LayerOne 2026: Nutella Pizza, Graphics Programming, and Last Hours CTF

Mon Jun 1 2026 (E: 2026 Jun 04)

• NUTELLA PIZZA
• This year’s theme and badge
• LayerOne’s Demoscene
• LAN PARTIES ARE HARD TO SET UP
• Resume reviewer says I don’t belong at Layer One?!
• Qualcomm CTF on the last day
• Going Again

I did 4 player co-op at LayerOne this year, meeting up with my friends on Friday night for the conference starting on Saturday morning.

It’s a busy weekend, and here are some of the talks we stood in for.

• Hacking Drones for Fun and Knowledge (Jack Hooker & Erwin “Dollarhyde” Karincic), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO3SCMaydfM

• What Your Car Knows: Digital Forensics and Modern Infotainment Systems (cesi0), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot7DtO6jNUM

As a side note, I felt like I went out of my way to avoid the “surveillance economy”.¹ Generally, I had drawn the line at selfies|mugshots. Anything online that had required a “selfie” to register, I declined and avoided which was fine as many online services aren’t essential.

I’m genuinely disappointed that as a result of the Biden administration, every car made after 2027 may have mandated federal surveillance.²³ I dislike the idea of being in the car with an AI equivalent of a federal agent. Therefore, for the rest of my life, I may not be able to drive a car made after 2026, and getting tons of money to pay the premium for privacy won’t be an option.

NUTELLA PIZZA

I met up with my friends on Friday night. We had pizza for dinner at Settebello Pizzeria. I don’t know Italian well enough to have an idea of what pizza I was ordering based on the menu items.

We did have Nutella pizza and tiramisu for desert. Nutella and pizza bread make an unusually good combination. The latter is like coffee but sweet and tasty even for people who don’t usually like coffee.

This year’s theme and badge

This year’s Layer One had an “alien invasion” theme. Because of the 1960s comic book artstyle, the aliens are green-skinned Martians with exposed brains in a glass case.

The cover art on the program reminded me of Adult Swim cartoons recycled from older Hanna-Barbera shows. If the artist was going for that, he really nailed the style.

The badge mostly features two ladies and a dog. I haven’t noticed any material introducing these characters. But the badge design again involved snapping a portion of the badge off: a USB 3-key keyboard as a nod to software/technology work only involving prompting an AI and accepting or declining its results.

I never snapped off the fidget spinner for LayerOne 2024 because the badge looks cooler intact. I don’t want to carry around a small object that could easily be lost from my sweater pocket. So for 2026, I didn’t bother soldering the keys onto the badge.

LayerOne’s Demoscene

Layer One features a demoscene party. The demos must be programmed on a demoboard that is about as powerful as a Gameboy Color. Also, the graphics library was written by the event organizers. Overall, just getting started involves jumping through a fair number of hoops.

This URL documents the process of getting started with programming the demoboard. As of May 28th 2026, there are PHP warnings upon landing on that page, so we are off to a great start.

https://l1demo.org/wiki/demoboard_getting_started#development_environment

Here are the obstacles I hit:

Click the “Downloads” tab near the bottom of the page and download the latest version of MPLAB X IDE.

Click the “Downloads” tab near the bottom of the page and download the latest XC16 compiler

The latest versions of the IDE and compiler have dropped support for the hardware involved. So the actual versions that need to be installed are IDE version 6.20 and compiler version 2.00.

2. There is a Discord channel for discussing demo development.

However, if you don’t want your chats to become corporate assets and to have AI psychologically profile your behavior and habits, you’re pretty much SOL because e-mailing arko@l1demo.org yields a return-to-sender and the IRC channel is quite dead.

3. snprintf will always write ‘0’ for any given integer.⁴

I wanted a frames per second counter. Also itoa wasn’t available.

4. The default resolution for the starter demo is 160x480 which very few monitors will support.

If nothing turns up on screen, one should try changing the resolution to 640x480, common but also losing support among modern monitors. If you don’t have an old VGA monitor, there is a web emulator for the board at https://emu.layerone.toys/. BUT…

5. ASCII table is offset in the emulator.

Just about every lowercase letter will be rendered as capital letters, and capital letters along with numbers will be rendered as gibberish. Who knows what else will go wrong with the emulator.

6. rcc_pixel and therefore rcc_line do not draw anything, and I haven’t figured out why.

A workaround is calling rcc_rec with a width and height of 1.

LAN PARTIES ARE HARD TO SET UP

At the dinner table, we met some party animal named ‘Mel’ teasing his buddy over getting an advertisement because The Algorithms would need to have picked up on some “habits” for that to happen.

This conversation continued for a few minutes until I told him the entire table was now going to get the same advertisement because he keeps saying it out loud, and our phones are listening.

Last year, my friends and I played Diablo II. Most of the time was spent on setup and the Chillout Room closed before we could get much of a session in.

This year, the Chillout Room was open for much longer; however, we still spent like 2 hours trying to get Diablo II set up on a friend’s new PC running Zorin Linux. Typically, I run Diablo II with a prefix and that same prefix has worked between Void Linux, Artix, and Gentoo. Apparently, Diablo II worked on default wine config on Ubuntu, but we never got things set up for Zorin because of various errors.

So we gave up on playing Diablo II and tried 0 A.D, a native game for Linux.

HOWEVER! 0 A.D as distributed by Artix and gentoo was Release 28 while it was Release 26 for Ubuntu. So we couldn’t get 0 A.D LAN going as hotel WiFi or Mobile Data bandwidth wasn’t going to let us download matching versions. So I totally get why video games have self-updaters or how LAN gaming made more sense when games were distributed by physical media and didn’t update continuously like with modern software development.

We then tried Starcraft: Brood War (CD version) which worked. The nice thing about Starcraft’s LAN menu is that I don’t have to type in the host’s IP address. The game just picks it up when it’s available.

Resume reviewer says I don’t belong at Layer One?!

Men: Consultant #1, “Sushi Guy” / Mike from Layer One 2025, SCaLE <= 22x Reviewers

Women: Consultant #2, Lady from last year’s Layer One, SCaLE 23x reviewer.

This year I got feedback from two consultants at the Career Village.

In the case of consultant #1, my friend and I both got drop-in appointments at the same time and did separate sessions in parallel. The first thing I do is bring my resume out, and the first thing he does (without looking at the resume or getting an idea of my situation) is give job search advice to the following tune:

“Find a company that aligns with your ideals.”

“Companies want someone who is there for more than just a paycheck.”

I had heard this before online, but being behind the glass wall never got to give my input on that and get an in-person reaction from that. In summary, that advice comes from the biases of someone who is already employed with a white collar job (hiring manager or company owner). So I said.

“People need money to make ends meet and survive. It’s not always the case that someone can turn down a suitable job posting over ideals.

“Consider how much better some people’s lives could be if they had more money.”

Before introducing myself as someone who is currently employed as at a medical laboratory, I also added that “I’ve resorted to gambling on the stock market for extra money.”

This earned laughter (at, not with) from about three other staff members in the Career Village, but the consultant I was talking to managed to stay professional. We didn’t spend time arguing our different perspectives on the hiring process and refocused on the goals of my job search. Overall, the guy seemed genuinely interested in being helpful, and the session was better than getting railroaded last year.

• acknowledged he gave advice on adding an executive summary while skipping over an executive summary because it wasn’t labeled so in bold font.⁵
• mentioned that recruiters have to deal with a large stack of a thousand of resumes (at SCaLE 23x I heard it was hundreds but wow a thousand).
• gave commentary on the rejection letters I had received, saying which one is generic and which one meant human eyes had read my resume.
• asked for feedback on the session.

Noteworthy, this guy said to put my open source contribution at the top of work experience because it is relevant to the jobs I am applying for. He recommends keeping the recruiter’s interest with relevant information.

Just as I finished session with consultant #1, the consultant I was originally assigned just so happened to be available. More opinions the merrier.

Like the lady from last year, this lady said to put my current job at the top because the work experience section needs to reflect chronological order. Unlike consultant #1, she didn’t consider my experience good enough for the industry. That before COVID, my resume would’ve have been enough to get hired, but now I need to skill up for AI and cloud technologies.

Both consultants recommend networking at in-person events. But this lady added that I’m at the wrong place for Layer One because it and DC858 are security and infosec related meetups despite the robotics and demoscene (embedded graphics programming) events. That “I don’t belong here” and I should be going to software engineering events or meetups stressing that I have “limited time”.

:/

Qualcomm CTF on the last day

A friend regularly plays CTF at Layer One. This year, he played less than before, setting up the team on Saturday night, as opposed to the afternoon. With no intent to win, our team of five participants got to 20th place out of ~50 other teams.

I contributed 225 points to the team by fulfilling 1 lockpicking and 1 reversing challenge.

The lock I picked was worth 75 points. It is moderately difficult in having ~4 pins; however, it is the most common lock showcased at the conference. I’m not a great lockpicker, but I’m more familiar with that type of lock than the easier ones.

The reversing challenge I did was worth 150 points. The executable provided was for Windows, but the challenge can be done with static analysis. I found the flag in a few minutes of poking around in Cheat Engine.

Going Again

We met the irishamoeba.

Despite what HR lady has told me, I do plan on going to LayerOne next year.