think of from different avenue [if you have enough people doing something it can happen [mistake present?]]
so a value is changing from 0, to min_delay, to remaining if we assume min_delay < remaining, then we can see that the slope is min_delay in that view, because each index is 1 more. this shows a constraint issue: if our slope is min_delay, and we have remaining_count total, and the value at remaining_count is remaining, then the slope is doubly defined. one of the slope definitions says it should be (remaining / remaining_count) the other says it should be min_delay. options include: making it quadratic, shrinking min_delay, shrinking remaining and tacking extra min_delays on
