Okay, I guess this is how I've come to understand then:

If we take a computer, it has hardware and software. The hardware is capable of dealing with quantifiable information that could be empirically observed; it's designed to run software and to an extent limits how that software will run, similar to how processors have instruction sets. And this software comes in some kind of encoded language that the hardware is capable of executing with its instructions. Those things could be argued observable.

But what happens when the software is designed to rewrite itself? Looking at the hardware and how it executes instructions won't elucidate the nature of the software because its behavior is not a static quantity, but a continuous change. Theoretically speaking then, any attempts to define it in a deterministic sense requires an understanding of all the change that's going on at once. And I guess if someone believes that there are basic laws of change to everything, such as seems to be the goal of physics, and finds those laws, then determinism could be thought of as true and people aren't much more than a result of physics. On the other hand, if there are no basic laws, but relative ones, then there is a pool of relative change, where an absolute cause can not be determined. And then one could imagine determinism as false. I think I prefer this view because it allows life to have the meaning of helping to define a world that would be otherwise undefined. Of course, this can get overly complicated, where one suggests that the sum of all relative change could equal an absolute change (as I think you mentioned by suggesting that knowing all the properties of every aspect of the universe could make it determined), but I'm using relative to mean divergence of how things change with one another, rather than convergence. Physics does seem to look for convergence. That's probably the basis behind the scientific method, anyway.

And sorry if this seems not understandable; you have very clear and explicable thoughts on determinism, but I just wanted to argue against it a bit.