doesn’t treat its viewer as an idiot

A lot of what you said is reasonable but this is absolutely laughable. As someone entering their thirties, this is the single most annoying aspect of anime and it’s especially blatant in works aimed at teenagers. And trust me, I’m not here to hate - this stuff isn’t aimed at me and that’s okay, but claiming most anime doesn’t do this or that not virtually 100% of shonen does this is absurd.

I’m pretty sure reaction time doesn’t matter, as long as both players have the same reaction time, right? Like, reaction time could be 10 minutes and if one player sees the stimuli 1ms faster than the other, then they will react first and (assuming their decision making is correct) “win” the interaction.

The next test of usefulness would be real world variance of reaction time between people. For high level players, I would expect it to be very similar, and thus potentially a few ms improvement could take you from slower to faster than an opponent. But “very similar” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here since I don’t have exact numbers to look at.

Hey, this is definitely getting really close. However, I think for this to work our phones would need to be connected to my Wireguard all the time, right?

Apprise is interesting. One of the many things it talks to might be what I’m looking for. I’ve seen multiple instances on the Internet of people using some kind of notification to trigger an automation software on the phone which actually sets the alarm. That might be the route to go.

Home Assistant is an interesting idea. I only learned about it recently but I know it’s hella dense and I feel like figuring out how to get it to do this one thing might be a huge task. I’ll keep it in mind though if nothing else pops up.

I’ve never been able to get a calendar to reliably trigger alarms :(

Another user posted about photoprism, which has AI powered features like facial recognition. Might be worth checking out.