> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://davidnunez.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # He'll Never Leave Me - URL: https://davidnunez.com/he-will-never-leave-me/ - Published: 2026-10-29T14:21:55.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-29T14:22:13.000Z - Description: A food app pictured a bacon and egg soda as a glass of fizzy drink with an egg in it. McDonald's forecast one man's next six weeks to the penny and gave him zero chance of leaving, so he left. And a 65-year-old writer would rather not ask a machine the date of his death. - Author: David Nuñez - Tags: broadcast A cafe in Belfast sells a bacon and egg soda. If you grew up in Northern Ireland you know that's soda bread, griddled, with bacon and a fried egg on top. If you're an image model working for Just Eat, the UK food delivery app, it's [a glass of fizzy drink](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crz981p0klvgo?ref=davidnunez.com) with a fried egg and some bacon floating in it. Breakfast of champions. Just Eat (a food ordering app) has been using AI to make photos for menu items that didn't have a photo of the actual dish. A Manchester "chip muffin" (a bread roll with fries in it, also known as a chip butty) came back as muffins with French fries baked into them. A "cheese roll" came back as sushi made of cheese. ![A cheese roll, per Just Eat's AI. Image: Just Eat, via BBC News](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/66/2a66aa35-855e-4718-a6f9-5e4f6e1dc30d/content/images/2026/10/02-just-eat-cheese-roll.jpg) A cheese roll, per Just Eat's AI. Image: Just Eat, via [BBC News](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crz981p0klvgo?ref=davidnunez.com) To be honest, to this American's ears, "chip muffin" already sounds like some AI hallucination. But when somebody misspelled "plane garlic bread" and it came back shaped just like an airplane, for a few seconds my mind started imagining starting a food truck of fun AI-derived food items. ![Garlic bread, cleared for takeoff by Just Eat's AI. Image: Just Eat, via @uknewestfoods on Instagram](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/66/2a66aa35-855e-4718-a6f9-5e4f6e1dc30d/content/images/2026/10/Pasted-image-20261029091737.png) Garlic bread, cleared for takeoff by Just Eat's AI. Image: Just Eat, via @uknewestfoods on Instagram Just Eat apologized, said it was removing the bad images, and paused the tool. A spokesperson said that "as with any new technology, it isn't always quite right the first time." It rarely is. **Other machines have met you.** In August, Wired's Reece Rogers used his rights as a California resident to ask McDonald's for everything it knew about him. He'd signed up for the loyalty app years ago. McDonald's sent back [a 515-page dossier](https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/?ref=davidnunez.com) that would make even the most unscrupulous personal data exploiter blush ketchup red. It included every item of every order, every offer it sent him, every Monopoly code he'd scanned (never mind that the Monopoly game was, itself, [rigged](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/arts/television/mcmillions-hbo-explained.html?ref=davidnunez.com)). It also included a forecast. Over the next six weeks, the file said, he would visit 2.16 times and spend an average of $13.49 a visit, for a total of $29.15\. His top predicted product: a large Diet Coke. Under "customer attrition likelihood," the odds he'd stop being a customer, McDonald's had written zero. Zero chance he would ever break up with McDonald's. The machine will commit to two and sixteen hundredths of a visit, a level of precision I associate with moon landings, and it has him never, ever leaving. [Dr. Lorrie Cranor](https://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/privacy-cert/people/faculty-bios/cranor-lorrie.html?ref=davidnunez.com), a privacy professor at Carnegie Mellon who read the file, told Wired, "This guy eats a lot of McDonald's," and also that the 515 pages are "not in a format that people will readily understand." This is true of most love letters. The file was so long that Rogers had an AI read it for him and pull out the numbers, then checked them by hand. A machine reading a machine's guesses about a man. Even eHarmony makes you fill out a questionnaire, [though psychologists say the matching itself has never been shown to work](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/grading-the-online-dating-industry.html?ref=davidnunez.com). McDonald's wrote 515 pages without asking him a single question. So he deleted his data and gave up his McDonald's habit, in his words, "just to prove the algorithm wrong." "He'll never leave me" meet "It takes me for granted." What algorithm could have predicted a messy, vengeful breakup with a fast food restaurant? Love hath no fury like a reporter scorned. I have the Whataburger app, but Whataburger doesn't exist in Boston (where people laughingly refer to Shake Shack and Five Guys as "food." Yes, them's fightin' words. I say this as somebody born and raised in Texas and proud owner of Whataburger socks. Combo #5, all day long, baby!) However, I forget to use my Whataburger app even when I'm in Texas. So it lingers on my phone as a ghost of a bacon cheeseburger that rarely comes. I don't know if Whataburger realizes it's always on my agenda when I visit my folks in Austin. I wonder what Whataburger thinks of our long-distance relationship? ![The app that knows I'll be back, eventually. Image: Whataburger](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/66/2a66aa35-855e-4718-a6f9-5e4f6e1dc30d/content/images/2026/10/Pasted-image-20261029095327.png) The app that knows I'll be back, eventually. Image: Whataburger As NextDraft points out, [the McDonald's dossier is the (ahem) palatable version](https://managingeditor.substack.com/p/showing-the-receipts) of all this. The shopping agents on the way from Meta, Google and OpenAI want your contacts, your calendar and your credit cards so they can buy things for you. McDonald's had to develop an understanding of you from your many meals together. The upcoming agents will just read your personal journal, email, and health data to predict your next drive-through order. The future is here and it's Happy Meals proactively ordered to your front door, delivered by drones and fed to us by robots. Happy Meal. Happy? I'll take fries with that. **Some guesses you can decline.** Joel Achenbach turned 65 this year, and in The Atlantic he describes the people around him wanting to know [how long he plans to live](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/ai-longevity-death-questions/689102/?ref=davidnunez.com). Years ago his financial adviser drew up a plan with him dying at 80\. This summer he asked to live a little longer [on a spreadsheet](https://davidnunez.com/freediving-into-a-spreadsheet/). His lawyer handed him end-of-life directives with three scenarios that overlap, he notes, like a Venn diagram. His doctor ordered new tests and filled his patient portal with numbers. So he pasted the numbers into Claude, which told him his echocardiogram shows "mild, common, age-related changes," so he felt reassured. But then: > You definitely don’t want to ask a question for which you are not prepared to accept the answer. Stupidly, I asked Claude whether a 65-year-old is still “middle-aged.” Nope! Guessing how long people will last is an old business. In 1692 the English crown sold life annuities at one price for everyone, which made them a bargain if you were ten and a rip-off if you were seventy. The next year Edmond Halley built a table of who dies at what age and showed how to price by age. Yes, this is the same Halley as the comet that passes Earth every 75 years, around the same as an average human lifespan. So most of us will see it only once. As [one machine learning textbook](https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.05242?ref=davidnunez.com) puts it, "Halley had stumbled upon the fact that prediction requires no physics." Three centuries later the Social Security Administration's calculator [asks only two things](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/population/longevity.html?ref=davidnunez.com), your sex and your birth date. It told Achenbach he'd make it to 84.5, which he worked out to around July 2045. Researchers in Denmark trained a model called [life2vec](https://life2vec.dk/?ref=davidnunez.com) on the records of six million people, then tested it on a group of 35-to-65-year-olds where half had died within four years and half hadn't. Asked which was which, it was right 78.8 percent of the time. A coin flip gets it right 50 percent of the time. The researchers say it [does not predict the day you'll die](https://life2vec.dk/?ref=davidnunez.com), that the model isn't online at all, and that the "life2vec death calculator" sites you can find are fakes. This month a study in The Lancet Digital Health described a model that estimates a cancer patient's survival from [one photograph of their face](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landig.2026.101056?ref=davidnunez.com). Achenbach could paste the whole patient portal into Claude and ask for the date. He won't. He invokes an old idea in medicine, the right not to know, and says he'd like "to be oblivious about the date of my oblivion." A fuzzy future, he argues, should be a human right. In Europe it has been, on paper, since 1997\. The Oviedo Convention says that if you don't want to know what's in your health file, "[the wishes of individuals not to be so informed shall be observed](https://www.jus.uio.no/english/services/library/treaties/03/3-04/oviedo.html?ref=davidnunez.com)." Nobody told the patient portal. There has been a test for Huntington's disease since the 1990s, and in the UK [more than 80 percent](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5027682?ref=davidnunez.com) of the people at risk have never taken it. I could have made some commentary about lifespan predictions as a function of fast food consumption, but McDonald's already lost a customer. Then again, they have the best French fries. I attended birthday parties in McDonald's playscapes in the 80s, with orange drinks and Happy Meals that came in actual boxes with toys. Those were good times. They got me already without the app. / David **Listening:** ["You Oughta Know,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPcyTyilmYY&ref=davidnunez.com) Alanis Morissette, 1995\. A breakup song for McDonald's. **Watching:** [An AI-generated drive-through order for a ridiculously large box of fries](https://www.tiktok.com/@samudiosteve/video/7621316079448575263?ref=davidnunez.com).