Honestly, I was the same. I tried to run it multiple times but the results where never good enough to make the switch. Just wanted to point out it’s existence to OP.

Did you ever stumble upon yacy? https://github.com/yacy The website seems down but the general direction of the project might be up your alley.

Reminds me of a presentation I saw a few months ago by netsafe which is an new zealand non profit that has an ai driven system to keep scammers busy. You can try it out or learn more about it here: https://rescam.org/

Dangerous Dave on DOS, must have been in the early 90ies somewhere. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Dave

If you’re not yet using reaper I highly advise you to try it out. I run it on debian and it works extremely well. For noise reduction you can use reafir which is one of the built in plugins of reaper. Here is a link with basic tutorial on how to do noise reduction with it.

https://www.homebrewaudio.com/9603/reafir-madness-hidden-noise-reduction-tool-in-reaper/

I used the bandit game as an in class exercise when I was teaching basic linux skills to aspiring system administrators. It was always a great success because everyone got to advance at their own pace. Plus, they felt like real hackers because it was really over ssh. Anyway, have fun!

Although it’s not in the fediverse I quite like reading https://tildes.net. It’s quite slow paced but the quality of conversation is quite high in my opinion.