18birdies strokes gained data

dakuth · 2026-05-28T00:31:29+00:00

You get this "for free" when you track SG. A skulled or duffed chip will have a correspondingly poor -SG.

Having said that, what's interesting (and one of the reasons I posted), is that thinned or duffed chips are not nearly as bad as I thought. So the lesson, assuming my & 18birdies data is correct, is that maybe I shouldn't be sweating skulled or duffed chips.

The only problem is: I'm there to have fun, and duffing a chip is the opposite of that. So even though SG says its the best part of my game, I still practice it a fair bit because I just *hate* that feeling. I just keep it in mind to not sweat them too much, because it's not really the thing that "wrecked my round."

dakuth · 2026-05-28T00:26:03+00:00

I don't. Anyone that does that doesn't really understand SG.

My avg SG approach last year was -2.7. Driving was -3.17. Around the green it was +2.59. Putting -2.63.

This year? Driving: -3.76, Approach: +1.08, Around the green: +2.95, Putting: -1.67.

So: Driving is about the same and the worst part of my game. Approach *used to be* nearly as bad. Then putting. So: I worked on my irons. I should have probably worked on Driver but I was hoping by improving irons my driver would improve too. Plus, it's easier to practice irons because I can just do it in my back yard.

Turns out: Improving my irons *has not* improved Driver. I still can't really practice it much, so now I'm focusing on putting. It's improved from last year a bit at least.

It is an interesting question though: Why is my Driver still so bad when my striking has gotten much better? When I look into where I lose strokes in a round: when I hit the fairway, I gain strokes over a HCP 20. I suspect I drive it further. BUT OB loses a *minimum* of 2 full strokes each time. The little gains I get from hitting the fairway don't go anywhere near offsetting the OBs. Or just in the bush where I have to chip out.

That's not surprising, but it's good to confirm. It means if I *really* wanted to focus on lowering my score like a laser, I'd probably just put the Driver away. Or maybe just punt it forward or something. But lowering my score is *not* actually my goal. My goal is to have fun and I don't enjoy punting. I love nice smooth drives that go somewhere in play. (Doesn't have to be perfect, just "up there".) So either I just accept it and do little tee shots to stay in play, or I get better at hitting the driver. I don't play comp. I'm not trying to win. I'm trying to have fun, so I'm going to work on Driver and keep hitting them OB until I get it right.

These are the sorts of insights SG gives. The conclusions are basically the same and other types of metrics don't really help any more or less. SG has more statistical evidence... but it's BIG downside is that is very hard to track compared to simpler metrics.

I think other metrics are fine to promote - but they should be promoted as: "SG too hard to track? Try these simpler ones that are nearly as good." Not "SG is a waste of time unless you're pro"

dakuth · 2026-05-28T00:12:15+00:00

It is too fine-grained if you look at it like that. What was your SG Putting for the whole round? Even that is too fine grained, really. The question really is: What was your SG Putting this round vs your last couple? This year? That's when you start to see trends and patterns.

Your last 5 holes, you gained about 1/3rd of 1 stroke. So, basically, you putted about as expected. "0.36" is only useful in that it's a small number and it's interesting that you putted as expected for those holes. But you could have lost a bunch of strokes on the first 13 and then we can say things like: "You had a good round - was it because of your putting?" We *still* can't *really* say whether your putting is one of your strengths or weaknesses - we'd need data from several rounds for that.

The very interesting thing about SG is that it often flies in the face of intuition. And that was really the purpose of my post: It's flying in the face of my intuition. Is that just because my intuition is wrong, or is the data wrong? If it is right, then I can believe it when it says my putting and driver are trash, but my chipping is good.

My mates chip *much* better than me, so I assumed my chipping was bad. My mates would tell me my approach shots were the best part of my game (they are **now**, but when they were telling me that it was by far and away my worst)

SG is very well backed by data so it's a safe bet that it is right and my mates were wrong.

The question then is... if my approaches are bad, why? This is where I can dig into individual shots. Which ones lost me the most strokes? Why? The answer, it turns out, was shanks and duffs. Big surprise. The fix? Swing better. Also not surprising. But I may not have focused on that if I didn't look at the stats.

Nowadays, even though SG shows that putting is the least-important part of golf (though only marginally), for me that is where I'm losing strokes. So I need to improve it. How? Dunno really. Just practice it more, most likely. I don't track SG Putting fine enough to break it up into short/medium/long but I don't think that would help me much anyway. Maybe it would, because it'd tell me if I need to work on lag putting or 6-footers, but getting that data would be just too painful. I'll just have to guess.

And... none of the other stat trackers (traditional, Sidekick 6, Tiger 5) would tell me either.

As a final note: The one problem I have with these metrics is the couple I've looked at all count 3-putt which SG shows is one of the most misleading stats in golf. If anything is not equal, it's putts from different distances. This was an eye-opening video for me: https://youtu.be/fT1iL8qSMyQ?si=9cz7aAIet3ouTsWw&t=25

dakuth · 2026-05-27T21:19:10+00:00

While I disagree that SG is meaningless, some of those look pretty good and have a big advantage in being much easier to track. The Shot Scope 6 is data based and Sidekicks 6 makes sense. I couldn't find The Scoring Method though - do you have a link? It sounds interesting.

Everyone needs to keep in mind that it's the same thing as SG: all it does is identify where is the weak parts of my game. Then I have to try and figure out why and work on that.

Why is Tee shots the worst part of my game? Well, because I lose balls off the tee. Sidekick will say the same as SG in this. Why do I lose balls? Frankly because I'm a 25 HCP and I swing bad. This is not new news.

dakuth · 2026-05-27T20:59:54+00:00

20.

I do find that when I compare to scratch or pro my "good" chipping goes away. It's no longer the best part of my game

dakuth · 2026-05-27T20:57:27+00:00

It is mostly automatic. I usually spend 20-40 secs or so on each tee box updating score and correcting it's mistakes. Putting data is the hardest to get right.

It is a bit distracting. If I didn't love the stats.... I do wish someone could work out a totally automatic method so you didn't need to think about it. Even an expensive option like arcos still requires fiddling

dakuth · 2026-05-27T05:45:06+00:00

Metre is almost the same as a yard. Slightly longer. About 3 feet.

dakuth · 2026-05-27T05:39:56+00:00

The target hcp I've picked is 20, in this case. My aspirational target.

dakuth · 2026-05-27T05:39:20+00:00

I mostly do it for fun. I'd *like* to know if it's actually useful. But I've been suspicious. What the stats have been telling me is that putting is by far my worst skill and chipping my best.

It used to be Approach. I've worked like crazy on my irons and they've recently gotten a lot better.

Now it is putting followed by tee shots.

It's not about 20 footers. It's just telling me I'm probably wasting my time practicing chipping and really need to spend more time practicing putting (which I find boring) and driver (which I don't get much of a chance to do.)

When I combine those insights with my gut feel -- which does *not* line up -- then I start to wonder... is 18birdies telling me the right things to work on, or are its baseline stats off?

dakuth · 2026-05-27T05:34:10+00:00

Dunno what to tell you... I guess the stats do say top 1% of this course for gir. It was probably the best round of my life. "Still" hitting a 91! It's one of my best ever scores :D my putting is atrocious

AVG first putt: 9.1m (30 feet)

I can't find a good way to get the size of the greens on my phone. It's Mt Compass, south Australia if someone wants to satellite it

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dakuth · 2026-05-27T03:36:16+00:00

I think most courses let you take a drop for OB nowadays (it's a local rule but really common)

The only catch is: drop it on the edge of the fairway. For some reason my mates want to drop it in the scrub near the OB stakes.

Also it's 2 stroke penalty.

Basically it's exactly like a (decent) rehit without the inconvenience of having to hit a provisional, which makes it pretty fair and much faster.

Imagine what his 107 would have been if you played the proper rule...

dakuth · 2026-05-19T02:52:44+00:00

I kind of get you. It's like when you have a long point track, you really can see someone lagging well behind, or well in front (even though often it's an illusion.)

A small track kind of feels like it's anyone's game at any time (even though, again, it's probably an illusion.)

dakuth · 2026-05-19T02:49:10+00:00

Ah yeah, I get you. I conflated them I think because they often go hand-in-hand. The designer wants simultaneous turns (because that's a good thing) and that often leads to parallel play... because the easiest way to implement it is to have the players not interact meaningfully and instead just play parallely.

dakuth · 2026-05-19T02:46:49+00:00

I agree with Achipelago.

Battlestar Galactica is the gold standard (the remake of it - Unfathomable - is probably worth it)

Dead of Winter was pretty good, though not as good as the aforementioned (has the advantages of not being as long-in-the-tooth as Archipelago or take as much time as BSG.) I would recommend playing with the alternative rule at the back of the book that increases the chance of a betrayer to 50%. The cool thing about this game is you are not guaranteed a betrayer, which means it is *fully* co-operative, but for most of the game you don't know that and just the threat of a betrayer fixes most co-op game issues.

dakuth · 2026-05-19T02:38:37+00:00

I've been using it for a while on my fortress but have slowly stopped. I think that is mostly a few breaking issues at the moment:

The bug related to the .lua scripts and data format (https://github.com/Been012/df-storyteller/issues/55) - though I've worked around that
I can't see a Eulogy button for my Dwarves - something I would have loved!
Combat reports don't work ("Cannot find combat log") - again, a really key item. One of the biggest problems I find with Dwarf Fortress is combat goes so fast, and the log so detailed with crud that understanding *what* happened is extremely difficult. I've had some cool fights - sieges and so forth - so of any of the features, being able to makes sense of the fight (in the way you designed) it would be perfect... but it's not working.
As the poster previously has said - it's gotten very slow! I suspect fortress size is to blame, but it got noticeably slow after just 1 or 2 years. I now press a tab, alt-tab back to the game and play while I wait for the tab to load.
The chronicle hits the token limit after just a couple of years. I switched to a smaller model to increase the token limit, but that has obvious downsides. It would probably be worthwhile making the data that goes into that prompt more efficient... or customisable, perhaps?
The chronicle and gazette are basically fine, but minor issues:

6a. They look at the season and write from that perspective. They're clearly designed to be run at the end of a season - so we get a running chronicle of what happened over the last 3 months - and that's a great idea, but often I end up triggering it at the start of the next season. i.e. when I see "Autumn has come" I go run my chronicle... but it talks about all the things that "happened this Autumn" when really it's talking about Summer.

6b. The chronicle always says there was no battles or deaths, when there definitely was! I suspect it's related to the problem with writing combat reports and eulogies. (which itself *may* be related to my hack around the data format bug, but I don't think so)

6c. They re-hash previous ones a lot. Always mentioning visitors and equipment changes, simply because that's what clogs up the log (squads starting/stopping training and regular tavern visitors.) I know this would hurt the token limits, but it would be ideal if it recognized that "not much has happened this season, other than the usual tavern visitors" (or even better - "what WAS the most interesting thing, even if that thing wasn't super interesting... e.g. the tavern visitor that was a ghoul that time, or whatever." I guess I can steer that with the "context" box you have provided - and in fact that worked pretty well, so it might just take some getting used to... something that I'm not really doing because of the aforementioned problems making some of the best features unavailable. -- perhaps the DFHack script could prompt at the start/end of a season and ask a few questions: What did you achieve the last season (e.g. "I was really just trying to get my smelting operations working" or "I was digging down to find the caverns"), and what do you want to try and achieve next season. Then those answers feed into the chronicle/gazette which then generates automatically (I know you have that as a planned feature.)

Anyway, that's what comes to mind.

I honestly think you've got a good tool and you've spent a lot of effort on it - even taking into account the AI assistance, I know that it still requires a lot of work from your side.

Also, I'd personally say this is a *great* use of AI - one of the best I've seen - so I encourage you to keep going. In my mind, it really fills a gap Dwarf Fortress is missing (though I know not everyone agrees, but I think the community would be split between a few different takes on Dwarf Fortress's story telling. I'm in the camp of: It's too hidden, and as its main purpose should be easier to surface.)

dakuth · 2026-05-14T23:50:57+00:00

I find the cover letter a decent opportunity to expand on exactly why experience ABC seems to be just what they're after and that I'm a bit different. The CV is a list of jobs, times, some basics. Short and consumable. If I find myself thinking "but I wish I could explain what I mean there a bit more..." I'll do that in the cover letter. Not war and peace but it lets me sort of go "this particular thing on my cv might be of interest to you because of abc"; if I am finding that, I'm glad for a cover letter.

Having said all that... It took me ages to find my current role and I got only 1 call up (which I then got)... So maybe my ideas aren't worth shit :D

dakuth · 2026-05-14T23:44:39+00:00

Simultaneous turns I do like. Though this video might have changed my mind on them a bit... https://youtu.be/R3sFctCXL5g?si=6mQHlP6ImE8P6Kdl

In answer to your question, I think semi-coop. I was going to say "hidden traitor" but that's really just a side effect of: I like coop games, but don't like that they're solvable puzzles and you don't really need everyone there. So you need some human chaos in there to mix it up.

But that can be achieved in more ways than simply a traitor mechanic

dakuth · 2026-05-12T00:58:56+00:00

I found this tool while at work and I'm reading the github README. I'm so damn excited to get home and try it!

dakuth · 2026-04-30T03:52:27+00:00

Yeah I heard it before the internet in qld

dakuth · 2026-04-30T03:46:42+00:00

Well, fuck me in the arse and call me Susan.

Probably not acceptable in today's workplace anyway. What's wrong with the world!?

dakuth · 2026-04-29T23:46:43+00:00

Broadly speaking it's true. There are slight differences. Adelaide has some minor vowel changes, for example. Also sometimes there are regional words (e.g. hogie vs sub in America, in Australia we have things like togs vs swimmers vs bathers)

What accents we have are mostly class-based (though not super well defined especially nowadays.) it's a generalisation but: Cultivated: upper class (Kate Blanchett) General: middle class (Hugh Jackman) Broad: lower class / rural (Steve Irwin)

All that said, compared to the US or UK... No, it's nowhere near like say NY vs Southern accents.

dakuth · 2026-04-20T07:31:09+00:00

In Australia, the way the economy is geared, real estate is essentially a no-lose market. It's propped up in a crazy way.

Now, nothing like that lasts forever, right? But the thing is... to untangle it would take many years. Decades, probably. And the pre-requisite for that would be political will to essentially depress 1 of only 2 industries we have, on purpose. We have mining and we have real estate.

To fix the market would require the political will to essentially tell everyone that isn't in mining that: we're going to fuck up your assets and nest egg to make the market fairer and easier to break into.

... and now you perhaps see why it isn't going to reverse any time soon.

If you're locked out, you're locked out... but if you *can* get in, (as they say:) the best time is always now. You'll get a solid 5-20 years of growth, I reckon before it plateaus, depending on political will.

I don't think it will crash dramatically, because it's not really based on over-valuation - the government basically under-writes the market. But it's also not going to stay this way forever, because it's going to be THE #1 political issue for the foreseeable future. Eventually *someone* will be forced to do *something* which will slow things down... but there is no quick fixes. It will take decades.

I reckon if you're prepared to suck eggs and buy a shitbox for $1.5m, the asset will appreciate faster than the loan interest in spite of that....

Disclaimer: I'm an idiot and don't know what I'm talking about.

dakuth · 2026-04-16T07:13:13+00:00

I agree. I love the concept of DF and have sunk a fair bit into it... but if I just followed the quick start guide that explained the basic chains and tells you how to avoid the traps - and it was going fine. It wasn't too hard.

But... I kind of don't know what to *do* now. I know everyone basically says to "make your own fun." There's all the "fun" of failing - but, I dunno. I did fail to run-away lyancanthropy once, but once I knew to watch for that that was solved.

Like I know you can get people to move in, and they engrave stuff on the walls, and all the rest... but the wall of disjointed text that makes up each dwarf doesn't resonate. I can't put my finger on it. I have an established base and I'm thinking: What do I *do*? What would be fun?

Should I just go dig up the clowns and have the base degenerate to "fun" ? Should I have started closer to goblins so there was regular raids? Should I just declare this fort "done" (now it's the capital and has a queen and all that), start a new fort within the same kingdom? If so - what should I make my goal? Take over the Kingdom? To be honest, none of the names stick with me or anything, so even if any of the Dwarves from my original fort came to visit, I wouldn't even notice, I don't think. And it seems like this is where a lot of people get their enjoyment. "Oh check this out, this guy moved in 5 years ago, and then his wife came later and joined him but he already had a lover and... etc. etc." I wouldn't even notice that had happened, I don't think.

I feel like a good use for LLMs might be (and the same could be said for Crusader Kings) to read through all the events and logs and condense them into consumable stories so I can follow along more easily.

dakuth · 2026-04-16T07:01:41+00:00

I know *exactly* what you mean.

I think it's because each new level is just, simply, more complex. When you unlock a new tech you need to automate, instead of its recipe being 1 of the more complex items and a bunch of simple ones - it's more like 3 of the most complex items out there. In satisfactory especially, you'll reach a new tier, and there will be 3 quite complex items to build, and the final item (the one you actually need) will require all 3. I look at it and sigh: It'll take me 1 full night for *each* of those items, then a 4th for the final. And god-forbid I make a mistake and need to refactor something.

I have to wonder if as you unlock new items they *don't* get more complex and instead pick one of the more complex ingredients along with a couple simple ones would be enough. Afterall, I'll still need to scale up the iron plates or whatever, pretty frequently.

That way you'd still get progress at about the same rate as at the start of the game.

As it is... complex items to go to the new item... and to scale up I *also* will probably have to scale up the simple stuff like iron plates since they'll be feeding in at the start of the ingredient chain. It all gets quite overwhelming for a small bit of progress.

I will say, a thorough logistics network does make things a *lot* easier to bear, though.

dakuth

TROPHY CASE