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Related question (I hoped to turn this into an answer for the user, but in the end it became a question on its own right!): this

In the book

Neeman, Amnon. Triangulated categories. No. 148. Princeton University Press, 2001.

there is a definition I would like to translate in the language of Lurie's stable $\infty$-categories: let me recall it in a couple of words.

Let $\cal T$ be a triangulated category admitting countable products and coproducts. We define the homotopy colimit of a diagram $X\colon\mathbb \omega\to \cal T$ (which consists of a sequence $X_0\xrightarrow{j_0} X_1\xrightarrow{j_1} X_2\to\dots$) as the object which completes the triangle $$ \coprod_{n\in\omega} X_n\xrightarrow{1-s}\coprod_{n\in\omega} X_n \to \underrightarrow{\text{holim}}_n X_n \to^+ $$ One can now prove some results: e.g. this construction is unique albeit non canonically. Everything can be dualized: the homotopy limit of the same sequence is the object $P[-1]$ obtained putting the arrow $$ \prod_{n\in\omega} X_n\xrightarrow{}\prod_{n\in\omega} X_n $$ into a distinguished triangle $\prod_{n\in\omega} X_n\xrightarrow{}\prod_{n\in\omega} X_n\to P\to^+$.

I feel uncomfortable with this construction as I'm not able to figure out what it should abstract. Has it something to do with a "telescope" construction?

And... what should a sensible translation of this construction be, in the setting of a stable $\infty$-category? Every piece of the construction makes sense (distinguished triangle $\to$ fiber-cofiber sequence, etc.), and yet it seems to have nothing to do with a "genuine" homotopy (co)limit.

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    $\begingroup$ The sensible translation is a plain (homotopy) colimit in the $\infty$-categorical setting. I'm confused by your last sentence, which reflects the different ways in which different people think of the same concepts. For me, Neeman's is one of the paradigms of homotopy (co)limits (the other ones being the construction of homotopy push-outs and pull-backs in proper model categories). The surprising (and somewhat anomalous) thing of Neeman's construction, is that he manages to get the right object out of the homotopy category equipped with the triangulation. $\endgroup$ Mar 7, 2014 at 8:25
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    $\begingroup$ Neeman's construction is (to my eyes) just a version of the usual formula for colimits in an additive 1-category using coproducts and cokernels. I think the reason why it works is just the fact that $\omega$ is a free category. $\endgroup$
    – Zhen Lin
    Mar 7, 2014 at 9:00

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