This is a way to send a notification to a set of clients, any of which can be
blocked waiting for a new notification to arrive. A complication is that any
number of clients may be be dead, and we don't want stale notifications for
those clients to pile up and leak memory.
It took me 3 tries to find the solution, which turns out to be simple: An array
of SampleVars, one per client. Using SampleVars means that clients only see the
most recent notification, but when the notification is just "the assistant's
state changed somehow; display a refreshed rendering of it", that's sufficient.
