I hate caching

Oh my god, I hate caching.

Despite the objectivist attitude I usually have, I'm not saying caching is evil or that you shouldn't use it, I just hate it.

The core drawback of caching is the same as one of the drawbacks of compiling: the possibility of the source being updated and not seeing the change due to having a cached copy / not recompiling. As I'm sure every programmer knows, this can be one of the most frustrating of types of problems to have, and it's not hard to see why; it's a class of problems that involves your efforts to debug not only failing but seeming to have no effect at all, and a perceived deprivation of agency is primally frustrating.

Emotions

Obviously, the performance benefits of caching can be enormous, and again I'm not saying it isn't worth it any particular case, just that I hate caching. (Before my Gemini transition) I didn't set full cache headers on the images on this site. Nginx sets `Last-Modified` and `ETag` automatically, which isn't quite as efficient since it still has to make the request, but it provides a lot of the benefit, and without all the miserable hours spent debugging issues that are already fixed. Besides, both Firefox and Chromium usually cache them without re-requesting anyway. Fucking browsers.

It gets even worse with the complexity of modern web technologies like service workers. I've had a situation at a former job where a test deployment was running in a FreeBSD jail to mirror the production setup. Changes *usually* took effect when I did shift-ctrl-R in Chromium or Firefox. But then I started using es-dev-server for faster test cycles, run on the host, and I had this situation where on every other reload (*usually* every other; sometimes two in a row would work or not work), Chromium would load the cached version from back when that domain pointed to a jail hosting a full deployment. This was still happening when it had been weeks since I had served the normally deployed version from that domain and had been using it for es-dev-server only. I could've fixed it by clearing all browser history, but that's such an inconvenience since I didn't know of a way to clear all history for only one domain, only by type of history or time range. I never figured out exactly how this worked. Caching is just 2 damn complicated 4 me.