At least for some of my goals, the “bare min” section doesn’t actually show what I need for an additional day. The goal that comes to mind for me is my Fitbit autodata goal that just shows the daily step count rate, not the actual incremental # of steps needed for one more day of safety buffer. I think I’ve noticed this with other goals of mine that are NOT autodata though. Perhaps the code for that particular section is broken beyond a certain # of days? It sounds like @scarabaea has noticed that this starts to happen beyond 7 days, which seems right. I know 7 days has a special significance in Beeminder because that’s the Akrasia horizon for changing weekly rates, pausing a goal, etc, but I don’t see why this’d carry over to the “bare min” section.
This probably sounds absurd to some of you, but for me, seeing the whole column of checkmarks isn’t actually reassuring, because for me, 7 days of safety buffer feels like a pretty short and “dangerous” amount. I’m not sure about the UI, but maybe making the area scrollable like you suggest would be a better solution than my original idea. It’d hide everything beyond the next 7 days from most users, and for users like me, the act of scrolling down to my date would give me a more visceral sense of how much safety buffer I have left.
If the “bare min” section always worked, then I’d say tweaking the “amounts due” table would still be nice, but I agree that it’s a marginal improvement for a minority of users. Originally, I pointed this out as an example of how a normally useful feature is useless for users with my use profile, but I’m not sure if there is a good solution here. My use case is seeing when the next few days of data are needed, the amount needed to get one more day (or 2 days, or 3 days, etc of safety buffer, and then the daily rate for the days after that. I realize that most of this same information can be seen elsewhere on the page (# of days until derailment, “cur daily rate”), but I’ve found that I tend to go to the “amounts due” table because it’s all together there (and because it’s above the "cur daily rate).
Also, something that is NOT available elsewhere is the exact amount needed to get 2, 3, 4, etc days of safety buffer. Particularly for “chunky” goals, this is a nice motivator. For example, if I have a goal to make my way through a book sporadically or write a blog post every now and again, then when I’m trying to increase the buffer, I’m not interested in increasing it by one day (which would be too little a jump given the infrequency of working on the goal), but what it’ll take to get to 2, 3, 4, etc. days of safety buffer. It sounds like @scarabaea does something similar. Again, this isn’t hugely important, because by definition, if I have a huge safety buffer, then obviously I can probably afford to fall between say 9 days of safety buffer and 10. However, it’s nice to have an arbitrary Schelling point to shoot for.
Again, I could continue happily beeminding indefinitely without ever having this feature request implemented. I just thought I’d throw it out there for consideration.