How is "days until wrong lane" being calculated?

Looking at my numbers here https://www.beeminder.com/apolyton/goals/weight
The latest value is 86.8
The “hard cap by day” table shows that the 86.8 value is over the hard cap for the coming days including Thursday.
But the “time left” is only 3 days (2 and today)? What am I missing? :slight_smile:

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Great question. The answer is arcane and almost counts as a bug but it’s being very conservative. Because weight-loss goals have auto-widening yellow brick roads we can’t be sure how wide the road will be in the future. If you’re in the wrong lane then the road should have fixed width but if you’re in the right lane then it can shrink. So, being conservative, it’s using the number of days of staying flat before you’ll cross the centerline.

It’s confusing and not so helpful and we’re going to change it. Thank you for bringing it up!

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I moved into the right lane recently and this is the first time I noticed the very short “Time left”. I’ve been in the right lane on and off over the last few months and never noticed it. It was very confusing and I only found this post when I went to write my own.

Any chance that the fix is actually in the works?

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Yes, but it’s a big, very multi-faceted fix that involves getting rid of the whole concept of lanes of the road and how we’ve treated the centerline as most fundamental. What’s now obvious (and thanks to @insti for making the case for this) is that the only thing that matters is the critical edge of the road and that’s what the road dial should adjust, not the centerline. We’re calling this project “Yellow Brick Halfplane”.

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