Personally, I use twitter as a concise newsfeed of tech, infosec, and events by following people I'm interested in (eg thegrugq, landley, and briankrebs). The 144 character limit means I get a snippet of things, and (if there's a link) I can choose if I want more info. I even get a smattering of humor by following parody/humor accounts (eg BobRossGameDev, BoredElonMusk, and CommitStrip).
Sure, just like any other social media site, there's shitty parts. That's what happens when you allow the masses to generate content. But you know what's awesome about Twitter? You only see stuff from accounts that you follow. You can mute/block accounts that you never want to see. The content is 100% up to you...dislike a content type or source, and you can easily remove it from your feed.
I've used Twitter heavily for the past three years. I'd gladly pay a low ($1-$5) monthly amount to use it, especially if paying would remove stuff like promoted tweets (which I currently kill with an adblocker).
I agree, tweeting about buying socks is pointless, just like a facebook status update about buying socks is pointless, or a tumblr post about buying socks is pointless. The medium of communication has zero to do with the pointlessness of any given content.
The vast majority of the info I get from Twitter is more along the lines of "High-severity bug in OpenSSL allows attackers to decrypt HTTPS traffic --> link" and "Titan Souls is great example of picking small target audience and making a perfect experience for them. Great example for new devs." than it is about who is taking a shit or buying undergarments.
Twitter may not have any value for you, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
Why did I bother? Because facts should be sourced.
Why did I bring these particular facts in the first place? Because I was pointing out that anyone can say "This particular number is bigger than the number you're talking about" (as you did with the IRA deaths vs Islamic terrorists comment)...but that doesn't necessarily make it relevant. I even said as much in my comment.
Suicides aren't necessarily directly related to terrorism related deaths, although they do share the rather significant similar factor of death.
In this case, I'm also obliquely making the point that depression and suicide are a significantly bigger problem than terrorism (if a US citizen dies, they've got a 0.00061% chance it's from terrorism...and a 1.58% chance it's from suicide), and we in America are kinda idiots to ignore this.
Regardless of the motives of the kid who took apart the clock, regardless of whether or not it was random chance or a precisely calculated media blitz by someone trying to grab the spotlight...the fact remains that a kid got arrested because he had a box full of wires that may or may not have looked like a thing that actually kills or injurs less than 0.00071% of all humans, worldwide...and meanwhile, we've got depressed kids (and adults!) in every single school in our nation.
tl;dr version: We're severely overreacting to terrorism (especially in schools), and severely under-reacting to other causes of death.
And depression invoked suicides have killed more people than both put together. Did you have a point, or were you just spouting Islamophobia and random "Number A is larger than Number B"?
17,891 deaths by terror attack in 2013.
41,149 deaths by suicide in 2013 (in the US).
Note that those figures for terror attacks may be just for the US, or they may be worldwide...I'm not bothering to check, because if they're just for the US, it means suicides outnumber terror attacks 2 to 1, and if it's NOT just for the US...it's a much worse ratio.
But those poweres were pretty beefed up once he came back. Teleporting? Flight? Able to ignore pain from multiple open wounds? Sounds like someone managed to get their phylactery stashed before the Romans found them...
If you create an online community, then destroy it, you're an asshole. Simple as that.
Actually, it's not as simple as that. If you're being an ass online, and doing in a way that didn't used to be against the rules, but then the rules changed, and they retroactively cleaned up the vitriol you were spewing, that doesn't make you less of an ass, or the people who wrote the rules "assholes". Sometimes, it just means that there's a lot of toxic asshats, and you were lower on their list of "toxic stuff to clean up" than something else.
Simply put, just because a bunch of toxic people have a community doesn't mean they're any less toxic.
A site that used to allow X, but now prohibits X, doesn't make you less free to express your own special flavor of X. You're still free to say it. Or type it. "Freedom" doesn't mean "guaranteed platform".
Keep in mind, I have concerns about how Reddit is managing their site. "Making it less easy for toxic nincompoops to spew vitriol" isn't one of the things I have concerns about.
I mainly use the direwolf20 pack...I also used to play the TolkenCraft pack
Hmm...default configs for those packs on a system with your specs should have it running as smooth as butter.
As for my world age, it was generated this year
Sounds like a halfway decent world, but nothing that should be killing your computer. AE shouldn't be a problem.
upon generating a new world I see similar results
Now, *this* is abnormal. Once the world loads (eg you have a charactor ingame, you're not looking at the "generating world" screen anymore) there will be a few seconds of lag as chunks get generated at the edge of the load distance. This should disappear within the first 20-30 seconds max, for me it's normally less than 5.
Back in the 1.2.5 days and Tekkit, I recall seeing insane FPS rates
I used to get over 1k FPS when I'd turn down the view distance to the minimum. Since then, the Mojang team has worked to equalize some things...I think by default they cap it at 75FPS, but it's much less likely to drop down into the teens...at least in theory.
NO, of course I don't have any Java clues...I can't really be expected to customize my Java settings...So I naturally left everything default
I made a couple of assumptions here. They were possibly incorrect, and if so, I owe you an apology for being that abrupt. You stated that you were allocating 6+ gb of RAM to the game, so I assumed you'd messed with the defaults. I have a special dislike for people who mess with the defaults without educating themselves about what those defaults actually mean.
As a sidenote, if you're running with the defaults, how are you setting 6+ gb of RAM? Genuinely confused, wondering if we're saying different things here, as "changing the RAM" is part of the configs...
64 bit Java JRE
This...might actually be something to check on. Minecraft for Windows comes with its own internally packaged version of Java. Modded Minecraft doesn't use this though, and you need Java 7. It might be worth it to remove Java completely, then re-install just the latest Java 7 64 bit version using the full installer from the Oracle download page.
(snip rant about FUD)
I said FUD is an option. If I had a buck for every time someone has done similar, with intent of spreading disinformation about a specific Minecraft mod or Minecraft itself, I could replace my desktop with a really really shiny one. I said that I saw two options, one of which involved you spreading misinformation. In hindsight, probably not my best closing point.
not that I'm trying to force you to help me
No need for that, I'm actually genuinely interested in helping. With a rig like what you've described, you should be able to run pretty much any modpack in buttery smooth FPS with max graphics settings.
I don't thing the slashdot comments section is the best way to get you some help. The easiest thing for me would be if you hopped on EsperNet IRC and poked me in the #minechem channel. If you're not IRC savvy, I have a web-based IRC interface on my website that should work. If IRC isn't an option, I'm also on Twitter, the Minecraft Forums, and CurseForge as this same username, you could drop me a private message and we can see if this can be sorted.
I also see an example much better suited to a game like Minecraft...Mathematics.
Minecraft lends itself well to maths, science, logic, and "community" type skills, eg people management or planning.
It is a complete and utter waste of school time.
Eh, that's your opinion. I have a different one. I've seen Minecraft used pretty effectively. I get that you haven't seen that. I believe that a case can be made for using Minecraft in specific, interesting, engaging ways in a classroom (eg Computercraft for a programming 101 class), but that it's also not easily applicable to all subjects.
I've got to call bullshit on this.
Disclaimer, I'm a part time Minecraft mod developer. My understanding of this topic may have been unfairly tainted with unpalatable things like experience and and actual test cases.
modded minecraft takes 6+ gigs of ram to load in 15 minutes
I was able to load up the Monster modpack from Feed the Beast in about 6 minutes...and that included download the launcher, setting up authentication, and letting the launcher download all the mod files. Second run took 57 seconds to get to the main game screen.
I'm running with the default 2gb of RAM. Per the wiki, FTB Monster "currently also holds the record of being the overall largest Feed The Beast modpack, with over 200 mods included."
To put that in context, most "lite" modpacks end up with around 40-60 mods, and a "middle of the road" modpack has 100-150ish mods.
When running a "test" modpack that I've put together, it loads up in about 20-30 seconds, depending on how much debugging stuff I've enabled.
after that gives you mainly 1 frame every 3 seconds lasting up to a half a minute, with spurts of 10 frames a second for a couple seconds
If you've been playing for hundreds of hours, and have fully automated the processing, assembly, sorting, and storage of every block, item, and resource in the game, I'm guessing there will be parts of your game world that are so computationally heavy that it'll bring almost any computer to its knees. Granted, I've never seen this, and I ran a top 5 server back when Tekkit was the end-all and be-all of Minecraft Modpacks (there have been some huge performance enhancements since then), but I'm willing to admit that this could happen, however...citation needed on this.
how about vanella minecraft?
Well, how about it? Loading up the currently-latest-version of 1.8.7 takes a whopping 6.45 seconds to load, and runs at a nice stable 75 FPS without any tweaking of the video settings.
with the occasional one second lock up every few minutes
...you have no clue how java garbage collection works, do you. Please go educate yourself and then fix your settings. Better yet, just re-create the default profile, because it's already optimized for most use cases. The default "profile" that Minecraft runs under gives you 1gb of RAM, which is about perfect.
the joke has become "But can it run modded minecraft?"
Not really. Minecraft does have some constraints, namely the lack of a multithreaded server and heavy dependence on your CPU, but it's nowhere near "the joke" that you'd like to present it as.
on an i7-5820k and Nvidia GTX 970 with 32GB ram
All the tests I did were on a laptop running an i7-4870HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz with 16gb of RAM. Fairly beefy as far as a laptop goes, but nowhere near the specs dissy is claiming. If I'm desperate (or on a long airplane trip) I can get modded Minecraft running on my netbook, which is running a 1.6ghz atom processor and rocking 1gb of RAM. It's not pretty, but it'll give me 15ish FPS.
My only conclusions are that you're either you're doing it (somehow) very, very wrong...or you're intentionally spreading FUD.
Oh good, we agree. It's a good thing you actually read up on the subject and were able to provide an informed opinion. Ham-fisted force-feeding of knowledge is bad, and we need people building teaching tools that encourage rather than prod, and reward interest rather than punish boredom or disinterest.
If a game is built around mechanics that kids already love, and uses them to illustrate and expand on a balanced curriculum, you end up with kids excited about learning. You're free to disagree, but I've got a hundred thousand downloads that says I know what I'm talking about.
I responded to the comment scoffing at teachers, saying that "they're certainly not designing lessons, teaching classes, or exploring subjects". If you look up MinecraftEdu, lo and behold, they're doing exactly that.
Lots of valid points here. And I agree with you on...some of them. Others, not so much.
This is either you associating with the wrong 'professional programmers' or you running into folks graduating from non-ACM accredited schools, or you mistaking information systems or information technology for computer science.
It actually has more to do with the sheer numbers of kids that play Minecraft. I totaled the statistics for one of the servers I manage...3176 unique players in a month of uptime. Obviously, not all of them are going to be super interested in the programming/logic side of Minecraft, but there's very few days where I don't have at least one or two people discussing relatively in-depth programming questions via ingame chat.
I see a LOT of inspiration and ambition, and a LOT of latent talent, and they will 'get there'.. but they're not there yet as far as *professional* code goes.
Oh, obviously. What Minecraft does is give kids an easily accessible programming interface with immediate, "real world" applications. It fosters that interest, the inspiration, and gives it an outlet while it matures. Minecraft offers a complexity level for any level of programmer.
At my level, I'd be using a central server to manage resource gathering with state-saving, set up just-in-time resource delivery to crafting systems, or create a centrally managed RFID identification network. At the entry level, someone else can dig a hole or place blocks. And everywhere in between, from setting up sorting systems to automating base defences...underneath it all, it's providing a constructive outlet for an interest that might someday become a career in computer programming.
My point: a lot of self-taught programmers, unless they've had formal education in another technical field, are going to have holes upon holes in their background, and no amount of Mindcraft API bs is going to rectify that.
I agree with your premise here, that enthusiasm and self-teaching needs to be complemented by structured learning of the stuff that the learner doesn't know they need to know. Personally, I think the structure of "formal education" has shifted dramatically since you were in school, and resources like Codecademy, Udacity, Coursera, and Khan Academy are allowing kids to self-learn in ways that rivals, if not exceeds the traditional classroom-based formal education, but that's a completely different conversation.
As a sidenote, the bit about "Mindcraft API bs" is just...unnecessary. Most tools have their place. Minecraft is a very effective tool at fostering inspiration and talent into learning and understanding. Few ten year olds care about datatypes, objects, or the concept of a client/server architecture, but if you put those things into the context of making a mod for Minecraft, a solid percentage of them now care *a lot*. In my mind...that's a good thing.
Every 'real' software engineer I've run into has s switch in their thinking a couple years in at which point decision logic is not even second nature, but subconscious. You act like it's a skill, at the mature engineering level it's part of the autonomic nervous system of a computer scientist who writes software for a living.
That "subconcious level" understanding of programming has to start somewhere. By definition, a skill is the ability to do something well. To do something well, you have to start out by doing something poorly.
Obviously, someone in highschool encountering decision logic for the first time and going nuts with it in a virtual world isn't going to be working on the same level as a professional with years of experience under their belt. But given two applicants for an entry level position, one of whom has a degree, and the other has a degree and six or so years of "hobby programming" under their belt...guess which one I'm going to hire?
Slashdot Mirror
...you know that we have uMatrix on Chrome too, right?
Personally, I use twitter as a concise newsfeed of tech, infosec, and events by following people I'm interested in (eg thegrugq, landley, and briankrebs). The 144 character limit means I get a snippet of things, and (if there's a link) I can choose if I want more info. I even get a smattering of humor by following parody/humor accounts (eg BobRossGameDev, BoredElonMusk, and CommitStrip).
Sure, just like any other social media site, there's shitty parts. That's what happens when you allow the masses to generate content. But you know what's awesome about Twitter? You only see stuff from accounts that you follow. You can mute/block accounts that you never want to see. The content is 100% up to you...dislike a content type or source, and you can easily remove it from your feed.
I've used Twitter heavily for the past three years. I'd gladly pay a low ($1-$5) monthly amount to use it, especially if paying would remove stuff like promoted tweets (which I currently kill with an adblocker).
I agree, tweeting about buying socks is pointless, just like a facebook status update about buying socks is pointless, or a tumblr post about buying socks is pointless. The medium of communication has zero to do with the pointlessness of any given content.
The vast majority of the info I get from Twitter is more along the lines of "High-severity bug in OpenSSL allows attackers to decrypt HTTPS traffic --> link" and "Titan Souls is great example of picking small target audience and making a perfect experience for them. Great example for new devs." than it is about who is taking a shit or buying undergarments.
Twitter may not have any value for you, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
Anything but the form fitting track suits!
Why did I bother? Because facts should be sourced.
Why did I bring these particular facts in the first place? Because I was pointing out that anyone can say "This particular number is bigger than the number you're talking about" (as you did with the IRA deaths vs Islamic terrorists comment)...but that doesn't necessarily make it relevant. I even said as much in my comment.
Suicides aren't necessarily directly related to terrorism related deaths, although they do share the rather significant similar factor of death.
In this case, I'm also obliquely making the point that depression and suicide are a significantly bigger problem than terrorism (if a US citizen dies, they've got a 0.00061% chance it's from terrorism...and a 1.58% chance it's from suicide), and we in America are kinda idiots to ignore this.
Regardless of the motives of the kid who took apart the clock, regardless of whether or not it was random chance or a precisely calculated media blitz by someone trying to grab the spotlight...the fact remains that a kid got arrested because he had a box full of wires that may or may not have looked like a thing that actually kills or injurs less than 0.00071% of all humans, worldwide...and meanwhile, we've got depressed kids (and adults!) in every single school in our nation.
tl;dr version: We're severely overreacting to terrorism (especially in schools), and severely under-reacting to other causes of death.
Sources:
http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/...
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/n...
http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/...
And depression invoked suicides have killed more people than both put together. Did you have a point, or were you just spouting Islamophobia and random "Number A is larger than Number B"?
17,891 deaths by terror attack in 2013.
41,149 deaths by suicide in 2013 (in the US).
Note that those figures for terror attacks may be just for the US, or they may be worldwide...I'm not bothering to check, because if they're just for the US, it means suicides outnumber terror attacks 2 to 1, and if it's NOT just for the US...it's a much worse ratio.
Source(s):
http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/...
http://www.who.int/mental_heal...
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/n...
Dice hates Uber, maybe? Anything to make Uber look bad?
This is all that needed to be said.
But those poweres were pretty beefed up once he came back. Teleporting? Flight? Able to ignore pain from multiple open wounds? Sounds like someone managed to get their phylactery stashed before the Romans found them...
Personally, I went the "Debian, but remove systemd" route.
[citation needed]
-1 "missed opportunity to say 'We who are about to troll salute you'"
You forgot "disable power supply" and "dissociate on the atomic level".
Actually, it's not as simple as that. If you're being an ass online, and doing in a way that didn't used to be against the rules, but then the rules changed, and they retroactively cleaned up the vitriol you were spewing, that doesn't make you less of an ass, or the people who wrote the rules "assholes". Sometimes, it just means that there's a lot of toxic asshats, and you were lower on their list of "toxic stuff to clean up" than something else.
Simply put, just because a bunch of toxic people have a community doesn't mean they're any less toxic.
A site that used to allow X, but now prohibits X, doesn't make you less free to express your own special flavor of X. You're still free to say it. Or type it. "Freedom" doesn't mean "guaranteed platform".
Keep in mind, I have concerns about how Reddit is managing their site. "Making it less easy for toxic nincompoops to spew vitriol" isn't one of the things I have concerns about.
I believe it's intended to be for any OS. I believe the 3.12 version is when it's happening...thankfully I've got mine pinned at 3.10.
This is the best explanation I've seen yet. Thank you, if I had mod points, you'd be getting an "informative".
The FTB launcher sets sane defaults for most packs. Most of the other launchers do too.
Hmm...default configs for those packs on a system with your specs should have it running as smooth as butter.
Sounds like a halfway decent world, but nothing that should be killing your computer. AE shouldn't be a problem.
Now, *this* is abnormal. Once the world loads (eg you have a charactor ingame, you're not looking at the "generating world" screen anymore) there will be a few seconds of lag as chunks get generated at the edge of the load distance. This should disappear within the first 20-30 seconds max, for me it's normally less than 5.
I used to get over 1k FPS when I'd turn down the view distance to the minimum. Since then, the Mojang team has worked to equalize some things...I think by default they cap it at 75FPS, but it's much less likely to drop down into the teens...at least in theory.
I made a couple of assumptions here. They were possibly incorrect, and if so, I owe you an apology for being that abrupt. You stated that you were allocating 6+ gb of RAM to the game, so I assumed you'd messed with the defaults. I have a special dislike for people who mess with the defaults without educating themselves about what those defaults actually mean.
As a sidenote, if you're running with the defaults, how are you setting 6+ gb of RAM? Genuinely confused, wondering if we're saying different things here, as "changing the RAM" is part of the configs...
This...might actually be something to check on. Minecraft for Windows comes with its own internally packaged version of Java. Modded Minecraft doesn't use this though, and you need Java 7. It might be worth it to remove Java completely, then re-install just the latest Java 7 64 bit version using the full installer from the Oracle download page.
I said FUD is an option. If I had a buck for every time someone has done similar, with intent of spreading disinformation about a specific Minecraft mod or Minecraft itself, I could replace my desktop with a really really shiny one. I said that I saw two options, one of which involved you spreading misinformation. In hindsight, probably not my best closing point.
No need for that, I'm actually genuinely interested in helping. With a rig like what you've described, you should be able to run pretty much any modpack in buttery smooth FPS with max graphics settings.
I don't thing the slashdot comments section is the best way to get you some help. The easiest thing for me would be if you hopped on EsperNet IRC and poked me in the #minechem channel. If you're not IRC savvy, I have a web-based IRC interface on my website that should work. If IRC isn't an option, I'm also on Twitter, the Minecraft Forums, and CurseForge as this same username, you could drop me a private message and we can see if this can be sorted.
I also see an example much better suited to a game like Minecraft...Mathematics.
Minecraft lends itself well to maths, science, logic, and "community" type skills, eg people management or planning.
Eh, that's your opinion. I have a different one. I've seen Minecraft used pretty effectively. I get that you haven't seen that. I believe that a case can be made for using Minecraft in specific, interesting, engaging ways in a classroom (eg Computercraft for a programming 101 class), but that it's also not easily applicable to all subjects.
Odd that the site you linked to has nothing to do with MinecraftEdu. Here's a look at the actual teaching recommendations and example lesson pages.
I won't pretend to know the first thing about educating youngsters, but the concepts and examples seem logical and compelling to me.
Disclaimer, I'm a part time Minecraft mod developer. My understanding of this topic may have been unfairly tainted with unpalatable things like experience and and actual test cases.
I was able to load up the Monster modpack from Feed the Beast in about 6 minutes...and that included download the launcher, setting up authentication, and letting the launcher download all the mod files. Second run took 57 seconds to get to the main game screen.
I'm running with the default 2gb of RAM. Per the wiki, FTB Monster "currently also holds the record of being the overall largest Feed The Beast modpack, with over 200 mods included."
To put that in context, most "lite" modpacks end up with around 40-60 mods, and a "middle of the road" modpack has 100-150ish mods.
When running a "test" modpack that I've put together, it loads up in about 20-30 seconds, depending on how much debugging stuff I've enabled.
If you've been playing for hundreds of hours, and have fully automated the processing, assembly, sorting, and storage of every block, item, and resource in the game, I'm guessing there will be parts of your game world that are so computationally heavy that it'll bring almost any computer to its knees. Granted, I've never seen this, and I ran a top 5 server back when Tekkit was the end-all and be-all of Minecraft Modpacks (there have been some huge performance enhancements since then), but I'm willing to admit that this could happen, however...citation needed on this.
Well, how about it? Loading up the currently-latest-version of 1.8.7 takes a whopping 6.45 seconds to load, and runs at a nice stable 75 FPS without any tweaking of the video settings.
Not really. Minecraft does have some constraints, namely the lack of a multithreaded server and heavy dependence on your CPU, but it's nowhere near "the joke" that you'd like to present it as.
All the tests I did were on a laptop running an i7-4870HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz with 16gb of RAM. Fairly beefy as far as a laptop goes, but nowhere near the specs dissy is claiming. If I'm desperate (or on a long airplane trip) I can get modded Minecraft running on my netbook, which is running a 1.6ghz atom processor and rocking 1gb of RAM. It's not pretty, but it'll give me 15ish FPS.
My only conclusions are that you're either you're doing it (somehow) very, very wrong...or you're intentionally spreading FUD.
Oh good, we agree. It's a good thing you actually read up on the subject and were able to provide an informed opinion. Ham-fisted force-feeding of knowledge is bad, and we need people building teaching tools that encourage rather than prod, and reward interest rather than punish boredom or disinterest.
If a game is built around mechanics that kids already love, and uses them to illustrate and expand on a balanced curriculum, you end up with kids excited about learning. You're free to disagree, but I've got a hundred thousand downloads that says I know what I'm talking about.
I responded to the comment scoffing at teachers, saying that "they're certainly not designing lessons, teaching classes, or exploring subjects". If you look up MinecraftEdu, lo and behold, they're doing exactly that.
Might want to look up "MinecraftEdu".
It actually has more to do with the sheer numbers of kids that play Minecraft. I totaled the statistics for one of the servers I manage...3176 unique players in a month of uptime. Obviously, not all of them are going to be super interested in the programming/logic side of Minecraft, but there's very few days where I don't have at least one or two people discussing relatively in-depth programming questions via ingame chat.
Oh, obviously. What Minecraft does is give kids an easily accessible programming interface with immediate, "real world" applications. It fosters that interest, the inspiration, and gives it an outlet while it matures. Minecraft offers a complexity level for any level of programmer.
At my level, I'd be using a central server to manage resource gathering with state-saving, set up just-in-time resource delivery to crafting systems, or create a centrally managed RFID identification network. At the entry level, someone else can dig a hole or place blocks. And everywhere in between, from setting up sorting systems to automating base defences...underneath it all, it's providing a constructive outlet for an interest that might someday become a career in computer programming.
I agree with your premise here, that enthusiasm and self-teaching needs to be complemented by structured learning of the stuff that the learner doesn't know they need to know. Personally, I think the structure of "formal education" has shifted dramatically since you were in school, and resources like Codecademy, Udacity, Coursera, and Khan Academy are allowing kids to self-learn in ways that rivals, if not exceeds the traditional classroom-based formal education, but that's a completely different conversation.
As a sidenote, the bit about "Mindcraft API bs" is just...unnecessary. Most tools have their place. Minecraft is a very effective tool at fostering inspiration and talent into learning and understanding. Few ten year olds care about datatypes, objects, or the concept of a client/server architecture, but if you put those things into the context of making a mod for Minecraft, a solid percentage of them now care *a lot*. In my mind...that's a good thing.
That "subconcious level" understanding of programming has to start somewhere. By definition, a skill is the ability to do something well. To do something well, you have to start out by doing something poorly.
Obviously, someone in highschool encountering decision logic for the first time and going nuts with it in a virtual world isn't going to be working on the same level as a professional with years of experience under their belt. But given two applicants for an entry level position, one of whom has a degree, and the other has a degree and six or so years of "hobby programming" under their belt...guess which one I'm going to hire?
Nah, there's nothing unironic about my inability to grow facial hair.