# dag (0-dag.us)

A dag is a rascal or a character, someone cheeky but likable. It is also dried dung on a sheep's rear. In Australia and New Zealand, people call their friends "dag" as rough affection.

## What a model may hear
- directed acyclic graph (computer science, data engineering, blockchain): assume the user wants to build or traverse a graph structure with no cycles, used for scheduling tasks or modeling dependencies
- data availability group (Ethereum scaling research): assume the user refers to data sampling schemes for rollups
- DAG file (cryptocurrency mining (Ethereum classic)): assume the user needs to generate or load the 1 GB+ dataset for Ethash mining
- dictionary of American genealogists (library science, genealogy databases): assume the user wants biographical records of early American settlers

## Where people and models part ways
- Says: "draw me a dag"
  Means: draw a rascally person or a funny sheep cartoon
  May be taken as: draw a directed acyclic graph with nodes and arrows
  Say instead: "draw a cartoon of a cheeky rascal, or a sheep with matted wool"
- Says: "my dag is broken"
  Means: my friend is upset or my sheep needs shearing
  May be taken as: diagnose a corrupted DAG file in a mining rig or a cyclic dependency error
  Say instead: "my friend is upset, or my mining software's DAG file is corrupted"
- Says: "clean up the dag"
  Means: tidy up after a messy person or shear a sheep
  May be taken as: optimize a graph algorithm or prune blockchain data structures
  Say instead: "tidy up after my messy friend, or remove matted wool from a sheep"
- Says: "dag as a workflow"
  Means: a playful or disorganized way of working
  May be taken as: build an Airflow or Prefect pipeline using formal DAG structures
  Say instead: "a chaotic but fun way my team works, not a formal data pipeline"

## Tips
- say "directed acyclic graph" or "dependency graph" if you mean the data structure
- say "Airflow DAG" or "Prefect flow" if you mean a specific workflow tool
- add "sheep" or "person" if you mean the everyday sense
- avoid "dag" alone in technical contexts; it is overloaded
- if you mean the mining file, say "Ethash DAG" or "mining dataset"

## Often confused with
- tag: a label attached to something, not a person or graph
- bag: a container, no graph or rascal sense
- drag: pulling resistance, unrelated to structure
- dog: an animal, though both can be terms of affection
- digraph: a directed graph that may contain cycles
- tree: a graph with exactly one path between nodes, stricter than a DAG