original sin?
The predator watches its prey carefully, waiting for the ideal moment to strike.
Is this what they mean by "self-documenting code"?
The better question is what if we don’t try?
This is a false dichotomy.
Not trying this particular option is not the same thing as not trying at all.
You are both arguing a straw man to try to undermine the article which it seems you have missed the point of entirely.
Fungi spread. It's part of their behavior. If a fungi is bred to specifically feed on a particular type of plastic, it will do that, outside of waste treatment facilities and outside of human control. This is not a "straw man", it is a directly relevant concern. The fungi will not know the difference between plastic pollution and plastic that is keeping infrastructure from falling apart.
something harmless like nature
How did you reach this conclusion? Nature is anything but harmless, it's a meat grinder.
PVC in a landfill is the same as PVC protecting wiring that is currently in use, or in plumbing. What exactly is going to prevent this fungus from spreading and destroying existing infrastructure?
Many of these fungi are white-rot fungi, which use ligninolytic enzymes like manganese peroxidase, lignin peroxidase, and laccase to break down lignin. However, according to research, these compounds effectively degrade specific types of plastics like polyethylene (PE) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC). There are also fungal enzymes called esterases that are capable of breaking down polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyurethane (PUR). These enzymes are derived from different kinds of fungi, and in laboratory conditions, they have been proven effective in breaking down plastics (12).
PE, PVC, and PUR are exactly the types of plastics used in electrical insulation
Did you even read the article?
"I'm a people person... I have people for that."
Ill Wind (1995), by Kevin J. Anderson
The largest oil spill in history prompts the oil company to release an untested designer virus to break down the oil spill. This designer virus is an oil eating microbe designed to consume and break down anything made from petrocarbons like oil, petrol... and plastic.
Before long the microbe has adapted to propagate through the air, emptying car tanks and destroying all plastics.
This is relatively minor. The bigger risk when running a downstream OS is that the team does not have the finances, the staff, or the broad-ecosystem visibility to support their own security research and development in any functional capacity, and there is an unavoidable delay in integrating security updates from the upstream OS.
This is a big problem. It makes running any small-team derivative OS a high-risk choice.