it goes in the trash. Bonus points if you send it to legal. Legal always has a fax machine.

With what people at OpenAI make per hour, every fax costs them thousands of dollars in labor costs, wasting all their precious resources one toner cartridge at a time in the process.

I am just making proper use of all that underutilised toner.

This guy knows what's up.

No toner on fax machines, just forever chemical paper that slowly muders their employees.

Obviously you do not know my trusty battle fax. The Brother Laser Fax 2840.

22 direct-dial and 200 speed-dial entries. Broadcast to up to 272 participants. Sexy.

Lots of companies still use Laserfax. dr2200 toner cartridge is 40 bucks for 12k pages.

> "Broadcast to up to 272 participants."

256 + 16? How do you get a number like that? Some trick with variable-width binary codes?

Not a binary encoding trick. It's just the sum of the fax machine's recipient capacities.

22 One-Touch numbers + 200 Speed-Dial numbers + 50 manually dialled numbers = 272

If you do not store a Group on any of your Brother machine's One Touch or Speed Dial locations, you can Broadcast a fax to as many as 272 different numbers.

Which comes in especially handy for keeping their SI from exfiltrating via fax to a remote location one baud at a time. You just keep all their landlines busy until the army flattens the building.

It wasn’t nukes or bombs that saved mankind from Skynet. It was a single fax machine keeping all of OpenAIs landlines busy for 25 minutes, sending hundreds of pages of hand drawn A4 sized dicks.

This guy faxes.

If you're going to that trouble you may as well create a DOI number for it so they think it's a rare book and scan and destroy it.

I think my signature will do for now.

Regards,

https://fbi.cults3d.com/uploaders/15196480/photo-file/19c974...

What are the chances that they already do this :) Well, probably not given how much memory the harnesses use. (Claude too in fairness)

I think Sam owes us money.

Also - this will probably age as well as Bill Gates and the 640kb statement, which he never stated in that way, but will forever be linked to him.

Sam RAM-boy Altman. Or Sam-RAM-man.

I am sad that it is not configured to actually email him by default

Wouldn't unused RAM infuriate him more ?

That’s the point.

lol, it’s so funny watching the cynical AI haters whip yourself into a frenzy over this. I bet 99% of you didn’t even listen to this podcast episode. His comments were so anodyne, y’all are ridiculous.

EDIT: lmao, and now people are going through my history and rage-downvoting things. Imagine being this fragile.

It is just one symptom of a push for corporate-controlled infrastructure.

A single unencrypted point of access is the dream for watching and controlling your life.

That is the centralized API in a nutshell, a single unencrypted point of access.

Hey, it's not just the cynical AI haters.

You have to factor in all the people enjoying that the shitcoin-for-your-iris-scans guy is having his time in the comedy-drubbing barrel. Don't leave us out, we've been waiting a lot longer for this.

FWIW, "anodyne" is not the word I'd reach for when describing things Altman says — I much prefer "banal".

(Not sure you can classify me as a hater, at least not in my day job context. Cynical: it's a fair cop.)

Huh. I would reach for "reptilian". Maybe that's too kind: "serpentine".

> and now people are going through my history and rage-downvoting things

Classic HN move.

Your first mistake was assuming this site wasn't always overrun with little-dicked Redditors doing Redditor things. It's just the paint's begun peeling off the walls lately.

So, the guy who built an AI company that thrives on your personal information to sell you ads and your idea of fighting the said guy is voluntarily emailing him everyday more personal information?

It doesn't actually email anyone anything, does it?

It's satire.

Is this a script-kiddy DDOS (when many users run it) of someone's email? This doesn't seem very HN.

Edit: No, the email is blank, so it's just a regular DOS, unless his email is public somewhere and everyone will fill in the same email. Still not very HN, but just bad, not malicious.

Is you determining what is and isn’t HN, simply by if it’s “many users” vs “many companies” spamming someone?

Based on your argument, I would assume YC-funded AI crawlers spamming a website with requests is “very HN” and “not DOS.”

Isn’t this kind of an illegal crowd-sourced DDoS?

We should allow it. I have around 15 computers across my home lab, desktop computer and laptop(excluding the toys like pi zeros). Letting him know that I'm not utilizing several hundred GBs of ram seems reasonable.

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