I've had a few notifications that townie Sims are learning the advanced tech skill on their own. Is there a setting to stop this from happening in my hometown (obviously, it's fine in the future town)? I'm not even sure where they are learning it. I do have a bot shop (which I could remove, it came with the town), but they aren't learning bot building. Is this maybe not even SP's fault? Thanks for any help.

SP can push sims to learn skills they're not actually acting out, so that's probably but not inevitably the source. Anyway, you can block it for the Inactive caste, meaning everyone not in your active household, through the Skill: Disallow setting. You'll need the SP Skill add-on in addition to the base module.

Aha! Thank you! I never use the caste thing, but I'll give that a try!