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[Musashi]

At some point, I grew tried of having waves upon waves of useless migrants, walking around doing nothing of value and causing more lag. So, I would recruit them all in "special" suicide squads just so I could make them all stand at once under a drawbridge before activating it.
After a couple times, I realized I'd gone too far. So instead, I sent them right toward nasty stuff like Forgotten Beasts as distractions while I finished traps or the pros were done gathering their equipment. Without any real equipment or training, of course. But that wasn't very effective, for they usually died VERY quickly, AND I still felt bad about sending them to a certain death made up of horrible syndromes and torn limbs. (Oh, yeah, it also took an awfully long time to find and gather all the limbs for burying.) Finally, the fact I wasn't as much concerned by their suffering as I was by efficiency, worried me a little.

Now, I rely a lot more on the Random Number Gods. I have them stand on a bridge that happens to be decently far from the ground. Those who die in the fall, tough luck. Those who survive serve as practice for all medical dwarves. At least, death is only guaranteed, like, 90% of the time as opposed to 100%. And the training is precious; by the time there are real emergencies, there are enough hospital staff and their skills aren't rusty. It's very efficient.
(I'm not very good at being callously evil. I'm also kind of terrible at trying not to be evil anymore. I'm the lukewarm of evil. Meh. At least I still do horrible stuff to goblins.)

[shadowform]

I decided to create a necropolis megaproject once. I made sure to embark on a location with plenty of obsidian, set up a very simple down-ramp on the surface to my underground entrance labyrinth-defenses-thing, and then next to it, built a large, more or less round footprint for a massive obsidian tower with gold columns (walls highlighting the obsidian; not actual supports). I built a dump-room for granite, attached masonries, locked a few dwarves inside, dumped them some food and drink and sealed them in. Permanent coffin-making slaves. The first of these was the first of those laid to rest in the necropolis; as it turns out, falling boulders of granite can have a negative impact on a dwarf's health.

Ten, twenty, then thirty floors. Tens, then hundreds of coffins.  Obsidian doors were replaced with silver, were replaced with masterwork silver, were replaced with masterwork silver encrusted with imported rubies and black opal. I was extremely fortunate to get a handful of masterwork statues (of various sorts) of things like forgotten beasts; I draped them in jewels and enshrined them in the necropolis. And then I realized:

You can't have a mausoleum without bodies.

The slave-dwarves, having made a surplus of coffins, stopped getting food. This got me a few bodies. My standard military, by this point, were well equipped and seasoned veterans, suffering few (if any) losses. I enlisted anyone who wasn't legendary in some necessary skill, handed them a short sword, a buckler, and an iron shirt, and sent them onto the field. That provided a few more bodies. I culled the first-born child of every family with children, luring them over a pit with the promise of a shiny lever before pulling a drawbridge out from under them. More bodies. Any immigrants who weren't married and ready to start breeding went into the pit or the slave army. The game changed from one of survival to one of carefully monitoring the sanity of my breeding dwarves, judging who could stand to lose another child and when, isolating dwarves from each other to prevent them from forming relationships, and routinely rotating dwarves between burrows to prevent any relationships that did form from becoming friendships.

I think I had some seventy or so dwarves interred by the time I decided I was tired of the map, so I waited for an immigrant wave, isolated one dwarf in a room with plenty of food and drink, and locked the remainder in a 'processing room' with just enough spike traps to send the survivors into a berserk fury, melancholy, or madness.The final dwarf had the duty of wading through the gory mess, slowly dragging the bodies of the fortress's inhabitants to their graves; some elaborate tombs, others merely holes in the wall into which a coffin had been sequestered. And finally, when he was done, he was ordered to wall himself into a room at the top of the tower, at it's center; a room with only a single, empty, coffin.

[Fluoman]

That's pretty awesome actually.

[ObiWorm]

I still care for my dwarves. I've only done two terrible things to them:

- One was a vampire who was murdering people left and right, but somehow he was never found guilty. I decided to take some action and impaled him to death.

- Another one was a dwarf who fought against a were-beast and was bitten. I decided to ignore it and let the other dwarves take care of the problem. But he kept killing a lot of people every full moon. So... I made him go into a room and build a wall where the door should be. He was locked alone, with no food or beer and unable to die for a very long time, until a squad of steel clad soldiers broke the wall and charged in.

It was justified... right, right?!

[Fen]

I think mine was when I designed an array of traps, retracting drawbridges, and fortifications into the entrance of my most recent fort after I realized that goblin ambushes were becoming more frequent and larger in number. Currently, most ambushes will try to chase a dwarf into the fort, stumble into the weapon traps.. and it gets ugly from there. All manner of weapons fly out at them, and when they hit, they shred the gobbos to pieces. When they don't hit, the goblins typically only dodge.. into more weapon traps. If they get past the first field of traps, then I retract the drawbridges, sending them plummeting down several z-levels into a walled-off pit. All the while marksdarves fire at them from the safety of the fortifications, leading to more injuries, and more dodging into the weapon traps or the pit.

That, and the pen of cats I keep near the butcher's shop for... emergency rations.

[hops]

I don't generally kill my dwarves unless they're tantrumming, then it's a matter of the Greater Good.

[Urist McVoyager]

^^That's not a start of darkness. That's pragmatism for the sake of your own people. Start of Darkness is when you started trying to hurt your own people.

Answer: I still don't. In fact, I'm standing on the precipice of building actual towns where everyone gets their own little houses with multiple rooms.

[magnum2016]

Woah it is amazing how ruthless some of you guys are

I have not had my "Start Of Darkness" yet and i doubt i ever will,

I never kill useless migrants and instead train them in labors that i need at the moment,

The only thing i have ever done wrong by my dwarves was when we were seiged by a necromancer and my main army was awfully injured in the fight and shortly after we were attacked by goblins i had no choice but to send my fresh 2 month trained army of dwarves armed with leather army to fight the bulk of the goblins while the few capable fighting veterans got there armor and even then i made a large separate burial ground for them and laid there weapons near there graves and kept them there to honor them in that great fight. 

[borno]

I generally keep a good record with my dwarves. I don't actively try to kill them, except recently when my fortress was crumbling apart, and I decided to kill as many dwarves as I could by caving in the roof on the dining room and similar things.

[Noel.se]

When I started sending useless dwarves on one-way missions in order to dig wells and when I started to lock children out of the fortress.

It escalated from there, and what started as pragmatism quickly became ruthless cruelty.

[Iamblichos]

I try to keep a sense of humor about it... so when I send a dwarf on a one-way mission to dig a well into the second cavern or something similar, I change their name to "Sacrifice".  I figure, Armok might as well know I don't want this one back.

[Trapezohedron]

There was once a time when I received a horde of useless immigrants. Annoyed by the problems concerning their presence and its correlation to dwarven cavern space and food, I simply enlisted them to the military, gave them naught a single weapon and sent them down to hunt a bunch of crundles. Some died, some lived, those who did were enlisted to the proper army, those who were maimed were sent to hunt for some other cave creature significantly more dangerous than a series of crundles and troglodytes.

[Urist McVoyager]

I think the next release gives you something productive to do with useless migrants. Aren't they going to be the ones you can send to the Hills to build secondary settlements that can interact with the world at large?

[Fen]

I've love to see that... "Welcome to the dwarven settlement of Shackwhistled, we have... uh.. I think Urist is a beekeeper, and I guess Cerol knows how to make cheese, but not very well. Anyway, please ignore the mess, we haven't finished construction and the masons are still only Dabbling."

[Arcvasti]

I think it was when I stopped thinking "Hey, this dwarf is in trouble. Lets pull out all the stops to save him." and started thinking "His relationship screen is mostly empty. No one will miss him. I don't care.". Also, I'm sometimes guilty of consigning entire migrant waves to their deaths arbitrarily[To be fair, dealing with 500+ dwarves at a time is hard on your CPU/Organization/Sanity.]. I've also killed dwarves for in-story reasons. Which would probably seem like insanity from their little ground-level point of view.

I think the next release gives you something productive to do with useless migrants. Aren't they going to be the ones you can send to the Hills to build secondary settlements that can interact with the world at large?

That's the first I've heard of that development. Toady, why are you so awesome?