Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully and without snark? I'm sure there is one here, but it's hard to make out what it is, and in any case the poison does more harm than the information does good.

I'd link to the HN guidelines here but I'm on my phone!

The ad hoc heuristics are the domain knowledge baked into the model by human experts, like features, architecture and loss function.

"Evaluation" means environments or datasets, the model is supposed to discover its representations from scaled up experience. That was the bitter lesson - more data and compute beat heuristics.