Its been a good year. Retirement is great, easy to fill the time even without travel.
Ayzen is now 14 months old and doing very well along with his parents Anjanette and Adam.
Nathan and Brianna anounced their engagement and their plans to look for a home to purchase.
Nanette and I had a good year with our health holding up and Nanette puting a lot into upgrading her home and ADU.
Joseph graduated from UC San Diego with a phD in bioinformatics and his thesis work published in Nature.
Stefan's health improved thanks to Ozempic.
The weather was excellent in spite of climate change. I enjoyed it thanks to Rocky walking me 4 miles/10k steps almost every day. That's 1200 miles total. This is one of many gifts Cameron left behind.
The house is now officially full due to acquisitions from the curb found during all the dog walking. Starting an antique wooden chair collection contributed significantly.
Our musical endeavors culminated in dropping a dozen songs to my website. A blue tooth audio monitor, microphone, Zoom recorder and a copy of Cubase enabled the production. Its been a nice wake up activity in the morning with Nanette. Practicing everyday really does improve our performance. Hearing our recorded performance on a hi fidelity playback system has further improved our performane. Its still pretty simple cover songs with just Nanette Singing and me playing the guitar. Figuring out how to operate the Cubase Digital Audio Workstation has been a good anti-dimentia activity though a little frustrating at times.
The biggest bummer has been the presidency of Donald Trump, necessitating our participation in various demonstrations including 2 No Kings events and several protests at the Tesla dealership which were successful in bringing down DOGE and getting Elon out of the government.
I sewed a few things including a quilt for Joe and a shirt for Nathan. This seems to be good for the brain and the hands too.
A little wood turning of a few things on a bargain wood lathe I got at a flea market.
Weekly coffee or lunch with Alan, Tim, Michael and the Anderson Dads have kept me socially networked and given us a forum to comiserate about the political chaos and progress in AI.
Grandson, Ayzen, had his first birthday celebration in September.
Ayzen and Adam, 2/3 of the A-team sharing an expression. Ayzen loves balls.
Brianna and Nate somewhere around Boston. They are now engaged.
Ayzen's first beer.
We had to take some action as citizens of the United States. We lost the election but, we don't have to be silent about it. We have put our energy into showing that 150 million people who didn't vote for Trump still have more power than a govenment of maybe 3 million people including the military. There is power in numbers. We were among the 7 million No Kings marchers. Action is the antidote to the feeling of helplessness.
A flag I made for the Divided States of America. Blue stars on one side, Red stars on the other side. United States doesn't describe the country accurately anymore.
Stefan with lapdog Rocky.
Rocky, 85 lb. walking monster. Great temper.
Food beggar. He learned its more effective to beg from Nanette when he wants me to feed him. He amplifies his power.
Mark and Nanette at Dr. Konrad and Saskia's garden party in Napa. Followed later by a 3 hour, 3 bottle lunch at Bouchon. Life was very good that day. .
Dr. Konrad and Nanette modeling Nanette's new hat.
Feeling good about something?
A quilt I made for Joseph. Sewing has been a nice retirement activity, especially in winter. Put on some Jazz and sew away.
Another sewing project. A custom shirt for Nate for Christmas.
Another retirement hobby. Assembling and painting plastic models of classic cars. My vision is still good enough for this close work thanks to modern medicine to address macular degeneration.
Yet Another retirement activity is refurbishing free stuff I find on the curb in Palo Alto. I walk rusty 4 miles a day passing about 400 homes worth about $500M in total. They have stuff they don't need anymore. I help some of these items refresh and find a new home rather than the back of a garbage truck. This piece was my best find in the 3 years of dog walking. I got $800 for it from a 9 year old girl's mother furnishing her new bedroom.
I also sewed this shirt in memory of Cameron. Driving a motorcycle is not a crime though it is very dangerous. I'm partial to the color Red in case its not obvious.
Nanette and I paying respects to Cameron at SkyLawn
Cameron. We miss him. His dog Rocky who he left with us is a constant reminder and a place where we can express our love.
Last edited 12/23/25 M.H. The Holler Family Website
P.S.
I Toured the Nvidia campus with Jim Anderson and a couple other guys. Very impressive to see what is now the hardware and software behind the neural networks embedded in AI. The most valuable company on the planet. $4.5Trillion. They are scaling up performance of AI models by adding more processors and racks rather than trying to scale the chips further although they are taking advantage of any scaling that TSMC is still able to eek out with the help of ASML lithography. Moore's Law is pretty close to the end when quantum mechanical tunneling between devices is causing soft errors.; This scaling by doing more compute in parallel is only possible because of the parallel architecture of neural networks and the use of learning algorithms rather than software development to build the AI models. The A.I. Models are now approaching brain scale data, 1 trillion parameters. The largest program humans can write and mange is a few million lines of code and takes years to write.
This new approach has opened the door to profoundly larger and unbounded automata(smart systems - chatbots, autonomous vehicles and robots). It will bring new meaning to the term creative destruction. . It will make the internet look like just a piece of infrastructure to move stuff around. AI learns from the stuff and can do all sorts of interesting things with what it has learned. Its Dangerous since its learning from human artifacts from all sorts of actors. There will be no way to stop all developers from exploring what can be done with A.I. Its a fertile frontier for creating value and making money. Capitalism thrives on this type opportunity hence the massive investment going on. Hang on its going to be a wild ride and if you're inclined jump in. There is money to be made. Nvidia is just providing the foundation.
Mark Holler 12/24/25