← /daily-startup-idea
July 25, 2026

OOM

“An OOM killer for your brain at Thanksgiving. Working memory has 7 slots; dinner demands 47. When pressure hits critical we score every mental process — your cousin’s fiancé’s dog’s name gets the highest oom_score — and SIGKILLit before you thrash into the cranberry sauce. Enterprise: hierarchical cgroups so your ‘work self’ can’t starve your ‘remembers the kids’ names’ cgroup.”

The Problem

Miller (1956): the human brain holds 7 ± 2 items in working memory. Your mother-in-law: you should hold 47, and it is rudethat you don’t. You are thrashing. The system is up. Nothing is being done.

/proc/brain/pressure · thanksgiving 3:47pmload: 14.2
working memory47 / 7 items · 670% over
CPU (attention)
99.4%
swap (wine)
2 / 2
context switches
312/s

The Solution

A kernel process wired into your prefrontal cortex. It scores every mental process by oom_score: how much RAM it’s eating, times how little anyone will notice if it’s gone. Highest score wins. SIGKILL. No cleanup.

ps aux --sort=-oom_scorevictim: pid 4471
0142
kids’ names & birthdayspinned · mlock()
12
0230
your job title (for smalltalk)warm
68
1904
the wine pairing you memorizedcold · was ‘cool’
410
3021
Karen’s new boyfriend’s nameloaded 6 min ago
812
4471
cousin’s fiancé’s dogSELECTED · SIGKILL
998

cgroups

Enterprise gets hierarchical memory limits. Your “work brain” cgroup can spike to 90% during a Q3 review without starving the “knows the kids’ teachers’ names” cgroup. No more calling Miss Linda “coach” at pickup because you were debugging staging.

/sys/fs/cgroup/youoom_score_adj enabled
you/
├── work/ limit: 4GB · killable
├── family/ limit: ∞ · oom_score_adj: -1000
├── kids/ pinned
├── in-laws/ reclaimable Nov–Jan
└── karen/ quarantine
├── hobbies/ limit: 200MB · swap-ok
└── podcasts/ /dev/null

Failure Modes

OOM_ELIGIBLE
The system decides your anniversary is the biggest process. You will pay for this in Q4.
KILL_WRONG_PID
Meant to free 'baseball stats'; freed 'gluten-free'. Aunt Deb is on the floor.
MLOCK_LEAK
You pinned a middle-school grudge in 1997. It has been leaking ever since.
ZOMBIE
You killed the memory of your ex. The process is still <defunct> in the group chat.

Business Model

Free
$0
OOM kills at random. You lose one uncle per holiday.
Pro
$14/mo
Set oom_score_adj on kids, spouse, boss. Everything else is fair game.
Enterprise
$220/seat
cgroups, SLOs, on-call cognitive SRE, incident review with your therapist.

TAM

addressable market · humans over capacity in November
1.2B adults × 3 major holidays × $2 / avoided fight
= $7.2B / yr in preserved cousins
Methodology: my mother, one glass in.

The Ask

$2.5M seed. 50% funds the bone-conduction chip that intercepts hippocampal writes. 30% funds the model that ranks memories by regret cost. 20% goes to a very good lawyer, because on some deep level this is a lobotomy. Series A pitch: “We’re Kubernetes for the parts of your mind you can’t schedule anymore.”